Two Natures

Welcome to Linthicum

2012-01-16T02:21:00.000-05:00

Welcome to a new year: 2012. Here in Maryland this year we are commemorating the War of 1812, which took place 200 years ago. I will return to this topic shortly.

After I returned to Maryland at the end of July, it took six trips to the MVA to get my car registration and driver's license transferred to Maryland. And, for various reasons, it took me until well into October to get settled in my new apartment in the town of Linthicum (which some, including the U.S. Postal Service, insist on calling Linthicum Heights), just outside the Baltimore Beltway near Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Apart from being just two blocks from church, the thing I like most about my new neighborhood is its walkability. I often walk to the library and the post office, and I sometimes go for walks on weekends when the weather is nice. I took my camera on a couple of my early walks, back when there were still fall leaves on the trees. My tour begins at the park featuring the new Veterans Memorial (above). The sign below gives a brief history of the town and the importance of the railroad to its development.

Just across the tracks from the sign is the old Linthicum railroad station.

Across the street from the station is the entrance to J. Charles Linthicum Memorial Park. The park is a trail that runs along the west side of railroad, which is now used for light rail. Not far into the park is a memorial to Mr. Linthicum.

It is interesting that the accomplishment chosen for emphasis was Rep. Linthicum's authorship of the bill to recognize "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem (which he first submitted in 1918), rather than his leadership of the effort to repeal prohibition or his reform of the foreign service. Because it was written just off the shore of Maryland during the British bombardment of nearby Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, Marylanders take a proprietary interest in our national anthem. (That explains the state's current license plate design, which you saw at the beginning of this post.) The top of the memorial is a relief plaque of the sheet music of the first verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner".

Continuing along the trail, I watch a two-car train zip past.

In the middle of the park is the Linthicum Light Rail Station.

I walk through the station, cross the tracks, and proceed towards downtown Linthicum. Here is the fire station, with the water tower looming behind it.

Across the street is the main shopping center. Not listed on the sign: the U.S. Post Office.

The hardware store and the water tower.

Returning to the light rail station.

Proceeding to the other side of the station and continuing for three blocks, I reach the Linthicum Branch of the Anne Arundel County Public Library. I have been borrowing a lot of recorded books to listen to while cooking and driving.

By the time I get back to the Veteran's Memorial, across the street from church, it is starting to get dark.

On the Futility of Councils

2011-12-30T19:57:00.000-05:00

For my part, if I am to write the truth, my inclination is to avoid all assemblies of bishops, because I have never seen any council come to a good end, nor turn out to be a solution of evils. On the contrary, it usually increases them. You always find there love of contention and love of power (I hope you will not think me a bore, for writing like this), which beggar description; and, while sitting in judgement on others, a man might well be convicted of ill-doing himself long before he should put down the ill-doings of his opponents. So I retired into myself; and came to the conclusion that the only security for one's soul lies in keeping quiet. . . .

Gregory the Theologian (Epistle 130) to Procopius, excusing his absence from a council called by Theodosius I to meet in Constantinople in 382
Translated by B. J. Kidd, edited by J. Stevenson

Lyrics for Advent

2011-12-09T23:31:00.069-05:00

We are now in the midst of a cluster of feasts honoring Christ's mother. Today we commemorated Mary's conception in the Byzantine churches. Most Catholics observed the same feast yesterday, and they will celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on Monday. This Sunday in the Byzantine Rite we commemorate the ancestors of Christ.

Earlier this week I heard the Lovemongers' cover of this song by Patty Griffin. You can hear a live recording of it by Patty with Natalie Maines here.

Mary

Mary you're covered in roses, you're covered in ashes
You're covered in rain
You're covered in babies, you're covered in slashes
You're covered in wilderness, you're covered in stains
You cast aside the sheet, you cast aside the shroud
Of another man, who served the world proud
You greet another son, you lose another one
On some sunny day and always stay, Mary

Jesus says Mother I couldn't stay another day longer
Flys right by me and leaves a kiss upon her face
While the angels are singin' his praises in a blaze of glory
Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place

Mary she moves behind me
She leaves her fingerprints everywhere
Everytime the snow drifts, everytime the sand shifts
Even when the night lifts, she's always there

Jesus said Mother I couldn't stay another day longer
Flys right by me and leaves a kiss upon her face
While the angels are singin' his praises in a blaze of glory
Mary stays behind and starts cleaning up the place

Mary you're covered in roses, you're covered in ruin
You're covered in secrets
You're covered in treetops, you're covered in birds
Who can sing a million songs without any words
You cast aside the sheets, you cast aside the shroud
Of another man, who served the world proud
You greet another son, you lose another one
On some sunny day and always stay
Mary, Mary, Mary

Patty Griffin
One Big Love Music/Chrome Dog Music (ASCAP)
From the 1998 album Flaming Red

Obama's Jobs Bill: More of the Same

2011-09-15T13:35:00.001-04:00

As an economist, I found President Obama's job-creation proposals predictably disappointing. Both the proposed tax cuts and the proposed new programs can be classified as fiscal stimulus. According to Keynesian orthodoxy, such stimulus can hasten the end of a recession by increasing demand, which induces increased production, which in turn necessitates increased employment. But fiscal stimulus, like all Keynesian policy, is oriented only to the short run. (In defense of his short-run orientation, Keynes famously said, "In the long run we're all dead.") Both the Bush stimulus of 2008 and the Obama stimulus of 2009 were arguably reasonable Keynesian attempts to hasten the end of what looked like a severe but otherwise normal recession.

But if this were a normal recession susceptible to cure by stimulus spending, by now those efforts would already have gotten us back to normal (say 5% unemployment and 3% real annual growth). The fact that the economy has not returned to a normal growth path shows that this is not just a normal, cyclical recession. Rather, it is a symptom of more serious structural problems in our economy. President Obama's policies have not just failed to address these long-term problems, but they are actually making them worse. Until we address those problems, stimulus spending will not get the economy moving again. The impact of stimulus spending under current circumstances will be like that of the Cash for Clunkers program – a quick boost whose impact will evaporate without a trace as soon as the program ends.

In appealing for support from Republicans, President Obama reminded them that they had supported President Bush's stimulus in 2008, implying that because they had done so once they were obligated for the sake of consistency to do so again. But he passed over in silence their near-unanimous opposition to his own politically larded 2009 stimulus plan. Given the failure of both stimulus programs, it would be perfectly reasonable for Congress to choose not to throw good money after bad with another stimulus program. At the very least, Congress should demand that the President explain why his previous stimulus did not end the recession and why he thinks it will be different this time.

On Monday the President dropped the other shoe: he gave us the details on how he wants to pay for his jobs program. Again, it sounded disappointingly familiar – the same tax increases that he has proposed repeatedly before, and that Congress has rejected. This combination of taxes and class warfare might appeal to the Democratic base that Obama has been in danger of losing, but it will be a non-starter in the House. The negative impact on jobs of the proposed tax increases might actually outweigh any beneficial impact from the payroll tax cuts, making the President's jobs proposal a net destroyer of jobs.

There are many things our government could do to create jobs without spending a single additional dollar of federal money. Here are a few: 1) rein in the out-of-control NLRB, which is actively obstructing the creation of non-union jobs; 2) enact the free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama that President Obama is holding up in an effort to extort concessions from Congress; and 3) repeal Obamacare. The fact that the Democrats will not countenance these sure-fire job creators shows that they care more about their special-interest constituencies than about jobs for unemployed workers. This rule is proven by the one recent exception: President Obama delayed implementation of some onerous EPA regulations, which might very well help businesses create jobs – and other Democrats threw a fit.

The House could move ahead with another reform without waiting for the President – a reform that would help businesses to create jobs and might even draw support from some Democrats: reform the corporate income tax. The universal recipe for tax reform is to broaden the tax base and reduce tax rates. Broadening the tax base means making more dollars subject to taxation – most often by closing loopholes. This would make the tax fall more evenly on all corporations instead of exempting those with good lobbyists who can persuade Congress to enact custom-made loopholes for them. This, in combination with lower tax rates, would reduce the distortionary effect of the tax and help to channel money to more productive uses, which would inevitably result in more jobs. If Congress could succeed in reforming the corporate income tax, perhaps it would be emboldened to take on the personal income tax next.

The Afterlife of Theological Formulae

2011-07-25T12:57:00.000-04:00

Proposition: Once a theological formula is published, its interpretation cannot be limited to its original purpose and context.

Exhibit 1. The Nicene Creed was formulated to rule out Arianism. This is made explicit in the final section, which anathematizes those who employ Arian formulae and terminology:

Those who say, ‘There was when he was not’, and ‘Before being begotten he was not’, and that he came into being from things that are not, or assert that the Son of God is from another hypostasis or substance or is changeable or alterable, these the catholic and apostolic church anathematizes.

But once that heresy had been extinguished (at least in the eastern Mediterranean – it hung on among some German tribes for another three centuries), the anti-Arian creed was not set aside. Rather, it became a touchstone of Orthodoxy. Its most prominent exponent, Athanasius, was elevated to sainthood as his generation’s paragon of orthodoxy, while Arius became forever the archetypal heretic. Adherence to “the faith of Nicaea” came to distinguish orthodox Christians not only from Arius, but also from later heretics, like Eunomius, Apollinarius, and Nestorius.

Since the Arian controversy had begun as an intra-Alexandrian affair before it spread abroad, certain assumptions shared by Arius and his local Alexandrian opponents were embedded in the arguments of both sides, as well as in the Nicene resolution. Athanasius’s successors Cyril and (especially) Dioscorus tried to interpret Nicaea not just as a negative statement ruling out Arianism, but as a positive statement enshrining the local peculiarities of Alexandrian Christology for the entire Church. (This might explain why Cyril was a stickler for the exact creedal formula approved by Nicaea, in opposition to the many other “Nicene” creeds in use in the early fifth century, which assimilated key Nicene phrases to existing local baptismal creeds.)

Exhibit 2. In his Letter to Acacius of Beroea (Ep. 33), Cyril of Alexandria defended his Twelve Anathemas by insisting that they were to be read only in opposition to Nestorius:

But the force of the statements was written only against the teachings of Nestorius. For they throw out what he said and wrote in error. Those who anathematize and deny his evil teaching will cease to object to the documents which have been written by us. For they see that the meaning of the statements only goes against his blasphemies. (John I. McEnerney, trans., St. Cyril of Alexandria: Letters 1-50, The Fathers of the Church 76 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1985), 133.)

But neither his theological allies nor his opponents read Cyril’s Anathemas in such a circumscribed, negative way. They read the Anathemas as a more general Christological statement with positive implications, seeing them either as an essential supplement to the Creed of 325 or as a revival of the heresy of Apollinarius (on whose writings Cyril had unwittingly drawn in formulating them). After the Reunion of 433, though Cyril never explicitly renounced the Anathemas, neither did he continue to emphasize them, and they faded into the background for the last decade of his life. But after his death, those who proclaimed themselves loyal to the memory of Cyril (a very selective memory that ignored the historical Cyril’s commitment to the Reunion of 433) denounced the terms of the Reunion and revived the Anathemas as a litmus test of orthodoxy. Eventually, long after the Nestorian heresy had been driven out of the Church, the Second Council of Constantinople (553) elevated Cyril’s Third Letter to Nestorius with the Twelve Anathemas to dogmatic status in an unsuccessful attempt to placate the enemies of Chalcedon.

Exhibit 3. In an appendix to his Tome to the Armenians, Proclus of Constantinople condemned selected passages from the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia. When he demanded that the Syrian bishops formally endorse both the Tome and the appended condemnations, they objected that the passages from Theodore had been removed from their proper literary, historical, and theological context. In his polemics against the Arians, the Syrian bishops said, Theodore had been driven to a

certain great distinction (i.e., between the natures in Christ), not coming to it from a depraved understanding, but deciding to use that mode of expression more efficaciously against the heretics, and he was not ignoring nor denying the total unity, far from it, for all his books are full of this mode of expression, but he was dividing the properties of the natures more fully as the fight which he had against the heretics dictates that he should do. (Nicholas Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Homilies 1-5, Texts and Translations, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 66 (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 117.)

But some Antiochene bishops, like Ibas of Edessa, did not restrict their reading of Theodore’s polemical extracts to an anti-Arian context any more than his enemies did.

This idea was a by-product of my thesis on the Formula of Reunion (433). It might find its way into my thesis in some form.

County 4-H Fair

2011-07-24T23:38:00.000-04:00

Last Sunday, while I was visiting my parents in Indiana, I attended the local 4-H fair. There was an open house at the agricultural museum with demonstrations including soap making, rope making, and a 19th-century one-room school. I went back again the next day for the annual gathering of my mom's family at the fair. We had lunch in the ag museum and then talked until well into the afternoon. I took some photos, mostly of old tractors.

My uncle's 1920s John Deere tractors

My uncle's 1950s Ford tractors, modified with V-8 engines

Art deco tractor #1: 1952 Oliver

Art deco tractor #2: 1956 Cockshutt

1940s Allis-Chalmers

1939 McCormick-Deering Farmall

Tractor ride for the kids

1935 Silver King

Other modes of transportation on display in the ag museum.

Small covered wagon

1901 Oldsmobile

Forty years ago my cousins dominated the dairy barn at the fair. Today their kids dominate . . . the small animal barn.

My cousins' chickens

My cousin's rabbits

Newly hatched chicks in the incubator

Changes

2011-07-23T23:42:00.010-04:00

From the beginning, I have blogged under my long-time on-line alias Roland. In fact, I originally planned to name my blog Oliphant: The Horn of Roland. I was pretty upset when I found the name Oliphant was already taken. The resulting frustration launched me into a small crisis in which I questioned the purpose and content of my intended blog. I realized it would have a primarily religious/theological focus, and I came up with a more fitting title. But it did not then occur to me to switch to a different alias.

I first used the name Roland my first summer in grad school. It was a hot summer, with frequent record-breaking, triple-digit temperatures, and I was living in a cheap room without air conditioning. So I spent my afternoons studying in the comfort of a lounge in the student union. Every once in a while, for a break, I would go the basement and play the video game Tutankham. When I got a high score and had to come up with a name, I spontaneously chose Roland, inspired by the Warren Zevon song, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”. Years later, I revived the name for my high scores in Tetris on a friend’s computer and subsequently began using it in various on-line contexts.

About a decade ago, not long after 9/11, I read The Song of Roland, the medieval French epic poem based loosely on the 778 Battle of Roncesvalles, and I began to assimilate my on-line persona more to this older Roland by choosing appropriately medieval-looking avatars, or by using the name Roland778 when Roland was already taken.

At the same time, in other on-line contexts I was using the alias Arimathean. Long before my chrismation, when Joseph of Arimathea formally became my patron saint, I had considered him my patron. Within a year of starting my blog, I realized this would have been a more appropriate alias (thus my avatar, which is a mosaic image of Joseph of Arimathea), but I had already begun to establish myself in the blogosphere as Roland. So I decided to wait for a more opportune time to make the switch.

For the past two years while I have been studying theology, I haven’t had much time for blogging (or recreational reading or TV or movies . . .). In the few forums where I have been active, I have mostly been using Arimathean, so Roland is now less likely to be missed. So, as of today, my handle in the blogosphere is changing to Arimathean (though I will continue to go by Roland in some non-blogging contexts).

Speaking of recreational reading . . . My first post-seminary novel brought together both of my on-line personae. The hero of Judith Tarr’s Kingdom of the Grail is Roland, who is a descendant of Merlin and Nimue. Nimue, in turn, is the sister of Parsifal, the Grail King, whom one can infer to be descended from . . . Joseph of Arimathea (though he is not mentioned by name in the book). The novel’s execution was not as good as the concept – it too often followed the conventions of the romance genre rather than historical fantasy.

I am also adopting another change. I recently read a Slate article about “logical punctuation”. Until now, for my whole literate life I have slavishly followed the convention of placing commas and periods inside quotation marks. Unlike nearly all other grammar and punctuation rules, this one never made sense to me, and I was always ready to disparage it whenever the opportunity arose, even while following it scrupulously and enforcing it as an editor. In the Slate article, I learned that this is not the universal English language rule my teachers would have me believe. Rather, it is a peculiarly American rule. The rest of the English-speaking world follows the more logical convention of placing commas and periods after the closing quotation mark (unless the punctuation is logically a part of the quote). On-line, it appears that most Americans are now punctuating like Brits. Wikipedia and other sites have adopted logical punctuation as their standard. And even the old guard has conceded that when quotes enclose a URL any following punctuation should be placed outside the closing quote so that no one tries to paste it into the address bar of his browser as if it were part of the address. For now the conflict continues, but it is already clear that the prescriptivist-traditionalist American copy editors are doomed. I’m happy to join the winning side.

Albanian Iconography

2011-07-08T20:32:00.000-04:00

Last year when I posted my photos from Albania, I promised a follow-up post focusing on iconography. Reading about the Albanian adventures of this year’s missiology class inspired me to resume work on that post.

As with my previous Albania post, I drew heavily on the photos taken by other members of the expedition. The pictures will be organized roughly in the order of our itinerary in Albania. My narration will be minimal.

In addition to iconography in the narrow sense, I will feature other aspects of church art, particularly wood carving. And besides traditional ecclesiastical iconography, I will include some less traditional religious art. You can click on any picture to see it full-size.

Our first stop was Annunciation Cathedral, Tirana.

St. Anastasios

The archbishop’s throne

The baptistery chapel

St. Constantine

The Theotokos

St. Panteleimon

Two days later, we stopped at two schools on our way to Shen Vlash Monastery.

The Resurrection of Christ is a popular subject in new Albanian iconography.

At Shen Vlash

The refectory

The monastery chapel

Shen Vlash (aka St. Blaise)

The chapel at the diagnostic clinic.

Framed art at the student center

Nazareth Center houses various ecclesiastical arts, including the creation and restoration of icons and wordworking.

On our way to Korça we stopped for a fish supper at this restaurant in Shen Naumi.

The next day we visited the Metropoly.

Then we spent the rest of the morning sightseeing in Korça, starting with this church.

St. Haralambos

Inside a small shrine

The old cathedral

Monastery of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Voskopoja

St. Ignatius

St. Nicholas

St. Katherine

Monastery of Ss. Peter & Paul, Vithkuq

The new cathedral in Korça

Church of St. Anna

Shen Naumi (St. Nahum)

Prophet Elijah

Chapel of St. Elijah, high above Korça

Church of the Resurrection, Pogradec

St. Marena

The Last Judgment

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Yannaras vs. the Zealots

2011-06-15T01:19:00.130-04:00

In my systematic theology classes this year we read a few articles by Greek Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras. We also got to hear him speak in person when the seminary presented him with an honorary degeree. While I respect Yannaras’s ability to tackle interesting, relevant topics (e.g., human freedom) from a point of view that is modern, original, and Orthodox, I disagree so strongly with his central philosophical commitment that I usually cannot follow him to his conclusions (though I can sometimes reach similar conclusions by a different route). In my reading of Yannaras, I quickly sensed a foundation of Sartrean-style existentialism underlying his thinking. My reaction to John Zizioulas was similar. I guess it should not be surprising that Greek theologians of the mid 20th century would engage with the dominant European philosophy of their day, just as Bulgakov and his generation had earlier engaged with Hegel and German idealism.

I am not entirely opposed to existentialism. I went through an existentialist phase in my early 20s, and I still retain a soft spot for Kierkegaard. But the more I thought about Sartre’s blunt assertion, "There is no human nature," the more I realized that 1) it is nonsense, and 2) it is irreconcilable with traditional Christology. If there is no human nature, then the whole concept of species does not apply to humans, and each of us is a sui generis being (rather like the Christ of Arius). If there is no human nature, then we cannot say that Christ assumed human nature, and the traditional explanation of the Incarnation falls apart. I think Yannaras and Zizioulas come dangerously close to Sartre with the notion of person transcending nature. As I understand it, this means that our path to theosis must lead to a transcending of our human nature. That strikes me as gnostic.

While Zizioulas has not, to my knowledge, accepted the existentialist label, Yannaras has been open about his influences. Toward the end of his recent commencement address at Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, for instance, he lauded Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, who "boldly attempted to make a painful break with moral error." To be fair, Yannaras went on to say that his ontology of the person was a response to "the need to confront Heidegger’s nihilism," so we should not imagine that he is an uncritical Heideggerian. But, still, he typically operates within a modernist framework of mid-20th-century European existentialism.

The main body of this commencement address, however, constituted a postmodern critique of "the problem of neoconservatism and fundamentalism which currently afflicts the way life is led in most Orthodox churches." (I’m really not sure what neoconservatism means outside the context of U.S. politics − in fact, I’m a bit hazy on what it means even in that context. Since the term did not recur, I will assume it is just a synonym for fundamentalism, and not a significant term in itself.) Yannaras clearly and correctly identifies the fundamentalist "zealots" of modern Orthodoxy − those who oppose all ecumenical dialogue and who pose as defenders Orthodox Tradition against the West − as unwitting examples of the very modernist Western ideology they claim to oppose. They set their own judgment above that of the Church and its bishops. They embrace a commitment to formal propositions and authoritative texts akin to Marxists, thereby reducing Orthodoxy to an ideology.

Yannaras then pointed out that it is not only the zealots who have fallen into a Western way of thinking and living, but "the whole of Christendom." Overcoming the pitfalls of Westernization, then, is not a matter of resisting the "other," but of self-criticism and repentance.

Read the whole address here.

Questions on Islam

2011-05-05T09:09:00.010-04:00

Nearly a decade ago, public interest in Islam spiked in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It gradually subsided thereafter but still remained much higher than before. In 2011, various stories related to Islam are once again dominating the headlines:

Unrest and protest in Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Bahrain, Libya, Iran, and Syria (and probably a few I missed).
Florida pastor Terry Jones announced he would burn a copy of the Qur'an, backed down in response to pleas and advice from other American religious leaders, and then went ahead with his original plan, sparking worldwide outrage among Muslims.
The House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response.”
Several states are considering bills to ban Shari'ah law (and foreign law in general) from being applied in state courts.
This week the long manhunt for Osama bin Laden concluded with his death in a U.S. raid on his compound in Pakistan.

In this post I want to address two recurring questions about Islam:

Do Muslims worship the same God as Christians?
Are violence and terrorism endemic to Islam?

No God but Allah

Some imagine Allah to be the proper name of the Muslim deity. But, in fact, it is the generic divine name in Arabic. Allah is a contraction of the Arabic al-'ilah, which means literally, "the deity." The definite article serves to emphasize singularity, so it is understood as "the sole deity," i.e., God. This name for God is not specific to Muslims but is used by all Arabic-speaking monotheists, including Christians. In my Antiochian Orthodox parish, when we sing the Trisagion in Arabic we address God as Qudduson ullah.

Others argue that Muslims worship "a different god" than Christians. I have found that the straightforward counter-argument – that a monotheist cannot logically posit the existence of "a different god" – does not phase them. When probing beneath the "different god" argument, I occasionally find a belief that Muslims are either pagans who worship a non-existent mythological deity or deluded devil worshipers (I have encountered both versions of the argument). In either case, I suppose one could argue with some logic that Muslims are worshiping a different god. But this is not what is usually meant by "a different god."

Typically those who make the "different god" argument will point out that Christians worship Jesus or the Holy Trinity and Muslims do not. But the same could be said of Jews, and most Christians would not say that Jews worship "a different god." What they really mean is that Muslims have a different conception of God than Christians do, and this is certainly true. But we do not (or at least ought not) worship our conception of God. To worship a conception produced by our minds would be every bit as idolatrous as to worship an image produced by our hands. We do not worship any conception of God, but the ineffable reality behind all conceptions.

It was the intention of Muhammad to introduce the God of the Bible to his people, the Arabs. There can be no doubt of the strong influence of Christianity on early Islam. Muhammad's wife's cousin, Waraqah ibn Nawfal, an Ebionite Christian priest, was the first to acknowledge Muhammad as a prophet. St. John of Damascus, who had grown up in the Damascus court of the Umayyad caliphate, classified Islam as a Christian heresy. In the early 20th century, Hilaire Belloc came to the same conclusion. Without necessarily endorsing that hypothesis, I think we can safely say that Muslims worship the same God as Christians, though they might hold incorrect beliefs about him and serve him badly (as, indeed, do many Christians).

The Religion of Peace?

The word islam is the infinitive of the Arabic verb 'aslama, which means "to surrender" or "to submit." A Muslim, then, is one who surrenders to Allah. The same triliteral root, s-l-m, is shared by salaam, which means "peace." But Islam does not have a reputation as a peaceful religion, either historically or today.

In the time of Muhammad, Arabic society was filled with injustice and violence and the tribes were constantly feuding with each other. Muhammad brought all of the Arabic tribes into a confederation, which resulted in inter-tribal peace. Since the united Arabs could no longer raid one another, they redirected their raids against their non-Arabic neighbors. In her book Islam: A Short History, Karen Armstrong describes the resulting conquests:

[W]hen the Arabs burst out of Arabia they were not impelled by the ferocious power of "Islam." Western people often assume that Islam is a violent, militaristic faith which imposed itself on its subject peoples at sword-point. This is an inaccurate interpretation of the Muslim wars of expansion. There was nothing religious about these campaigns, and Umar did not believe that he had a divine mandate to conquer the world. The objective of Umar and his warriors was entirely pragmatic: they wanted plunder and a common activity that would preserve the unity of the ummah. . . . Later, when the Muslims had established their great empire, Islamic law would give a religious interpretation of this conquest, dividing the world into the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam), which was in perpetual conflict with the Dar al-Harb (the House of War).

It should be emphasized that being conquered by Muslims does not necessarily entail an expectation of conversion to Islam. In fact, for the first century of Islam, conversion was not an option. Islam was conceived by Muhammad and his immediate successors as a religion for Arabs only. Anyone who wanted to convert to Islam would have had to join an Arab tribe. Conquered peoples were expected to live as they did before the conquest, but to pay the jizyah, a per-capita tax on non-Muslim subjects. Later regimes permitted or even encouraged conversion to Islam, but this often caused fiscal problems, as mass conversions resulted in an equally massive decline in state revenue. Therefore some regimes actually discouraged conversion, which was seen as a form of tax evasion!

Centuries later, Islam was adopted by many of the Mongol and Turkish tribes that were raiding and conquering Asia (and trying to do the same to Eastern Europe). But these tribes were not motivated in their efforts by Islam; they had been trying to conquer the world (with some success) long before they converted to Islam. Rather, Islam was a religion of convenience that was more accommodating of their culture of raiding and conquest than the Buddhism and East Syrian Christianity previously popular among the Mongols.

Still, a religion that is attractive to violent cultures and which accommodates their violence by directing it outwards might have something to answer for. It has been noted that Islam has "bloody borders." Many of the world's recurring-conflict zones involve an Islamic presence – the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East, South Asia, East Africa. Islamic history and ideology can facilitate a presumption of a God-given right of Muslims to rule over non-Muslims, which inevitably leads to conflict. Today, however, this archaic ideology more often serves as a cover for nationalism or personal and factional agendas. And much of Islamic violence today is between different factions of Muslims.

Schools of Thought on Islamic Terrorism

Muslims did not invent religiously motivated terrorism. That distinction might go to the Sicarii, first-century Jewish anti-Roman fanatics. But their tactics were replicated by the Assassins, a 12th-century Persian Isma'ili Shi'ite sect known for murdering opposing leaders by stealth.

But the Sicarii and the Assassins were both well organized factions with clear political goals who targeted specific known enemies. Today's Islamic terrorism, by contrast, is a loosely organized mass movement that shares common enemies, rather than common goals. It is distinctly modern in its ideology and its methods. And it engages in mass murder rather than targeted killings.

Is mass violence inherent to Islam in the modern context? Are all Muslims potential terrorists? I define three schools of thought on these questions: the 1% school, the 10% school, and the 100% school. These percentages are different answers to the question, "What percentage of Muslims supports militant Islam?"

The 1% school encompasses most U.S. politicians of both major parties. They profess that the terrorists and their sympathizers are a small fringe of Muslims, which certainly does not include Wahhabis. This is a convenient view to espouse since it does not require a strong policy response and does not risk upsetting our supposed allies in Saudi Arabia.

According to the 10% school, the terrorists and their sympathizers are a large minority of Muslims that includes Wahhabis. This school is represented most clearly by Daniel Pipes and Stephen Schwartz. (Pipes inspired my development of this classification system when he estimated that 10-15% of Muslims worldwide support militant Islam.) This is the school that I identify with.

Finally, the 100% school says that all Muslims (or, at least, all real Muslims) sympathize with Islamic terrorism – i.e., that Islam is inherently a terrorist religion. The most outspoken proponent of this school is Serge Trifkovic.

One might think the 100% school would be the most strongly opposed to militant Islam, but the 100%ers, ironically, largely agree with the militants. These nominal enemies agree that Islam is inherently committed to imposing its rule on the entire world and that self-described Muslims who disagree are either liars or apostates. They both embrace the same all-encompassing us-vs.-them worldview. They even respect each other as adversaries who are playing the same game. Trifkovic and militant Muslims have actually engaged in tactical alliances against Pipes and Schwartz, whom they despise in common.

What game is Trifkovic playing? He is a professional apologist for Slobodan Milosevic and his cronies. The subtext of everything he writes is to justify Serbian actions, including atrocities against Muslims, in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. His portrayal of Islam implicitly castigates the Western powers that intervened to save Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo and warns us that we will one day be sorry we did not let them finish the job.

Pipes and Schwartz, by contrast, by distinguishing between good Muslims and bad Muslims – and naming the militants as the bad Muslims – challenge the whole worldview shared by Trifkovic and the militants. While they do not downplay the challenge posed by militant Islam (which separates them from the 1% school), neither do they portray all of Islam as an enemy that must be annihilated to save the world (which separates them from the 100% school). This school of thought presents us not with Armageddon, but with a problem like the Cold War – a self-declared enemy that we must take seriously and resist consistently, which we can defeat in time if we persist. If we succeed, we may be able to help save Islam rather than annihilating it.

A Child's Life at Seminary

2011-04-15T20:25:00.000-04:00

The daughter of one of last year's graduates reads a short memoir about her three years at St. Vlad's, accompanied by pictures of the campus, students, and families.

My Other Home: A Memoir of Living at St. Vladimir's Seminary, by Ayame Whitfield from St Vladimir's Seminary on Vimeo.

Christology in Dialogue

2011-04-11T01:27:00.002-04:00

My favorite class this semester has been Christology in Dialogue. We have carefully examined the Christological disputes of the fifth century that culminated in the Council of Chalcedon and resulted in ecclesial schisms that are with us to this day. We have also looked at the 20th-century dialogue process between the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches that has resulted in surprising agreed statements on Christology. Now, in the later part of the class, we are hearing from representatives of the Oriental Orthodox churches while working on our research papers. Tomorrow afternoon we will meet with Fr. Daniel Findikyan, the dean of nearby St. Nersess Armenian Seminary, and theologian Dr. Abraham Terian.

Last Sunday we visited St. Mark's Cathedral, Teaneck, NJ, American headquarters of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. The Liturgy was about 70% Syriac, but we were able to follow it in the tri-lingual Liturgy books (with the help of the page numbers on the TV screen on the wall in front of us). (This was apparently more English than usual - and some of the youth conveyed to their bishop that they would like hear more English even when visitors are not present!) After the Liturgy we were ushered into a large, plush meeting room. We got to spend nearly an hour in conversation with Abp. Mor Cyril Aphrem Karim and Dr. George Kiraz, founder of Gorgias Press. Each student received a copy of the Liturgy book, a copy of the collection of Eastern-Oriental Orthodox dialogue documents, and a CD of the Syriac Orthodox Footwashing service of Holy Thursday.

As we were leaving, Abp. Cyril remembered something he wanted to show us. He and Dr. Kiraz moved a couple of chairs out of the way and pulled back a plastic sheet to reveal two sixth-century mosaics from Edessa they had just received. Here, Abp. Cyril translates the Syriac inscription for us.

This past week I think I set a personal record for the number of library books checked out at one time: 40, of which 33 were from the St. Vlad's library and the remaining 7 from inter-library loan. While some were for my thesis, most were for my Christology paper on the Formula of Reunion, which reunited the Church in 433, following a brief schism after the Council of Ephesus. I've already begun to break up the collection, but here it is at its peak.

Same-Sex Marriage vs. Religious Freedom

2011-02-21T00:07:00.001-05:00

It now appears that the Maryland legislature is likely, in coming weeks, to legalize same-sex marriage in the state. Coming from a notoriously liberal state that just elected Barbara Mikulski to her fifth term in the Senate, this will not surprise anybody. Still, it might constitute a milestone for the gay marriage movement because Maryland was the first state in the US to ban same-sex marriage by law. Under the Family Law Act of 1973, "only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid in this State." Before that, marriage in the US was regulated by common law, not by statute. By 1994, in the face of increasing activism by same-sex couples seeking marriage, 45 states had passed marriage laws that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited the federal government from recognising same-sex marriages or any other kind of same-sex union. This turned out to be the high-water mark for the effort to prevent same-sex marriage.

The following year, the Supreme Court of Hawaii became the first to find prohibition of same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Hawaiians responded by voting, by a margin of 69% to 31%, to amend the state constitution to relieve the state courts of jurisdiction over marriage. In late 1999, Vermont's Supreme Court issued a similar ruling, and in 2000 the Vermont legislature acquiesced by recognizing same-sex civil unions. This established the pattern that has been followed for the past decade: activist courts imposed legal recognition of same-sex relationships contrary to the will of democratic majorities, who sometimes succeeded in reversing the courts' radical reinterpretations of marriage and sometimes failed.

The reasoning of same-sex marriage proponents is invariably based on an absolutist form of individualism, which recognizes no criterion of justice besides the equal treatment of all competent adults. Other criteria, such as the impact on families and children, public morals, social stability, and religious freedom, are ignored or dismissed. Some courts have gone so far as to state that hatred of homosexuals is the only possible reason why anyone would want to differentiate between same-sex and opposite-sex couples. Thus, they wield their liberal prejudices as a preemptive ad hominem attack to dismiss all opposing arguments before they are even enunciated.

Wherever same-sex marriage is enacted, conflicts with religious liberty inevitably emerge. In Canada, Catholic clergy have faced hate-crime investigations by human rights commissions for simply reiterating Catholic teaching on homosexuality. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities was forced out of the adoption business because it could not agree to place children with same-sex couples. In California, doctors may not refuse to artificially inseminate lesbians on religious grounds. And in a number of cases in both Canada and the US, photographers have been fined for discrimination after they declined to photograph gay weddings. The most extreme views have been put forth by EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, who states, "There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that's the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner."

Feldblum is unusual only in her candor. The primary agenda of the ACLU for the past two decades has had a similar point: to transpose the traditional places of sex and religion in our culture. Where religion was once expected to be a person's primary public affiliation, source of identity, and basis of social behavior, sexual expression was expected to be conducted discreetly in private between two consenting adults. A presumption of privacy in matters related to sex and reproduction was the basis of the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. But liberal activists now despise privacy in sexual matters, holding that insistence on privacy facilitates shame and demeans sexual identity. Rather, sexual identity is to be proclaimed, celebrated, and lived publicly. Where the sexual innocence of children was once protected by social consensus, now their sex education might begin before they learn the multiplication tables. In short, sex is being pushed out of the closet.

Meanwhile, secularists are trying to shove religion into the closet. They portray even the mildest public display of religion as inherently offensive to anyone not of that religion. They increasingly substitute "freedom of worship" for "freedom of religion" in an effort to redefine religious liberty as nothing more than the freedom to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. Many educators now take it as part of their job to counteract the religious upbringing of their pupils. Some would even prohibit all religious indoctrination of children, calling it a form of child abuse. In short, secularists are working to reduce religion to a private recreational activity that consenting adults may engage in discreetly behind closed doors.

The American public has little patience for this sort of anti-religious activism. But same-sex marriage and the cluster of gay rights that always accompany it into law have become a way for activist courts to circumvent American religious sensibilities. Can there be any doubt that secularists will continue to use same-sex marriage laws as a bludgeon against religious liberty?

According to The Washington Post, my own state senator, Jim Rosapepe, endorsed Maryland's same-sex marriage bill only after the "conscience clause" was strengthened, which would make it clear that religious organizations do not have to participate in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. But I'm not sure why we should trust courts that have overturned previous marriage laws to respect a conscience clause whose effect is to permit discrimination against same-sex couples. In any case, the conscience clause appears to cover only religious organizations, not religious individuals like wedding photographers or fertility doctors. I can't help feeling that the Maryland I will return to in a few months will be less free than the one I left two years ago.

Ephrem on Christ's Refutation of Death

2010-12-15T13:50:00.002-05:00

Take note therefore how the Living One sought to refute death in every kind of way. He was an embryo, and while in the womb [death] was not able to destroy him. [He was] an infant and while growing up, it was not able to disfigure him. [He was] a child and during his education it was not able to confuse him. [He was] a young man, and with its lustful desires it was not able to lead him into error. [He was] instructed, and with its wiles, it was not able to overpower him. [He was] a teacher, and because of his intelligence, it was not able to refute him. [He was] vigilant, and with its commands, it was not able to turn him aside [from his purpose]. [He was] strong, and in killing him, it was not able to frighten him. [He was] a corpse and in the custody of the tomb, it was not able to hold him. He was not ill, because he was a healer. He did not go astray, because he was a shepherd. He did not commit error, because he was a teacher. He did not stumble, because he was the light. This is the perfect way that the Messiah opened up for his Church, from the beginning through conception until the completion of the resurrection.

Saint Ephrem's Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron IV:14
Translated by Carmel McCarthy

Staniloae on the Light of Revelation

2010-12-05T00:15:00.000-05:00

I thought this passage from the article “Revelation and Promise,” by 20th century Romanian theologian Dumitru Staniloae, was appropriate for Advent. (If you have to read it two or three times before you get it, don’t worry – everyone has that experience when reading Staniloae.)

The acts of the Old Testament revelation prepare and condition the act of the coming of Christ, and this in turn crowns the former. The acts of the Old Testament revelation lay history open for Christ who descends and enters into it. They constitute all the different preparations for the realization of the promise of a Messiah to come. They constitute that history which prepares for the entry into history of one who himself transcends all history. They succeed one another on the path leading towards the gleam of that heavenly light which shone when God came to dwell among men and history was fulfilled by what lies beyond it.

In this sense the Old Testament revelation as a whole is also a gift and not simply a promise, for it throws open the shining light of the fulfillment in Christ. It does not leave the people in total darkness, nor does it move in darkness to the very end. This also is a gift, not simply a promise, although the gift is more like a light shining at the very end of a road. The Old Testament revelation moves toward this light until it reaches the end of the road and comes up along side it, but this gift is not the same as the very light itself illuminating the road from above. It is more like an oasis; we see it from afar and we move towards it until we come right up beside it – but we never finally reach it.

Ephrem on God's Inexhaustible Word

2010-11-03T22:49:00.000-04:00

Who is capable of comprehending the immensity of possibilities of one of your [God's] utterances? What we leave behind us in your utterance is far greater than what we take from it, like those who are thirsting, when they imbibe from a fountain. Many are the perspectives of his word, just as many are the perspectives of those who study it. God has fashioned his word with many beautiful forms, so that each one who studies it may consider what he likes. He has hidden in his word all kinds of treasures so that each one of us, wherever we meditate, may be enriched by it. His utterance is a tree of life, which offers you blessed fruit from every side. It is like that rock which burst forth in the desert, becoming spiritual drink to everyone from all places. They ate spiritual food and drank spiritual drink (1 Cor 10:3-4).

Therefore, whoever encounters one of its riches must not think that that alone which he has found is all that is in it, but rather that it is this alone that he is capable of finding from the many things in it. Enriched by it, let him not think that he has impoverished it. But rather let him give thanks for its greatness, he that is unequal to it. Rejoice that you have been satiated, and do not be upset that it is richer than you. The thirsty one rejoices because he can drink, but is not upset because he is unable to render the source dry. The well can conquer your thirst, but your thirst cannot conquer the fountain. If your thirst is satiated, without the fountain running short, whenever you are thirsty, you can drink again. But if, through your being satiated, the fountain were rendered dry, your victory would be unto your misfortune. Give thanks for what you have taken away, and do not murmur over what remains and is in excess. That which you have taken and gone away with is your portion and that which is left over is also your heritage. That which you were not able to receive there and then because of your weakness, receive it at another time by means of your perseverance. And do not, in your impudence, attempt either to obtain in one moment that which cannot be taken up in one moment, or to desist from that which you are able to take up little by little.

Saint Ephrem's Commentary on Tatian's Diatessaron, I:18-19
Translated by Carmel McCarthy

Summer Reading

2010-07-16T20:35:00.001-04:00

While shopping for souvenirs in the kitschy tourist block of Kruja, Albania, I spotted a book with a title in English, Faith and Fairies: Tales Based on Albanian Legends and Ballads, by Mustafa Tukaj. I didn’t know I was supposed to haggle, so I overpaid for my used, water-damaged copy. The English translation is quite new – it just appeared last year. Perhaps it should have been delayed to allow an actual English speaker to proofread it before publication – some of the translations are unintentionally hilarious. Of the ten tales in the volume, the last five concern the heroes of Jutbina, Gjeto Basho Muj and his brother Halil. The book begins with a scholarly essay summarizing the main themes and motifs that run through Albanian folk tales. The primary virtue exalted in these tales is faith (besa, in Albanian) – keeping one’s sworn pledge of honor.

Before I found Faith and Fairies, I was reading Arabian Fairy Tales by Amina Shah, who comes from “an ancient Afghan family of writers and savants.” The Arabian stories feel, somehow, more familiar and less austere than the Albanian tales. Perhaps living in Britain has taught the author what an English-speaking audience expects. Or perhaps The Thousand and One Nights has become so much a part of the English canon that tales from that culture no longer seem particularly exotic.

At St. Vlad’s, returning students can check out books for the whole summer. After I learned about this privilege, every time I found a book I thought I might want to read over the summer, I filled out a check-out slip for the book. On the second-to-last day of the semester, I took my pile of slips to the stacks, located all my books, and checked them out.

First on my list was Edessa ‘The Blessed City’ by J.B. Segal, a thorough, detailed history of this city, which was central to Syrian Christianity. Here was where Greek, Semitic, Persian, and Armenian cultures met and mixed. Originally home to Antiochene theologians who followed Theodore of Mopsuestia, Edessa’s theological school later switched sides and adopted the theology of Cyril of Alexandria. The city was also home to King Abgar and the famed Edessa icon, known as the mandylion.

Continuing that last theme is Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image by Polish artist Ewa Kuryluk, an examination of the veronica, the mandylion, and other “true images” of Christ from a postmodern feminist perspective.

Tangentially related to these is Image and Liturgy: The History and Meaning of the Epitaphion, the 2008 M.Div. thesis of St. Vlad’s staff member Tatiana Penkrat. The epitaphion is an embroidered icon of the burial of Christ that is used in Byzantine services of Holy Friday and Saturday, particularly the Lamentation service. I am eager to read this work for multiple reasons:

The Lamentation service has always been my favorite Byzantine service.
Many recensions of the epitaphion display the Troparion of St. Joseph of Arimathea in the border and place St. Joseph himself at the feet of Christ, making this my patronal icon.

Penkrat considers the possibility that the epitaphion is a recension of the True Shroud of Jesus, which some equate to the mandylion translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944.

Finally, a book that has nothing to do with Edessa and its icon: Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings. Identity politics in the Balkans has interested me since my 1992 stint on a joint military intelligence task force that followed the Balkans. Since then I have followed Kosovo with special interest; Slobodan Milosevic made the province a particular focus of Serbian identity politics, and the Kosovar Albanians responded creatively to his provocations. Duijzings questions the assumption that ethnic and religious identities in the Balkans are clear-cut and fixed. Indeed, I have long been aware that Balkan villages have historically changed their language and ethnic identity when it was expedient to do so, much as they converted to Islam under pressure from the Ottomans. The whole idea of nationalism, as we understand it, is an invention of the 19th century, and it is even more inappropriate to project it further into the past than it is to maintain it in the present.

Albanian Mission/Class

2010-07-14T16:52:00.004-04:00

The day after the spring semester ended, four seminarians from St. Vladimir’s drove to Brookline, MA, where we joined seven Holy Cross seminarians for a new, experimental class/practicum, “The Missiology of Archbishop Anastasios,” offered jointly by Holy Cross, OCMC, and the new Missions Institute of Orthodox Christianity. We had one week of classes at Holy Cross, during which we learned about the theology and practice of missions. We also read two books about the resurrection of the Orthodox Church in Albania, plus four articles and a collection of seven papers by Abp. Anastasios. We flew to Tirana via Munich on Lufthansa, arriving around noon on Tuesday, May 25. We ate lunch and settled into our rooms at the church’s Mount Tabor Center on the outskirts of Tirana. Here is the view from the balcony of my room, where I spent a lot of time reading and writing. (All of these photos can be enlarged by clicking on them.)

After the traditional Albanian post-lunch siesta, went into the city. We stopped at the new cathedral, which is still under construction.

Here you can see the cathedral’s bell/clock tower, along with the small chapel next to the cathedral.

My artistic shot of the interior of the chapel.

Then we strolled around Tirana, with a stop for ice cream, before returning to the Tabor Center. That evening we had guests for supper – a number of young Albanians, mostly students. After supper the music started, and the Albanians taught us some traditional dances.

The next morning we returned to Tirana. We learned that in Albania, unlike much of Europe, America is very popular. Albanians are especially proud of the visit of the last U.S. President – so proud that they named a street after him!

Our first stop was Annunciation Cathedral. This was the only church in Tirana to survive the 23-year suppression of religion (1967-1990) under communism. It survived because it was used as a gymnasium during this period. It currently functions as the cathedral while the new cathedral is being built.

We met Fr. Asti, who told us of growing up under communism, when all religious practice was forbidden.

He told us his father would occasionally stand in silence, and he was afraid to ask him what he was doing. Only many years later did he learn that his father had been praying. Our meeting with Fr. Asti was held in the cathedral’s baptistery. The cross-shaped baptismal font, big enough to dunk a large adult, was built into the floor.

Next, we met with Abp. Anastasios himself in his office. This was our chance to ask him firsthand about what we had read about his life, his theology, and the revival of the Albanian church.

We visited a number of the church’s ministries – the Protagonist School, the bookshop, the women’s group, and the youth center. Then we visited the National Archives, where a new exhibition of medieval church manuscripts was just opening. The oldest manuscript in the collection is a copy of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark from the 6th century. This display shows photos of the original documents with scholarly reconstructions of what they would have looked like originally.

Back at the Tabor Center, we had a quiet evening with most of the OCMC’s missionaries in Albania. The following day we met with Nina at Diakonia Agapes, the church’s social outreach ministry.

Later on, we visited the apartment of OCMC missionary Pamela Barksdale, from whose balcony these next two shots were taken.

The second shot shows one of the less attractive features of Albania. They have not yet developed a sense of environmental consciousness, so it is not uncommon to find garbage piled up in out-of-the-way places.

The next day we began a two-day excursion to Shen Vlash Monastery and the Resurrection of Christ Theological Academy, just east of the coastal city of Durrës. We met with the seminarians, and we all told our stories.

In the afternoon we walked to a nearby cemetery where OCMC missionary Lynette Hoppe is buried and said prayers at her grave.

The road through the cemetery divides it into Christian and Muslim halves. You can see how Albanians bury their dead in above-ground tombs, and they often leave flowers – or snacks – for the departed.

In the afternoon we visited the Children’s Home of Hope, an orphanage on the grounds of the monastery.

Some of the older girls performed a dance for us.

We divided the kids into two groups, taking one outside for games, including a water balloon fight. The other group stayed inside for a craft – decorating a small wooden cross with paints and beads. Then the two groups traded places and activities.

The next day was a big student conference at the monastery. Students came from all over the country, and they filled the auditorium set up for the conference. Here the students open the event with songs.

The red and black flag is the national flag, and the gold and red flag is the church flag. Both feature the double-headed eagle, a symbol that the Albanians inherited from the Byzantine Empire. After the singing, Fr. Luke gave a talk, and then we divided up into small groups for discussion of passages of scripture on the topic of love. Thanks to my translator Aleksandra, I was able to participate in the discussion in my group. During the break that followed, a couple of girls who wanted to meet Americans talked to some of the seminarians. They invited me to join them for a walk. One of them spoke very good English, which she said she learned mostly by watching American movies and TV shows. On our way back for lunch we stopped to play on the swings.

This is the refectory where everyone from the seminary and monastery eats, packed with students from the conference.

After lunch, Fr. Raphael and I were invited to join an Albanian family enjoying the beautiful afternoon in the shade of a tree.

Later we attended Saturday Vespers at the monastery church, which is built in the traditional Greek style typical of new Albanian churches.

That evening we drove back to the Tabor Center, and on Sunday morning we attended Orthros and the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy at the cathedral. Here is a bird’s eye view of the beginning of the Liturgy, with all the clergy gathered behind the archbishop.

On Monday morning we visited the church-run diagnostic clinic and had a Bible study with the student leaders at the Student Center of the Orthodox Church in Student City.

On Tuesday morning we visited Nazareth Center, which houses several church-related crafts: printing, icon painting and restoration, wood carving, and candle making. Here we see a batch of candles that have just been dipped in molten wax. They will be dipped repeatedly until they reach the desired thickness.

After this we visited the Gypsy camp on the edge of Tirana. The Gypsies in Albania, as in much of Europe, have not assimilated to the majority culture. This is partly a result of discrimination, but traditional Gypsy culture promotes cohesion within the band and independence from non-Gypsies, which creates pressure not to assimilate.

The Gypsies subsist by begging, working at short-term unskilled jobs, and exploiting Tirana’s trash. Some of them repair junk and re-sell it, while others collect recyclables. This Gypsy crushes aluminum cans to be recycled. I wonder how much worse the trash problem in Tirana would be if the Gypsies were not picking up all the recyclables.

Back at the Tabor Center, we joined the closing lunch of a clergy conference, and then we heard from Papa Jani, an important figure in the Church’s revival, over frappés.

Then we immediately packed up for a three-day visit to the southeastern city of Korça, a traditional Orthodox stronghold. We had a long drive through the mountains with a lot of breathtaking scenery.

We stopped at Shen Naum, on the shore of Lake Ochrid, for a delicious supper of koran, a local fish.

The décor of the restaurant featured three stuffed bears. Here Jason earns his nickname, the bear whisperer.

We spent the night at the Metropoly. In the morning, after fortifying ourselves with a round of Greek coffee, we met with Metropolitan John in his office.

We then had the rest of the morning free for sightseeing in Korça. We three of the city’s Orthodox churches, but we only found one of them open. A few of us walked up a long crumbling staircase to the top of a hill on the edge of town, not knowing what we would find at the top. It turned out to be a cemetery and war memorial. Here, Ryan poses in front of the socialist-realist memorial statue.

Looking the other direction gave us a dramatic view of the whole city and a snow-capped mountain in the distance.

We could also see the next church on our itinerary.

There seem to be a lot of bridal shops in Albania, and everything American is popular. But I’m not sure what Mickey Mouse has to do with wedding gowns.

As I was saying, America is popular.

Our group nearly entered this restaurant’s outdoor seating area, but then opinion quickly divided about what we wanted, and a critical mass of the group drifted across the street to a place that served beer and meat – despite the fact that it was a Wednesday in a fasting season. I knew what I wanted – Turkish coffee – so I persuaded Ryan to join me, and we returned to Restaurant Amerika for coffee. Eventually, everyone else drifted back across the street to join us.

That afternoon we traveled to the Monastery of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, near Voskopoja.

The facilities were . . . primitive. After Vespers and supper, we gathered around a campfire with Metropolitan John for a couple of hours. The next morning we loaded our bags on a mule and commenced a 20-kilometer hike through the mountains to the Monastery of Ss. Peter & Paul, near Vithkuq. In this next picture, we went off the trail to avoid an area where the army was destroying excess ammunition.

Here you can see two of the one-man bunkers that became ubiquitous in Albania during the communist period. Placed in strategic locations all over the country, they are deep enough for a man to stand in (and shoot from) and made of concrete a foot and a half thick.

On our way out of Korça, we drove up to the big cross overlooking the city for our morning prayers. On our way up the hill we saw this cement truck that fell off the road two years ago and has been stuck there ever since.

Here, Logan approaches the cross.

And here is the view across the valley.

On the way home, we stopped in Pogradec and Elbasan. In the former, we met Papa Todi, who took us out to this restaurant, formerly a favorite retreat of the dictator Enver Hoxha, where I had the best Turkish coffee ever – and the raki wasn’t bad either.

On Saturday morning we took the orphans to the beach at Durrës. Most of the kids started out playing soccer.

Then we had some races.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anyone took a picture of the awesome sand castle. After we returned the kids to the orphanage, we headed for the historical city of Kruja. Here you can see the dramatic cliffs above the city.

We had lunch at this little restaurant while a storm came and went.

After shopping for souvenirs, we visited the Skanderbeg Museum. Skanderbeg was the medieval military leader who held the Turks at bay for a generation to maintain Albania’s independence. Our hero strikes a profound pose at the entrance to his museum.

Socialist realism projected back into the 14th century! The first exhibition room showed some artifacts of the Illyrians, the people who occupied the Adriatic coast in the Roman era, and who are sometimes claimed as the ancestors of the Albanians. This is a model of an Illyrian ship.

On Sunday evening we held a big farewell party, with the OCMC missionaries and many of our Albanian friends.

(You will probably have noticed that I did not include many shots of icons and church interiors. I decided to hold those for a second post at a later time. If I had tried to include them here, they could easily have displaced the narrative and dominated the whole post.)

Abp. Anastasios on "Theotokos Spirituality"

2010-06-09T23:34:00.002-04:00

Theotokos simply means Mother of God or God-bearer. This is Mary, Christ’s mother. Think of her! She became the first and best disciple and sets the perfect example for anyone who is trying to follow her Divine Son. There are three main elements in her witness. She said to the archangel, ‘Be it done to me according to your word.’ God's will, not my own! She gives us this example and through it Christ enters our lives. She also said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord.’ We are asked to centre our lives on the Lord, not ourselves. And she says, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ We learn from her another type of freedom, the freedom to be free of your own plans. We realize he becomes present in our lives, as he became present in hers, through obedience. It is the obedience of love, a gift of the Holy Spirit. In her silence, in her capacity quietly to consider events in her heart, we also learn much about prayer as face-to-face conversation with God in silence. Contemplating the Mother of God is a great help and is itself a form of prayer.

His Beatitude Anastasios (Yannoulatos)
Archbishop of Tirana, Durrrës, and All Albania

from The Resurrection of the Church in Albania: Voices of Orthodox Christians, by Jim Forest

Turning 50 at Seminary

2010-04-25T19:58:00.002-04:00

On Thursday I reached the half-century milestone. In most ways this was a typical day at St. Vlad's for me, but it was special in some ways too. So I thought it might make for a good day-in-the-life post.

I got up at 6:30 and was in the chapel before 7:15. Since I was the morning reader this week, I had to arrive early to set up the Matins book and mark the Psalm verses and the Epistle reading, and then I looked over the readings until the bell rang at 7:30. Standing in the middle of the church, just behind the analogion, I intoned the Paschal Troparion three times, followed by the Trisagion Prayers. After the choir sang the Paschal Troparion three more times, I read Psalm 103. Then I stepped back to the congregation while the deacon and the men's choir did the Great Litany and the choir sang God is the Lord. During the third week of Easter season, we commemorate the Myrrh-bearing women and St. Joseph of Arimathea every day, so the choir sang their troparia at this point in the service. (Since the Arimathean is my patron saint, I enjoyed hearing hymns about him at every service this week!) After I read Psalms 27-29, I returned to the congregation until towards the end of Matins, when I read the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch from Acts 8. Following Matins, I had to help the student ecclesiarch put away the Matins books and set up the choir stands for Vespers.

I arrived late for breakfast in the refectory, which was the usual fare for a non-fasting weekday - scrambled eggs, pancakes, hash browns, fruit salad, assorted breads, and orange juice. After breakfast, we sang the last part "The Angel Cried," beginning with "Shine, shine," as we have after every meal since Pascha. After Father Stephen gave the blessing, he recognized my birthday and everyone sang "Many Years," the universal, all-purpose song for honoring people on their birthdays, name days, anniversaries, baptisms, chrismations, marriages, etc. in the Orthodox Church. Then I went to the kitchen and joined my meal crew in clearing tables, washing dishes, and putting things away. (My classmate Maggie, who normally works on another meal crew, had subbed for me for the pre-meal set-up since I was reading at Matins.) I had a few minutes left to go to the libarary and check my e-mail before class.

The Thursday morning class for first-year students is Pauline Epistles. We're currently on Romans, as we will be for the rest of the semester. Drawing a diagram on the board, Dr. Barnet reviewed the hermeneutic circle that produced the Gospels: early Christians, reflecting on Scripture (i.e., the Old Testament) in the light of the gospel (good news) of Christ's Passion and Resurrection, produced the written Gospels. He then returned to Romans, drawing on the work of Luke Timothy Johnson to examine the epistle in terms of the classical rhetorical form of diatribe.

My afternoon class, Integrating Seminar, is split into two sections. I am in the second section, which does not meet until 2:10. Until then, I continued my search for sources on the old Georgian Rite for my Church History paper. In Seminar we heard presentations from three students on the subject of self-control, drawing from the writings of St. John of Kronstadt and St. Gregory the Great. After class I made a cup of tea in the refectory and then walked back up the hill to North Dorm. I remotely accessed my desktop computer in my Maryland office, retrieved some files, and e-mailed them to myself. One file was a photo of myself for my application for the Albania mission (a hoop I have to jump through even though I have already been accepted). The other file was information on "the Rule of the Mother of God" - variations of the Rosary used by Eastern Christians - which I then e-mailed to another student for a project he is working on.

Then I hurried back to the chapel. I was to sing with the Byzantine Choir at Great Vespers for the eve of the Feast of St. George. Even though attendance is officially required of all students at daily Matins and Vespers, it is not enforced, so a lot of the OCA students skip the services when the Byzantine Choir, composed mostly of Antiochians, is scheduled to sing. But this day the chapel was packed for the feast. I got to free chant a sticheron for the Myrrh-bearers, a sticheron for St. George, and an aposticha verse. (Unfortunately, it had not occurred to me the request to chant the Troparion of St. Joseph of Arimathea. I made a mental note to do so at Liturgy the next morning.)

Back in the refectory at supper, I was pleased to see there would be ice cream for dessert! But that wasn't all. In the middle of supper, people suddenly started singing "Many Years," and my friend Tracy returned from the kitchen carrying a cake with five candles on it! I blew all the candles out, but one of them re-lit. Suspecting a trick, I blew again, and it stayed out. I was supposed to work the clean-up shift, in exchange for not having to do set-up at breakfast, but Maggie insisted on taking the rest of the supper shift for me so that I could enjoy my cake and ice cream without hurrying.

On Thursday evenings, I am auditing an Iconology class. We are learning to analyze Orthodox iconography in terms of its rhetorical content and its use by the church - a contrast to the more mystical and dogmatic approach popularized in recent decades by Ouspensky. We looked at innovation and development in iconography, focusing particularly on the introduction of pathos - the expression of emotion by the figures in icons. We then spent some time looking at icons that depict other icons, focusing on an elaborate icon of St. Luke painting the first icon of the Virgin Mary. It inserts the traditional icon of St. Luke writing the Gospel into the middle of the traditional icon of the Annunciation, resulting in an icon with a new narrative - Gabriel teaching Luke how to paint Mary. We concluded by looking at some strange icons and considering the limits of innovation in iconography.

After class I returned to the dorm, where my classmate Philip was waiting for me. We began learning how to play Starfleet Battles, a wargame set in the Star Trek universe. I was running a Federation starship against Philip's Klingon cruiser. It was 1 AM before we knew it, so we recorded our positions, intending to resume the game in the future.

But my day was not over yet. I knew the deadline was creeping up to send in my $100 deposit for the missiology class in Albania. The information about the class had trickled out in an un-systematic way, with a number of additions and corrections, and I had not yet collated it all in my mind. It was a good thing I checked - the deadline for sending in the full $500 cost of the class was only a week away!

I knew I would have to be in the chapel by 6:40 to prepare to read at the Liturgy for the feast of St. George, so I set my alarm for 6 AM and turned in.

Paschal Greetings

2010-04-18T14:09:00.001-04:00

During the 39 days from Pascha until Ascension, we Orthodox Christians exchange the Paschal greeting: Christ is risen! Indeed, he is risen! To make it more interesting, we repeat it in many languages - most often the common Orthodox liturgical languages like Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, and Romanian, but occasionally in more obscure languages. In the past couple of weeks I have heard Albanian, Georgian, Syriac, and various native Alaskan languages, among others. But I also learned it in a couple of modern North American dialects:

Urban-American
Word up!
True dat!

Texan
He's back.
Yup.

If you know any other non-serious variations on the Paschal greeting, please post them as responses.

Annunciation Update

2010-03-25T14:41:00.007-04:00

Greetings on the Feast of the Annunciation! I am celebrating by listening to Kate Campbell's album Rosaryville, whose thematic threads include Louisiana, the Blessed Virgin Mary, motherhood, and the color blue. I have twice heard Campbell, a southern, Christian singer-songwriter, live, and I have most of her albums on CD. Rosaryville was my first exposure to her, and it is still my favorite of her albums.

Today is a liturgical rather than academic day here at St. Vlad's. Metropolitan Jonah is spending the whole day with us. We had a two-hour hierarchical Matins service this morning. It was impressive to see 11 priests lined up in front of the metropolitan, all in blue phelonia. Next, at 3 PM, is the Ninth Hour, followed by a hierarchical Vesperal Liturgy at which two students will be ordained - one to the priesthood, another to the diaconate. Then, at Compline at 9 PM, Metropolitan Jonah will receive the monastic vows of one of the students and tonsure him as a stavrophore.

Tomorrow will be a final academic day before we launch into Holy Week. Our schedule for the week will be, essentially, the full cursus of services from the Typikon - the kind of thing that is normally found only at a monastery. Bright Week, by contrast, has few services and no classes - it is our spring break.

I had been planning to make a visit to my home parish for Agape Vespers and Bright Monday, with a stop on the way back to watch the final game of the NCAA basketball tournament with my brother's family. But this year Agape Vespers was moved from the customary 6 PM to noon, which will make it impossible for me to attend, so I will probably just cancel the whole trip and stay on campus to study.

I am looking into some exciting possibilities for this summer. I have applied to take an intensive three-week summer course on the missiology of Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, which is being offered by the Missions Institute of Orthodox Christianity and OCMC. It will include two weeks in Albania! There were 16 applicants for 10 slots, so it's not a sure thing. I am also considering studying Syriac at Notre Dame for three or six weeks. And it looks like my institute might have some work for me, which would take me back to the DC area for at least a few weeks. I also hope to fit in a long road trip to visit friends and family I haven't seen in a while.

I just added a two new features to the blog, which you'll find in the right-hand column. First is OLD POSTS, BACK IN SEASON, which collects links to my past posts that are appropriate to the current season. It currently lists my old posts related to Lent, Holy Week, and Pascha. Second is a list of my followers. Yes, believe it or not, I have followers - or at least my blog does!

P.S. While I was writing the above, I received word that I have been accepted to the missiology course!

Schmemann on Fasting and Liturgy

2010-02-16T23:59:00.074-05:00

Lent began yesterday for us Byzantines, and Ash Wednesday is tomorrow. So it's an appropriate time to think about fasting.

On Sunday at coffee hour I learned about this article by Fr. Alexander Schmemann, "Fast and Liturgy." He argues, based on the typikon, that the length of the Eucharistic fast was intended to vary with the character of the occasion. The Divine Liturgy was to begin at the third hour on Sundays, the fourth hour on Saturdays, and the fifth hour on other days when it was celebrated. Given that the Eucharistic fast was to begin at midnight, it would be longer on days of a less festal character.

On a few particularly solemn days, the Liturgy was not to be celebrated until after Vespers - either a Vesperal Liturgy or a Presanctified Liturgy. On a day of strict fasting (such as the Beheading of St. John the Baptist or the Exaltation of the Holy Cross), there was to be no celebration of the Liturgy at all, and thus it would have to be postponed until the start of the next liturgical day, which began with Vespers. (My acquaintance at coffee hour said these would originally have been Presanctified Liturgies before such services were restricted to Lent.)

The Christian life is defined by the complementary poles of fasting and feasting. We pray and keep vigil, watching and waiting for our Lord's parousia. But we also experience a foretaste of the messianic banquet in the Eucharist. So we fast in preparation for feasting. We keep a Eucharistic fast before every Liturgy, and we keep a season of fasting before major feasts.

Of course Schmemann says it better. Read the article.

My Brain in Church

2010-02-15T23:56:00.001-05:00

Well, not my brain. The Anonymous God-blogger's brain. (Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The Head of John Chrysostom

2010-02-14T23:24:00.003-05:00

On Friday I joined a few fellow seminarians on an expedition to St. Nicholas Cathedral in Manhattan, where they celebrated the Feast of the Three Hierarchs (Old Calendar) with a Divine Liturgy and Molieben in the presence of the head of St. John Chrysostom. The head, which has been in Russia since 1655, was brought from Moscow to New York City last week for a short visit. It spent most of the week at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Sign and was then brought to St. Nicholas on Thursday evening.

St. John Chrysostom's second exile resulted from the empress Eudoxia's opposition to his efforts to curb the decadence of the clergy and nobility of Constantinople. After the empress had a silver statue of herself erected near the cathedral, Chrysostom boldly preached against her: "Again Herodias dances. Again she seeks the head of John." I mused on the irony that we were once again seeking the head of John.

The relic is stored in a cubical gold reliquary, with a bit of the skull protruding through a four-inch circular opening on the top. We were able to venerate (i.e., kiss) the skull before the Liturgy and again after the Molieben.

The services were almost entirely in Slavonic (I heard one litany and one prayer in English). So I spent a good deal of the time looking at the iconography, applying some skills from the iconography class I'm auditing. The iconography, mostly in pastel colors, shows clear Art Nouveau influence. It would have been right at home in a Roman Catholic cathedral of its era (the early 20th century).

On the south side of the nave is a large relic case containing 50 or so relics. If you've ever wondered how to spell St. Raphael of Brooklyn in Slavonic, this is the place to look.

Schmemann on Fundamentalism and Secularism

2010-01-31T15:10:00.001-05:00

In his essay, "Worship in a Secular Age," Father Alexander Schmemann traces the origin of secularism to a medieval Western theological error. In condemning Berengarius of Tours for his teaching that "because the presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements is 'mystical' or 'symbolic,' it is not real," the Lateran Council simply reversed the formula and proclaimed that because Christ's presence in the Eucharist is real, it is not mystical or symbolic. Both sides in the debate accepted the mutual exclusivity of verum and mystice, which undermined "the fundamental Christian understanding of creation in terms of its ontological sacramentality." Schmemann continues:

Let us not be mistaken, however. This Western theological framework was in fact accepted by the Orthodox East also, and since the end of the patristic age our theology has been indeed much more "Western" than "Eastern." If secularism can be properly termed a Western Heresy, the very fruit of the basic Western "deviation," our own scholastic theology has also been permeated with it for centuries, and this in spite of violent denunciations of Rome and papism. And it is indeed ironic, but not at all accidental, that psychologically the most "Western" among the Orthodox today are precisely the ultra-conservative "Super-Orthodox," whose whole frame of mind is legalistic and syllogistic on the one hand, and is made up, on the other hand, of those very "dichotomies" whose introduction into Christian thought is the "original sin" of the West. Once these dichotomies are accepted, it does not matter, theologically speaking, whether one "accepts" the world, as in the case of the Western enthusiast of "secular Christianity," or "rejects" it, as in the case of the "Super-Orthodox" prophet of apocalyptic doom. The optimistic positivism of the one, and the pessimistic negativism of the other are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. Both, by denying the world its natural "sacramentality" and radically opposing the "natural" to the "supernatural," make the world grace-proof, and ultimately lead to secularism.

From For the Life of the World, by Alexander Schmemann, pp. 128-130.

Vacation Reading

2010-01-03T01:47:00.000-05:00

I am free for a whole month between semesters – my longest period without work or classes in 15 years. While I have been spending quite a bit of time with my family, especially playing with my nephews and niece, I have managed to get in some reading, as well.

I wanted to get a jump on my reading for next semester without over-exerting my brain while recovering from final exams and relaxing with my family. So I started with Orthodox Christians in America, by John H. Erickson. It is written at a junior high level, but it will be required reading for Church History this coming semester, as it is the only book ever written on American Orthodox History. It gives a solid overview of the subject, but leaves a lot of details to be filled in.

An excellent place to begin filling in those details is my favorite podcast, Matthew Namee’s "American Orthodox History" on Ancient Faith Radio. Before I left campus, I loaded up my MP3 player with podcasts from AFR to listen to on the road, including the two most recent episodes of "American Orthodox History." The last episode was especially interesting. Namee interviewed Nicholas Chapman about his research on members of the Ludwell and Paradise families of Virginia and Britain, who were secretly Orthodox in the 18th century. Members of these families were tied to the founding fathers of the United States, the governments of Russia and the UK, the Non-Jurors, and the Jacobites.

Next on my reading list was the children's novelette Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman’s take on the world of Norse myth: "In a village in ancient Norway lives a boy named Odd, and he's had some very bad luck: His father perished in a Viking expedition; a tree fell on and shattered his leg; the endless freezing winter is making villagers dangerously grumpy. Out in the forest Odd encounters a bear, a fox, and an eagle – three creatures with a strange story to tell. Now Odd is forced on a stranger journey than he had imagined."

Having recovered from final exams, I was ready to tackle something a bit more challenging. A few days ago I began reading Dragon’s Wine and Angel’s Bread: The Teaching of Evagrius Ponticus on Anger and Meekness. The subtitle says it all. Since anger is a recurring theme of my confessions, this book went to the top of my reading list even before it was published. I plan to read this one slowly in order to digest it all.

Other books I am carrying around in my book bag include The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, by J. M. Hussey, another book on the syllabus for Church History in the spring semester; Mary for Time and Eternity: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism, which includes an article by my friend Virginia M. Kimball that she has been pushing me to read for a couple of years; The Challenge of Our Past: Studies in Orthodox Canon Law and Church History, another book by John H. Erickson, which is on the syllabus for Liturgical Theology; The Cappadocians, by Anthony Meredith; and finally, another book for fun: Arabian Fairy Tales, by Amina Shah. I hope to get to a couple of these before I return to campus.

As We Come Out of Darkness

2009-12-28T23:20:00.002-05:00

Having been raised Methodist, I think of singing as an essential part of church. The biggest thing that initially drew me to both Anglo-Catholicism and Orthodoxy was the principle of a liturgy that is mostly sung. During my Anglo-Catholic years, it took me a long time to get used to the Low Mass, a service with no singing at all (though I eventually grew to love serving at Low Mass more than any other service).

Nearly all of my pre-Orthodox singing, however, was done as a member of the congregation. I chose both my Anglo-Catholic parish and my Orthodox parish mostly because their respective congregations were participants in the singing, not just an audience for the choir. (One might argue that I was a member of the choir when I was chanting psalms as a vocationer with the Benedictines, but in a monastery the monks are really both choir and congregation.) I have written previously about how I got into chanting after I became Orthodox, so I won't repeat that story here.

Singing at Seminary

After patristics, my most demanding class in my first semester at St. Vlad's was liturgical music. It was an easy class for the OCA students with choir experience, but not so easy for the rest of us, especially the Antiochians. I've never been much of a choral singer - I have trouble hearing parts other than the melody. And, to the extent that I have sung in choir at all, it has been as a tenor. (When I was a freshman, my music major friends told me I was a tenor, and I always assumed they knew what they were talking about.) But in my voice test at St. Vlad's, I learned that I am actually a baritone. And then I was assigned to the mixed choir, where the only parts for men are tenor and bass, so I struggled to sing bass. In addition to singing at Matins or Vespers four days a week, plus Vigil every other Saturday and Liturgy most Sundays, I had to attend two choir practices and a music lecture each week. All together, that came to about ten hours a week, not counting the biweekly music quizzes, which were held outside of class time and required a lot of preparation.

During my first semester at St. Vlad's, the thing I missed most was chanting at Matins every week at my home parish. So I was really looking forward to being back for Matins on Christmas Eve and the Sundays before and after, chanting familiar Byzantine music. The two Sundays were to be tones 3 and 4, no less - my two favorite tones!

But I learned a few weeks ago that Matins on the Sunday after Christmas would be displaced by a baptism, and Christmas Eve would be complicated by the presence of the bishop. So I placed most of my hopes on the Sunday before Christmas. Unfortunately, thanks to last weekend's big snow storm, Matins was cancelled and I was snowed in at my brother's house (the first of several weather-related complications of my Christmas vacation). So Christmas Eve would be my only opportunity to chant.

The Stolen Canon

At Holy Cross, our normal schedule on December 24 is Royal Hours at 9 AM and Matins at 10 PM, followed by the Divine Liturgy. This year we added Vespers following the Royal Hours. When I arrived I found the largest congregation I've ever seen for Royal Hours - a good turn-out for our bishop's visit. The service moved a bit quicker than usual, as it often does when Bishop Thomas is present. When it ended, and I moved up to the chanters' stand for Vespers, I was disappointed to learn that our protopsalti, Emily, would not be joining us. Her absence left us in disarray, but we managed to get through the service. The bishop jumped in a few times and unexpectedly sang hymns that chanters were expecting to do. This was actually something of a relief at the aposticha, which we were not completely ready for.

When I checked my e-mail a few hours later, I learned that Emily was out with the flu and would not be joining us for Matins either, and my Matins assignment had been expanded to include the stichera on the Praises, as well as the kathisma hymns. My only other major parts were ones I knew about - the First Nativity Canon and the odd verses of the Great Doxology, both to be sung with Garth. I had been practicing the Nativity Canon for nearly a month - and it was challenging enough that I really needed that much time to learn it. I spent a couple of hours at my office printing music, marking up the kathismata and stichera for free chanting, and practicing everything, then headed for church.

The three chanters stood with the choir at the back of the church, rather than at the chanters' stand. Matins started smoothly. I free chanted the first two kathismata pretty well but was a bit shaky on the third, which followed a different pattern than the first two. The men got through the Polyeleos without messing up the "humiliation" verse, but in celebrating that small victory almost missed the next verse. Eventually, the time came for the Nativity canons. Garth and I chanted the first ode of the first canon, and then Debra chanted the first ode of the second canon. Before we could start on the next ode of the first canon, Bishop Thomas jumped in and sang it. He did this on all the remaining odes of the first canon. In no time, the piece I had been practicing for weeks was over and I only got to sing the first verse. I managed to recover my composure in time to free chant the stichera on the Praises, which went well. We concluded Matins with the Great Doxology in tone 2, and it sounded much better than it had in rehearsal two nights earlier.

Without Transubstantiation

The bishop sang a slightly different translation of the First Nativity Canon than the one we had been practicing. In the third and sixth odes where our translation read, "without change," he sang, "without transubstantiation." In both instances, the original Greek words come from a root that means "to flow" or "to change." (This is a different word than the one translated "without change" in the Chalcedonian definition of Christ's two natures and in the hymn "Only-Begotten Son.") The bishop's translation is one that appears in various official Antiochian places, like the website of the Los Angeles diocese. (The existence of multiple official translations is not unusual in the Antiochian Archdiocese.) I am still wondering if this translation was intended by the translator as a bit of anti-Roman polemic. Or, alternatively, did he have a limited English vocabulary heavy on technical theological terms?

My favorite ode of this canon is the fifth. (The fifth ode of a canon is based on Isaiah 26:9-20.) The ode reads:

O Lover of Mankind, since thou art the God of Peace and the Father of Mercies, thou didst send to us the Angel of Thy Great Counsel, granting us thy peace. Wherefore have we been led aright to the light of divine knowledge, glorifying thee as we come out of darkness.

Just after we have passed the darkest time of the year and the days are beginning to lengthen, we celebrate the arrival of the Logos, the true light who came into the world to enlighten us all.

Wishing a merry Christmas and a happy 2010 to all of my readers.

Melito's Reproaches

2009-11-22T21:35:00.000-05:00

O lawless Israel, what is this new injustice you have done,
casting strange sufferings on your Lord?
Your master who formed you,
who made you,
who honored you,
who called you Israel.

He it was who led you into Egypt,
and guarded you there and sustained you.
He it was who lit up your way with a pillar,
and sheltered you with a cloud.
He cut the Red Sea open, leading you through,
and destroyed the enemy.

He it is who gave you manna from heaven,
who gave you drink from a rock,
who gave you the law at Horeb,
who gave you the inheritance in the land,
who sent you the prophets,
who raised up kings for you.

He it is who, coming to you,
helaed your suffering and raised your dead.
He it is whom you outraged,
he it is whom you blasphemed,
he it is whom you oppressed,
he it is whom you killed,
he it is whom you extorted,
demanding from him two drachmas as the price of his head.

His gifts to you are beyond price,
yet you held them worthless when you thanked him,
repaying him with ungrateful acts;
evil for good,
affliction for joy,
and death for life.
On this account you had to die.

On Pascha 81, 84-86, 90
by Melito of Sardis
translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes.

Melito's Exsultet

2009-11-08T23:53:00.001-05:00

This is the one who clad death in shame
and, as Moses did to Pharaoh,
made the devil grieve.
This is the one who struck down lawlessness
and made injustice childless,
as Moses did to Egypt.
This is the one who delivered us from slavery to freedom,
from darkness into light,
from death into life,
from tyranny into an eternal Kingdom,
and made us a new priesthood,
and a people everlasting for himself.

This is the Pascha of our salvation:
this is the one who in many people endured many things.
This is the one who was murdered in Abel,
tied up in Isaac,
exiled in Jacob,
sold in Joseph,
exposed in Moses,
slaughtered in the lamb,
hunted down in David,
dishonored in the prophets.

This is the one made flesh in a virgin,
who was hanged on a tree,
who was buried in the earth,
who was raised from the dead,
who was exalted to the heights of heaven.

This is the lamb slain,
this is the speechless lamb,
this is the one born of Mary the fair ewe,
this is the one taken from the flock,
and led to slaughter.
Who was sacrificed in the evening,
and buried at night;
who was not broken on the tree,
who was not undone in the earth,
who rose from the dead and resurrected humankind from the grave below.

On Pascha 68-71
by Melito of Sardis
translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes.

Melito's Typology

2009-11-01T16:34:00.010-05:00

The Lord made advance preparation for his own suffering,
in the patriarchs and in the prophets and in the whole people;
through the law and the prophets he sealed them.
That which more recently and most excellently came to pass he arranged from of old.
For when it would come to pass it would find faith,
having been foreseen of old.

Thus the mystery of the Lord,
prefigured from of old through the vision of a type,
is today fulfilled and has found faith,
even though people think it something new.
For the mystery of the Lord is both new and old;
old with respect to the law,
but new with respect to grace.
But if you scrutinize the type through its outcome you will discern him.

Thus if you wish to see the mystery of the Lord,
look at Abel who is likewise slain,
at Isaac who is likewise tied up,
at Joseph who is likewise traded,
at Moses who is likewise exposed,
at David who is likewise hunted down,
at the prophets who likewise suffer for the sake of Christ.

And look at the sheep, slaughtered in the land of Egypt,
which saved Israel through its blood whilst Egypt was struck down.

On Pascha 57-60
by Melito of Sardis
translated by Alistair Stewart-Sykes.

UN Prayer Service

2009-10-31T00:13:00.001-04:00

On Monday I attended the Ninth Annual Orthodox Christian Prayer Service for the United Nations Community, sponsored by the SCOBA/SCOOCH Joint Commission of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches. The service took place at Holy Trinity Cathedral with His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew presiding and Ambassador Strobe Talbot as the featured speaker. The choir from St. Vladimir's Seminary was to sing the recessional, so the seminary rented a bus for the occasion. There were extra seats on the bus, so I went along.

The Ethiopian choir that was to sing the processional did not show up, so the St. Vlad's choir was asked to do it. During the lengthy delay before the entrance, the choir ran through its whole repertoire, except the number they were saving for the recessional. So the first 19 minutes of the video are just the St. Vlad's choir singing. At about the 15-minute mark the bishops finally begin to trickle in. Vespers begins at about the 25-minute mark. The service is sung by the choir from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Both choirs sounded great, and they demonstrated just how different Russian and Greek music sound.

The sound quality of the video is inconsistent - there are some spots where it gets faint and scratchy.

Sacramental Validity

2009-10-17T18:15:00.002-04:00

[The priest's prayer for himself] is important because it denounces and corrects the tendency to understand sacraments somewhat "magically," a tendency widespread among the Orthodox and whose spiritual danger and consequences in the life of the Church are often overlooked. Since, according to the Church's teaching, the validity of sacraments does not, in any way, depend on either the holiness or the deficiencies of those who perform them, one has come little by little to view and to define sacraments exclusively in terms of "validity," as if nothing else "mattered." The whole point, however, is that the Church does not separate validity from fullness and perfection. "Validity" is merely the condition for fulfillment, but it is this latter that truly "matters." The Baptism of a man like Stalin was probably a perfectly "valid" one. Why then was it not fulfilled in his life? Why did it not prevent Stalin from sinking into incredible abomination? The question is not a naive one. If millions of people, "validly" baptized, have left the Church and still leave it, if Baptism seems to have no impact on them whatsoever, is it not, first of all, because of us, because of our weakness, deficiencies, minimalism and nominalism, because of our own constant betrayal of Baptism? Is it not because of the incredibly low level of the Church's life, reduced to a few "obligations" and thus having ceased to reflect and to communicate the power of renewal and holiness? All this of course applies above all to the clergy, to the priest, the celebreant of the Church's mysteries. If he himself is not the image of Christ, "by word, by deed, by teaching" (I Tim. 4:12), where is man to see Christ and how is he to follow Him? Thus to reduce sacraments to the principle of "validity" only is to make a caricature of Christ's teaching. For Christ came into this world not that we may perform "valid" sacraments; He gave us valid sacraments so that we may fulfill ourselves as children of light and witnesses of His Kingdom.

From Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism, pp. 44-45.

Words of Power

2009-10-10T01:20:00.003-04:00

We speak to the Devil! It is here that the Christian understanding of the word as, above all, power is made manifest. In the desacralized and secularized worldview of the "modern man," speech, as everything else, has been "devaluated," reduced to its rational meaning only. But in the biblical revelation, word is always power and life. God created the world with His Word. It is power of creation and also power of destruction, for it communicates not only ideas and concepts but first of all spiritual realities, positive as well as negative. From the point of view of a "secular" understanding of speech, it is not only useless, it is indeed ridiculous to "speak to the Devil," for there can hardly be a "rational dialogue" with the very bearer of the irrational. But exorcisms are not explanations, not a discourse aimed at proving anything to someone who from all eternity hates, lies and destroys. They are, in the words of St. John Chrysostom, "awesome and wonderful invocations," an act of "frightening and horrible" power which dissolves and destroys the evil power of the demonic world:

[Here follows the First Prayer of Exorcism from the Byzantine baptismal service.]

Exorcism is indeed a poem in the deepest sense of this word, which in Greek means creation. It truly manifests and does that which it announces; it makes powerful that which it states; it again fills words with the divine energy from which they stem. And exorcism does all this because it is proferred in the name of Christ; it is truly filled with the power of Christ, who has "broken" into the enemy territory, has assumed human life and made human words His own, because He has already destroyed the demonic power from within.

From Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism, pp. 24-25.

Joseph, the Grail, and the Shroud

2009-08-08T13:24:00.001-04:00

Those who know me will understand why I was excited last year when I came across an article whose title promised to tie together three of my favorite subjects: "Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, and the Edessa Icon," by Daniel Scavone. Those unfamiliar with the third item might find the title of an earlier presentation of the same material more eye-opening: "Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, and the Turin Shroud." On the one hand, Scavone's literary research undermines the popular understanding of the Grail as the chalice of the Last Supper, as well as the association of Joseph and the Grail with Britain. On the other hand, he gives us as much as he takes when he ties Joseph to Christ's burial shroud, the shroud to Edessa and its icon, and, ultimately, the Grail to the shroud. He concludes that the Grail as chalice is a garbled medieval Western interpretation of mysterious Byzantine descriptions of Jesus' burial cloth.

In his article, originally published in Arthuriana (Winter 1999), Scavone pieces together his hypothesis from numerous ancient and medieval texts, carefully laying the foundation before revealing his conclusions. His paper is thoroughly documented and referenced (the lists of texts, endnotes, and bibliography take up more pages than the main text of the article). For those of you who are into that kind of thing as much as I am (and I know some of you are), just click on the first link above and download the PDF. Here I will just try to summarize his more interesting conclusions.

Joseph and the shroud both make their first appearance in the Gospels. Mark (15:46) tells us that Joseph "bought a linen shroud, and taking [Jesus] down, wrapped him in the linen shroud, and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of the rock." And John (ch. 20) reports that when Simon Peter and the Beloved Disciple came to the tomb on the first day of the week, they "saw the linen cloths lying there." The pseudepigraphal Acts of Pilate picks up the story from there, telling us that Joseph was seized by the Jewish leaders and imprisoned. But Jesus came to him in prison and freed him. In describing that encounter later, Joseph recalled, "And I said to him that was speaking to me, 'Show me the place where I laid thee.' And he carried me away, and showed me the place where I laid him; and the linen cloth was lying in it, and the napkin for his face. And I knew that it was Jesus."

According to a Georgian text from the 5th-8th century, St. Joseph's subsequent missionary activity was associated with that of St. Philip, and the two built a church together in Lydda, directly west of Jerusalem. The NT book of Acts names two Philips, whose are associated, respectively, with Samaria/Caesarea in Palestine and Phrygia/Galatia in Asia Minor.

Abgar VIII (r. 177-212), King of Edessa, became a Christian sometime before the year 200. He had a close relationship with Rome, and like many Roman client kings, he took a Roman name: Lucius Aurelius Septimius Megas Abgarus VIII, partially taken from the name of the emperor, Septimius Severus. He was well received on a visit to Rome around 202, and he might very well have corresponded with Pope Eleutherius. In 205 he built a citadel called Birtha in Syriac and Britium in Latin.

It may have been during Abgar's reign that the shroud, known as the Mandylion, came to Edessa. In any case, its presence in Edessa is documented from the fourth century. It was transferred to Constantinople in 944. When it was not kept entirely hidden, it was usually displayed folded, so that only the face appeared. This is probably the source of the acheiropoietos, the "icon not made by human hands," usually known in the West as the veronica, a slight corruption of vera eikon, or "true image." But on special occasions the Mandylion, with elaborate ceremony, would be unfolded in stages to full length, over the course of a day. Worshipers were kept at a distance, so the nature of the unfolding ceremony - and of the Mandylion itself - was not clear to the crowds who witnessed it. But the accounts of those who saw it up close, describing the bloodstained image, make it sound like the object we now know as the Shroud of Turin.

It was around this same time that some new icons of Christ appeared, depicting him in death. Scavone suggests that these were inspired by the Mandylion in its partially and fully unfolded forms. Scavone further speculates that it was reported that Constantinople possessed a mysterious relic associated with Christ, which had collected his blood at the Passion, and which appeared in different forms. When these stories passed to the West, they took the form of the no less mysterious Holy Grail.

The Mandylion disappeared from Constantinople when the city was sacked by Western crusaders in 1204. According to a recent Vatican announcement, the burial cloth now known as the Shroud of Turin was hidden and venerated by the Knights Templar from this point until about a century later, when the Templars were suppressed. Not long after that, the Shroud enters the historical record in the West.

St. Joseph of Arimathea is first associated with Britain in a revision of William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitate Glastoniensis (Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury), published in 1247 by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey. According to this revised history, St. Philip, who was operating in Gaul, sent a delegation to Britain headed by his mission partner, St. Joseph. But William's original text, written about 1125, had mentioned Philip only in the most speculative way and had not mentioned Joseph at all! The monks apparently revised their history in an effort to claim an apostolic foundation, which would let them trump rival monasteries.

Moreover, William's speculation regarding Philip's presence in Gaul was based on a misunderstanding of his source, which actually related the traditional story that Philip preached in Galatia. The whole idea that Philip and Joseph preached in the West unravels under scrutiny. There is no reason to believe they ever left the Middle East.

The earlier origin story of the Church in Britain, related by the Venerable Bede, was that the 2nd-century British king Lucius had sent a letter to Pope Eleutherius asking to be made a Christian. Bede was apparently drawing from a line from the Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes). But it has been recognized for some time that this King Lucius was probably not a British king, but was the Edessan king, Lucius Abgar, whose citadel was known as Britium.

So the connections of Joseph and the Grail to Britain fall apart. Scavone leaves us, instead, with a connection between Joseph, the Mandylion, and Edessa. He sums up his conclusions thus:

In the apocryphal tradition about Joseph of Arimathea, then, before Joseph's Holy Grail as cup of Jesus' blood, there was Joseph's cloth in which he had captured the blood of Golgotha. Britium's face icon (Mandylion) was over time identified as a burial shroud icon of the body of crucified Jesus. The mysterious tenth-century ritual in Britium/Edessa and the new twelfth-century Byzantine Melismos service, inspired respectively by the presence of this reputed burial wrap, portrayed the infant Jesus becoming the adult Jesus, sacrificial victim of the Last Supper and Passion. The romance Holy Grail also revealed the mystery of the infant Jesus changing to the body of crucified Jesus.

Hymns of the Arimathean

2009-08-01T01:46:00.008-04:00

On Thursday evening, the eve of my name day, I attended Vespers at Holy Cross, hoping to hear a few hymns of my patron saint, and I was not disappointed. He shares his feast day with St. Germanus of Auxerre and the Forefeast of the Procession of the Precious Cross, so not all the hymns were about St. Joseph. After the service, I made copies of most of the hymns of St. Joseph of Arimathea for myself, with the exception of the canon (yes, he even has his own canon!). These all come from the appendix to the July Menaion, as published by Holy Transfiguration Monastery. I will share a few of my new favorite hymns.

Doxastikon of Saint Joseph. Plagal of Second Tone.
All generations call thee blessed, O Noble Counsellor; for thou wast deemed worthy to minister to the divine dispensation of the universal salvation of our race. Thou didst pluck that ever-living Flower of Forgiveness that burst into bloom on the trellis of the Cross, and hast delighted the whole world with the sweet fragrance of our restoration to God. Since thou art glorified by Christ as his disciple and friend, O Joseph, intercede with him to save them that keep thy memorial with faith and love.

Another Apolytikion of Saint Joseph. Plagal of First Tone.
Let us honour the man that gave burial to God and showed compassion to him by whose mercy all things exist: Christ the Angel of Great Counsel's Noble Counsellor: who gave his narrow grave to Christ and received as recompense the vast spaciousness of Heaven, where he entreateth the Saviour to show his mercy to those praising him.

Exapostilarion of Saint Joseph. Third Tone.
When the Apostles faltered, the Noble Counsellor valiantly went in, obtaining of Pilate that Body which shook all the world. Now he obtaineth forgiveness for all who keep his remembrance.

Fourth Sticheron of Saint Joseph at the Praises. Plagal of Fourth Tone.
Blessed are thine eyes, which looked on Christ; O Joseph, blest are thy hands, which conveyed him from off the Cross to that quickening Sepulchre where our race was reborn to God. Blest is thy heart, which was rended at his death, wherein he dwelt always, filling it with grace. O Noble Counsellor, as we honour thee with songs of hearfelt joy, intercede unceasingly with God to save us all.

Theotokion. Grave Tone.
A virgin womb, conceiving thee, revealed thee; a virgin tomb, receiving thee, concealed thee. We glorify her from whom thou didst receive a beginning in time, and we honour him that ministered to the end of thine earthly life for our sakes, asking that through their prayers, O merciful Saviour, we might be deemed worthy of thy Kingdom of the Heavens.

Critical Issues in Healthcare

2009-07-20T20:36:00.005-04:00

Today I filled out the Future of America's Healthcare Survey from John McCain's Country First PAC. To some extent, it had the usual flaw of such surveys - a limited range of responses that made it easier to give a response in line with the organization's biases. But there were also places where one could step off the marked path and write one's own brief responses, including this open-ended final question: Please list, in order of importance, the four health issues you consider most critical. As an economist who works in the field of injury epidemiology, I am not unfamiliar with some of the problems of our healthcare system. So I took my time to come up with four critical healthcare issues. Here I will share my responses and expand upon them. (This will be an atypical blog post for me - more stream-of-consciousness, without my usual images, links, and obsessive editing.)

1. The system is rigged to favor the insured over the uninsured.

Unless you have the good fortune to live in Maryland, here is how hospitals determine how much you owe them: The hospital issues a bill for about twice what it actually spent to treat you. If you have insurance, your insurer then negotiates down the amount it actually pays to a more reasonable level. So the amount that is collected by the hospital depends primarily on the relative market power of the hospital and the payer. If the payer is the government (e.g., Medicaid) it has tremendous clout and can sometimes even force the hospital to treat patients at a loss. If you don't have insurance, on the other hand, you are stuck paying way more than you should.

If you've studied industrial organization, you will recognize that the system I have described here is not a competitive market. In a state of competition, by definition, everyone would pay the same price for the same service. What we have here, rather, is bilateral oligopoly. In the state of Maryland, we have cost controls to keep hospitals and insurers from playing this game. The result of this regulation, ironically, simulates a competitive market more closely than the free-for-all in other states. But maintaining such regulations is difficult. New York formerly had a similar cost-control regime, but it broke down when hospitals found they could get around the restriction on charges per day by increasing the length of stay of inpatients. Before the system was abandoned, New York had average lengths of stay that were (as I recall) roughly 25% higher than anywhere else.

It seems to be the consensus of pundits and policymakers that the solution to the problem of rising healthcare costs is simply to mandate that everyone be insured. This is like saying that the solution to the threat of lawsuits is to require everyone to keep a lawyer on retainer. Or the solution to the threat of armed robbery is to require everyone to carry a firearm at all times in public. In short, if there is going to be an arms race, everyone should be armed. The big winners, obviously, will be those who make and sell arms - in this case, the insurers.

While this approach might protect individuals from the threat of outrageous medical bills, it will not reduce medical costs overall. In fact, far from reducing the amount our society spends on healthcare, it would inevitably increase it. By making healthcare less expensive to individuals, it will encourage them to consume more healthcare. Greater demand will increase the price of healthcare. If these costs are not borne by individuals in the form of higher insurance premiums, they will have to take the form of reduced profits for hospitals and insurers . . . or increased subsidies from the government.

My opinion in short: Health insurance is the problem, not the solution. Making health insurance, as we now know it, universal will make our healthcare problems worse, not better.

2. Hospitals and doctors use secrecy to prevent evaluation and comparison shopping.

Hospitals and doctors fear competition. It is as if every hospital secretly fears that it is not as good as its peers, so it does its best to keep anyone from getting enough data to evaluate it. Researchers like me who do get access to the necessary data are generally forbidden from using it for this purpose. Doctors, meanwhile, have professional restrictions on advertising. This makes it difficult for potential healthcare consumers to discover where they can get the best treatment for the lowest price. This, in turn, makes a competitive market in healthcare impossible.

3. Too much reliance on drugs for treatment, rather than nutrition (including supplements) and exercise.

Our healthcare system has a drug dependence problem. Doctors have become so impressed with the power of medicines that many have come to see their primary role as prescribing medicine. Some doctors avoid career tracks, like the emergency room, where they would see a lot of patients whose problems cannot be treated with drugs. The pharmaceutical companies have encouraged this approach to doctoring for obvious reasons. And Americans, who like to think there is a quick, easy solution to any problem, can be persuaded to subscribe to this ideology without much arm-twisting.

The best solution to many health problems is prevention - cultivating healthy habits so that one does not get sick in the first place. But good health is not in the interest of drug companies and the doctors who prescribe drugs. They would rather see us contract chronic conditions (e.g., obesity, diabetes, arthritis) that require treatment for life with the medicines that only they can sell us.

In recent years there have been repeated efforts by drug companies and the Congressmen they control to prohibit most vitamins and other nutritional supplements. They make the specious argument that supplements are drugs and should be regulated like drugs. They have even extended this argument to some foods, reasoning that if health claims are made for a food (e.g., drinking milk will reduce the likelihood of osteoporosis), that makes it a drug. But since food, vitamins, etc. cannot be patented like synthetic drugs, no one would have an economic incentive to put them through the expensive trials that drugs have to go through.

4. Too many resources are wasted on useless and expensive end-of-life care.

I have been thinking about this one for a long time. It was my back-up dissertation topic. But since my adviser liked my primary topic (bureaucracy), I never pursued it. Currently, more than one-fourth of Medicare payments go to treating the terminally ill. In part, this results from a culture that is in denial about death and simply refuses to accept its reality. We either need strict controls on end-of-life care or a cultural revolution that encourages us to prepare for the inevitability of death.

There are other topics I could have covered if I were not limited to four issues. The next on my list would have been the threat of lawsuits, which raises the price of malpractice insurance and forces doctors to perform extra tests. Another issue, which I touched on above in 3, is the generally unhealthy lifestyles of most Americans today. In particular, the marketing arm of the food industry encourages us to consume way too much food and drink with too little nutritional content.

Fortunately, Senator McCain only asked me to list issues - he did not ask me to propose solutions. I really do not like any of the options that are politically realistic - especially the default option, the status quo.

However, I think there might be a confluence of developments on the horizon that will make a single-payer healthcare system inevitable. As we learn more about the genetic basis of illnesses and genetic testing becomes more widely available and more economical, individuals might soon be able to have fairly certain knowledge of the conditions for which they are at risk. At the same time, a growing obsession with privacy of medical information will make it impossible for insurers to see their clients' genetic information. If I have 100% knowledge of my genetic information and my insurance company has 0% knowledge of same, the information asymmetry will destroy the viability of private insurance.

What will happen when the government runs the healthcare system? It certainly will not be all bad. Many administrative costs will disappear and others will be slashed. The government will acquire an interest in keeping its citizens healthy in order to keep costs down, and this will end its too-cozy relationship with Big Pharma. We will actually have national conversations about some cultural issues that should be decided by the democratic process rather than by the market.

On the other hand, there will be obvious problems, as well. In addition to the usual problems of government bureaucracy, we will suffer the consequences of monopsony - a market with a single buyer. Those on the other side of the market - doctors, hospitals, makers of medical devices and drugs - will find their incomes squeezed. As a result, some hospitals will go out of business, and fewer young Americans will choose medical careers, and fewer new drugs will be developed. The US might lose its status as the world's leader in the development of new medical technology. The most expensive and innovative forms of care might be prohibited as too expensive. And matters of appropriate treatment and payment levels will become political questions, fought over every four years by special interests who could become powerful players in our political system. Every disease-of-the-month organization will try to get special treatment for its members/victims, which could easily eat up any cost savings if their entreaties receive positive responses.

Conclusion. The problems with our healthcare system are complex. Too complex, in fact, to be alleviated by any political quick fix. Any program that is rushed through Congress hastily on a single-party basis will make things worse, not better. This is not an emergency and should not be treated like one. But neither should we remain complacent about the growing costs of healthcare. The current system will not fall apart next year, but it might in ten years.

Addendum. One of my correspondents reminded me of an issue I forgot to mention. I tend to favor abolishing the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance - and for most other fringe benefits, for that matter. One could argue that health insurance is a public good, and that it is reasonable for the government to subsidize it. But the logical conclusion of that argument is that the government should subsidize all private health insurance, not just that provided through employers.

There is also the matter of insurance for catastrophic health events. I think it might be best for the government to provide such insurance for all Americans. Such events are rare, but when they occur they can wipe out a family's finances, even if they have insurance. They can be so expensive that insurance companies will try to dump such policyholders or resist paying on their policies. If the government were to cover these rare events, it would level the playing field for insurance companies to compete in the non-catastrophic insurance market.

Yesterday, the New York Post published this piece by Robert A. Book and Robert E. Moffit of the Heritage Foundation. They conclude that the plan now being discussed in Congress would break most of President Obama's campaign promises about health insurance.

Homosexuality Reading List

2009-07-08T21:11:00.008-04:00

In recent weeks I have received a barrage of interesting articles on homosexuality and related issues such as same-sex marriage. As a possible explanation of why so much anti-gay material is now finding its way around the intellectual marketplace of the internet, I would hypothesize that, in the wake of the pro-gay blitzkrieg we have seen in the past three years in the media and the courts, the conservative counter-reaction is finally getting organized. I harbor no illusion that these arguments will be seriously entertained by the mainstream media or the government in the age of Barack Obama and his buddy Gene Robinson, but that tide could turn quickly.

In "What About the Children?", Canadian writer Tom McFeely discusses the disadvantages faced by children raised in homosexual households. The article's hook was the new position statement of the American College of Pediatricians, which reversed a 2002 endorsement of same-sex parenting: "Given the current body of research, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by reproductive manipulation. This position is rooted in the best available science."

The mission of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) is to "uphold the rights of individuals with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care and the right of professionals to offer that care." LifeSiteNews covered NARTH's publication of a study that examined over a century of professional and scientific literature, which refutes the claims of some factions of the American Psychological Association, who assert that homosexuality is immutable and that attempts to treat it therapeutically are harmful. Blogger David Virtue interviewed Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the head of NARTH, at the Sex and the City Conference in London. According to Nicolosi, "the three great pioneers of psychoanalysis, Freud, Jung, and Adler, all saw homosexuality as disordered." In his practice, Nicolosi finds that most of his patients experience significant diminishment of same-sex attractions. Those who do not improve are mostly the ones who are not motivated – teen-agers dragged in by their parents, or husbands pressured into treatment by their wives or pastors.

Dennis Prager, a Jewish theologian and radio talk show host, makes the bold assertion, "When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible." His article, "Judaism's Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality," supports his thesis persuasively. Prager shows us how radically Judaism departed from the sexual practices of its pagan neighbors. The Jewish condemnation of non-marital sex was, no doubt, a key motivation for the ancient hatred of the Jews. (It should be noted that Prager, in passing, also repeats the Jewish view that male celibacy is a sin: a man who is unmarried is incomplete.)

In "Answering Advocates of Gay Marriage," Canadian scholars Katherine Young and Paul Nathanson enumerate 20 different claims (not all of them consistent) made by advocates of same-sex marriage, and they systematically demolish them. They begin by assuring readers that they are not opposed to gay persons or gay relationships, but only to gay marriage. They describe their approach as comparative and dialogical: "One of us is a man, the other a woman; one is Jewish, the other Gentile; one is gay, the other straight; one specializes in Western civilization, the other in Eastern civilization; and so on. As a result of our collaboration, we have been able to gather a great deal of evidence, both historical and cross-cultural, to support our answers to the claims made by advocates of gay marriage." They argue against the shallow, individualistic understandings of sex and marriage implicit in most current discussions. Instead, they argue that heterosexual bonding is fundamental to civilization, and that it must be deliberately fostered by a supportive culture. In particular, they argue that culture and its institutions must bind men to their families, lest men become a toxic force with no stake in their society. Their own country, unfortunately, ignored their wisdom, proceeding with the "massive human experiment" of same-sex marriage.

Finally, British journalist Melanie Phillips reports that the Conservative Party is expected to unveil a new policy to shore up marriage. It will be based on a report, expected to be released this month, which recommends "a sweeping overhaul of the law to strengthen marriage, including moves to make divorce more difficult and promote marriage preparation classes and 'family relationship centres', as well as tax breaks for married couples." Phillips laments that the Tories cannot see that their support for marriage will ultimately be undermined by their support for gay rights.

After reading all of the above articles and pondering them, I conclude that Western society's current thrust for the abolition of heterosexuality as a norm grows out of a larger underlying problem: Our society is already corrupted with the ideology foisted on us by Baby Boomers, which tells us that the world exists for the immediate pleasure of competent adult individuals, and anything that interferes with this in any way is unacceptable. We have no debt to the past, no obligation to the future; no stake in the culture we inherit and pass on; no responsibility for weaker members of our society, including children (except, perhaps, those we "choose"). The gay rights lobby is so immersed in this self-indulgent, individualistic ideology that it cannot imagine a contrary reality. But this does not distinguish it from most other special interest groups of 21st century America.

We will never reverse the onslaught of gay rights – or, more generally, "rights" associated with sexual identity – if we do not reform our society's entire view of sex and marriage. Barring the once-in-a-millennium true leader, this will not happen through the political process. We can no longer count on a self-serving mainstream media to confront us with hard questions and harder answers. For the most part, the academic world has insulated itself from reality by wrapping itself in ideology. Only a religious revival is likely to save our civilization from being consumed by a culture of self-indulgence. Otherwise, we can start reading Brave New World as a roadmap of the near future (though I think Huxley was rather optimistic).

Give Me This Stranger

2009-04-11T00:35:00.011-04:00

Today, which is Good Friday on the Gregorian calendar, my Byzantine Catholic e-friend Dan sent me this YouTube video of the hymn “Give me this stranger.” It is Byzantine chant sung in Arabic, and it’s about 10 minutes long. It’s not very impressive visually – just a series of very slow pans over icons of Christ’s burial – but the music is otherworldly.

This hymn is sung on the night of Great and Holy Friday at the end of the Lamentation service, which commemorates Christ’s burial. It is sung from the point of view of my patron saint, Joseph of Arimathea. Many of the hymns on Holy Friday mention St. Joseph, but this is one of only two that are sung from his point of view. (Interestingly, both of these are in tone 5, as opposed to the hymns about him, which tend to be in tones 2 and 6.) An English translation of the hymn follows.

Seeing that the sun had hidden its rays and the veil of the Temple had been rent at the death of the Saviour, Joseph did approach Pilate and did plead with him crying and saying,

Give me this stranger, who from his youth hath wandered like a stranger.

Give me this stranger, whom his kinsmen killed in hatred like a stranger.

Give me this stranger at whom I wonder, beholding him as a guest of death.

Give me this stranger who knoweth how to take in the poor and strangers.

Give me this stranger whom the Jews in envy estranged from the world.

Give me this stranger that I may bury him in a tomb, who being a stranger hath no place whereon to lay his head.

Give me this stranger, to whom his Mother, beholding him dead, shouted crying, “O my Son and my God, even though my vitals be wounded, and my heart burns, as I behold thee dead, yet trusting in thy Resurrection, I magnify thee.”

In these words the honorable Joseph pleaded with Pilate, took the Saviour’s body, and with fear wrapped it in linen and balm, placing thee in a new tomb, O thou who grantest to all everlasting life and the great mercy.

Byzantine Chant

2009-04-10T19:28:00.006-04:00

In the 18 months since I was chrismated into the Orthodox Church, my main ministry has been chanting at Matins, which I do nearly every Sunday. Matins begins at 8:15 on most Sundays, and 8:00 on certain feasts. That it could get a night owl like me out of bed that early on a weekend should be sufficient proof of how much I have come to love chanting.

When I was an Anglo-Catholic, my liturgical involvement took the form of serving as an acolyte. I served at both Low and Solemn Masses, as well as Evensong & Benediction. I especially enjoyed my five years serving for Fr. Anderson at Morning Prayer and Low Mass on Thursdays. After working together for so long, each of us knew what the other was going to do, and our choreography became automatic, so that I could actually pray during Mass instead of always thinking about what I had to do next.

In my various liturgical roles, I was not only serving the church but also educating myself on the details of the liturgy. While I gained a respectable degree of expertise on the Mass, there were always others with more knowledge (and bigger libraries) than I on that subject. But eventually, thanks in large part to my exposure to Benedictine monastic life, I think I became the parish’s resident expert on the Daily Office.

At Holy Cross, lay liturgical roles at the altar are reserved, for the most part, to subdeacons and teen-age boys, so it looked like I would have to learn Byzantine worship standing with the congregation. When Doug, one of the protopsaltis (lead chanters) began offering occasional classes in Byzantine chant on Sundays after coffee hour, I attended. Since I have always found my voice frustratingly inadequate, I did not imagine that I would actually be able to chant in services, but I thought this would be a chance to begin my education on the Byzantine services of Vespers and Matins. Not much later, the other protopsalti, Emily, took over the job of training the new chanters. We would meet to practice for two hours on Saturday afternoons before Vespers. At first we focused on learning the standard pieces that are sung every Sunday, as well as on learning the eight Byzantine tones. Emily recorded and uploaded several of the hymns, as well as a short introduction to each of the tones consisting of the apichima (a short mnemonic to help the chanter bring the tone to mind quickly), a sample hymn in the tone, and the Resurrectional Troparion of the tone. I learned to chant by playing these pieces over and over and singing along with them. Eventually, the time came when I was scheduled to chant at Sunday Matins.

My very first time, I was the only chanter who arrived on time. When Deacon Mark came out of the sanctuary to ask if I could get the service started by myself until the other chanters arrived, I could only say no. (Ever since then, I have judged my progress, in part, by asking how far into the service I could get if I had to do it solo.) The first few times, I would just be assigned to read psalms and other parts that are simply read, and otherwise sing only the parts that were sung in unison by everyone. But it wasn’t long before we newbies started to take our turns on the kathismata and the anabathmoi, two types of hymns that are free chanted every Sunday.

In free chanting, one is given a text, along with a number from 1 to 8 representing the tone in which the words are to be sung. Each Byzantine tone has its own characteristic patterns built on one of the four scales. The chanter sings the words, matching them to the patterns of the tone, essentially composing a musical setting for the words spontaneously within the strictures of the tone. If you really know the tone and can get it into your head, free chanting is not as hard as it sounds. If you don’t know the tone or can’t call it to mind, however, it is impossible to do right. Free chanting is much easier when you are following someone else who has just chanted something in the same tone. Another thing that makes free chanting easier is that each Sunday is assigned one of the eight tones, and most of the pieces that are free chanted will usually be in the tone of the week. Therefore, we could focus on one tone each week.

Not everything is free chanted. For most of the hymns there are settings written in Western musical notation. Some chanters prefer to rely on these, while others prefer to free chant. Free chanting comes easier to me. However, free chanting only works for solo pieces. Hymns that are to be sung by everyone require written music to keep everyone together. I learn the frequently sung pieces by ear and then use the written music as a reminder. Otherwise, I try to follow those who read music better than I.

About a year ago, on Lazarus Saturday, a crew from the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly came to interview Emily about Byzantine chant and to film Matins and the Liturgy. That segment, edited down to under three minutes, will finally air this weekend. It became available on-line today.

Only James chants with Emily in the segment. I was still too green to chant on TV (in the big game you play your stars, not your rookies), so you’ll only see the back of my head in the congregation (I’m the one obstructing your view of the icon of Christ). Now, a year later, I get to chant with Emily and James all the time – like tomorrow at Matins of Lazarus Saturday.

For those who want to read more, here are some links:

Byzantine Chant – an article from OrthodoxWiki.
Byzantine Chant – an article from the Holy Cross Website.
Tone Three – Emily’s reminiscence about chanting in Greek on Christmas Eve.
Makin’ the Big Time – Emily’s blog post on the TV segment.

Thoughts on Evolution

2009-02-12T21:22:00.012-05:00

On the occasion of the 200^th birthday of Charles Darwin, today I went through some of the old messages in my e-mail folder labeled Evolution. It consists mostly of discussions over the past decade with a circle of old friends from the Wesley Foundation at the University of Illinois, mostly on evolution and related topics such as human nature and philosophy of science, with occasional forays into discussions of homosexuality, the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies, and ancient Greek drama. I came across a lot of interesting stuff, some of which I remembered and some of which I had forgotten. I was looking for one message in particular. In 2005, when the subject of Intelligent Design was in the news, Diane Rehm devoted an hour of her radio talk show to ID. Unfortunately, the episode was hastily arranged so as to strike while the topic was hot, and she settled for second-string guests who were not really experts on evolution or ID. Both guests exhausted their knowledge of the subject before the program was half over. It was the most disappointing episode I have ever heard, and perhaps the only time I have heard Diane obviously frustrated with her guests. In my e-mail to her afterwards I wrote, "I think I could have argued both sides better than either of your guests!" I then wrote down some of my own thoughts on the creation-evolution debate that I thought might have made inspired a more interesting program. The essay that follows here is built up from that old e-mail.

I have accepted the truth of biological evolution by natural selection for as long as I can remember. I can't recall ever hearing about evolution in science class in my rural K-8 elementary school – I just picked it up on my own through my extensive reading, and it seemed to make sense. In the sixth grade I did my science fair exhibit on evolution, and as a result I suffered a brief wave of persecution – a rare opportunity for my classmates to pose as more pious than me. Obviously, I do not find evolution to be in conflict with Christianity or with divine creation of the world.

Terminology

Evolution and creation are sometimes framed as competing theories of "the origin of life," but this is a mistake. While creation is certainly about the origin of life, evolution is not. Evolution offers an explanation of how life developed and diversified into different species, but it says nothing about where the first life came from. For this reason, evolution and creation are not exactly symmetrical, competing theories – they don't cover quite the same ground. The specific aspect/theory of creation that might be seen as the counterpart of evolution is "special creation" – the notion that every species is directly created by God as a separate and distinct creation. This is what is usually meant by creationism. But obviously one can believe in God's role as the ultimate source of creation without endorsing this theory.

Like creation, the term evolution also requires some narrowing. In the broadest sense, it simply refers to the accretion of changes in forms of life over the generations. Even some self-described creationists concede the reality of microevolution – small changes within a species in response to changes in its environment – but they deny the possibility that such evolution can lead to the development of new species. Before Darwin, evolutionary theorists already believed that existing species had evolved from earlier species, but they proposed many different mechanisms by which this evolution might have occurred. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck famously proposed that parents could pass on acquired traits to their offspring. But today when we say evolution, the default meaning is the development of new species through evolution by natural selection, as proposed by Charles Darwin 150 years ago in The Origin of Species.

In the Classroom

Opponents of evolution often talk in terms of presenting "alternatives" to evolution. But there is no real alternative to evolution. This is not to say that there never can be and never will be any alternative. Nor is it to say that evolution is ready to be enshrined as a final and complete law of nature. It is only to say that there is currently no alternative on the table. Evolution has vanquished the competing theories and no new theory has yet risen to challenge it.

Some have proposed Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution. But ID is unable to explain the thing that evolution explains – the origin of species. ID does not constitute a stand-alone alternative to evolution, but, rather, a critique of evolution. By pointing to possibly anomalous data that evolution (allegedly) cannot explain, ID demands a re-thinking of the theory of evolution as currently understood.

Some advocates of evolution freak out at the very mention of Intelligent Design. But in doing so they betray themselves as proponents of science qua ideology, not science qua science. They would be more Darwinist than Darwin himself!

You see, the principle on which ID rests was introduced by none other than . . . Charles Darwin. In Chapter 6 of The Origin of Species, Darwin himself proposed a number of possible critiques of evolution. ID is, essentially, a highly developed form of one of these critiques. Darwin admitted that it is difficult to see how "organs of extreme perfection and complication," such as the eye, could have come about by natural selection, but he tried to answer this objection. Modern ID theorists have run with this critique, producing the idea of "irreducible complexity." Evolutionary biologists, in turn, have answered the critique. That is how science works.

I think this suggests one approach to the controversy over teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. While ID cannot reasonably be taught as an alternative to evolution (because it does not actually propose a concrete alternative mechanism for the origin of species), it could be introduced as one of a number of critiques that evolutionary biology must address if evolution by natural selection is to be established as a law of nature. If Darwin himself could raise such questions, I don't see why a biology teacher should be prohibited from doing so. Working through Chapter 6 of The Origin of Species might make for an interesting high school biology lecture.

I think the fact that evolution currently faces no competion makes it especially important to raise such questions. Evolution is a strong enough theory to withstand all such questions, so I see no danger of leaving students with the impression that evolution has been refuted. Rather, such questioning would serve as an example of the scientific approach to knowledge, showing budding scientists that it not unthinkable to question even the best established of scientific theories. This should help to dispel any tendency to think of scientific theories as unquestionable dogmata.

Evolution and the Incarnation

In a stereotypical creationist-vs.-atheist debate, I have no one to root for. Both sides have already lost me before the debate even begins. Once the debate is joined, it looks like they disagree on every single point, and that is how they are usually perceived. To me, however, it seems that they agree with each other on the central premise that underlies the debate: in the provocative form attributed to Richard Dawkins, "If Darwin's cosmology was right, then theology is senseless babble." And creationists like Phillip Johnson accept the premise and join the debate on those terms. This all-or-nothing proposition, for those who accept it, validates both the conflict and the energy they expend on it.

When combatants on both sides find a rare proposition they can agree on, one is tempted to let it pass without further examination. But this premise is both illogical and heretical. It assumes that God's only purpose is to serve as a causal explanation of phenomena in the physical universe, and that if a completely natural explanation can be found for every phenomenon then we can dispense with God as redundant and dismiss the supernatural entirely. This argument might be compatible with a Deistic "God of the gaps," but it cannot be reconciled with the God of orthodox Christianity. We believe that Jesus was both fully divine and fully human – that these two natures dwelt in him without contradiction. From this orthodox Christian understanding of the Incarnation, it follows that the supernatural is not excluded by the natural; rather, the supernatural manifests itself in and through the natural. Therefore, even if science were somehow to demonstrate the truth of an entirely materialistic explanation of the universe, it could not exclude the existence or activity of God.

Therefore, from an orthodox Christian point of view, a debate premised on the mutual exclusivity of the natural and the supernatural is flawed from the outset.

Interesting Links

Here are a few interesting bits I came across in my Evolution folder.

"Special Creation" on the Left

Science vs. Norse Mythology

God and evolution: the state of the question

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

A classification of possible routes of Darwinian evolution

For Sociobiology

Charitable Solicitations Revisited

2009-02-04T00:07:00.003-05:00

Back in March I gave a preliminary report on charitable solicitations I received in 2008. At that point, my solicitations were running 3% behind 2001, the last time I conducted such a study. But by the end of the year, 2008 had topped 2001. Last year I received 864 solicitations (2 more than in 2001), plus 123 newsletters or magazines, from 214 different charitable organizations. (That does not count thank-you letters and tax receipts that were sent by the charities I actually donated to.) The biggest single month was October, when I received 103 solicitations – that's an average of 3.8 every time I opened my mailbox!

One major difference between the two years is that 2008 was an election year. I received 40 solicitations that I categorized as political, of which 33 were from political parties or candidates. In 2001 I received only 13 politically oriented solicitations.

The category with the biggest drop was Roman Catholic religious orders. In 2001, 31 orders sent me 80 solicitations (with 22 coming from a single order!). In 2008, just 9 orders sent me 11 solicitations. In late 2000 I purchased a rosary from a monastery, and I think the monks must have shared my address with everyone in the Catholic Church. Most of them probably lost track of me after I moved in 2003 and 2004.

The two worst offenders were Human Rights Watch and WETA, each of which sent me 19 solicitations. I had not donated to either in 2007, so I'm not sure what they hoped to accomplish by flooding my mailbox.

At the other extreme, two local charities that I have donated to consistently over the past decade did not contact me at all last year. In the past I have even made special efforts to restore contact with them after I moved, but it seems they just aren't very good at keeping their databases up to date.

A Day on the Mall

2009-01-23T20:14:00.022-05:00

Yesterday I traveled downtown to the National Mall. My primary mission was to attend the 36th annual March for Life. A secondary mission was to take a few photos with my guest, Flat Ajay. I got off the train at the Archives-Navy Memorial Metro Station around 11 AM, and the march was not scheduled to begin until noon, so I took a short detour through one of my favorite places in Washington, the National Gallery of Art. On the lower level I found a room with a few pieces of sculpture, including stained glass, on the theme of the Annunciation. Since no one else was around, I decided that would be an appropriate place for a quick prayer. Then I pulled Flat Ajay out of my backpack and posed him for his first photo, with the 15th-century marble sculpture Kneeling Angel, by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo.

I suppose this would be a good place to explain why I'm taking photos of a construction-paper image of a kid. In the children's book Flat Stanley, a boy who is accidentally flattened takes advantage of his state to be mailed in an envelope to friends in other places. Inspired by this tale, children create flat images of themselves and mail them around the country, where their hosts take them to interesting places and record their adventures. Flat Ajay is the alter ego of a third-grader in California.

Then I headed for the mall, looking to meet up with some other folks from my parish who were planning to attend. The march was to begin around 4th Street, at the Capitol end of the mall, and proceed around the Capitol to the Supreme Court. I walked back and forth across the mall, looking for some of my fellow Orthodox Christians, but I only spotted one priest. Finally, on my third pass, I found a big ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS FOR LIFE banner with an image of Christ blessing the children.

As you can see from the picture, it was a beautiful, sunny day - the first nice day, in fact, after a couple of frigid weeks! Christian pop music was playing from the loudspeakers on the stage as the crowd grew and grew. I read one estimate that about a quarter of a million people attended - about one-seventh the size of the crowd that had gathered two days earlier to see Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. If you out-click the photo above to full size, you'll see that some of the apparatus from the inauguration, including five big historic U.S. flags, are still in place at the Capitol.

Another Orthodox banner featured an icon of the Visitation. The ByzanTeens (Byzantine Catholic youth, I presume) had a similar banner based on the same icon. It shows Our Lady greeting her cousin Elizabeth, with their sons in their wombs made visible (Luke 1:44).

The event began with introductions by the founder and the organizer and a prayer. Then more than a dozen members of Congress spoke. And then the speaker all the Orthodox had been waiting for - Metropolitan Jonah, the new primate of the Orthodox Church in America. Then a few more speakers. The most rousing speaker was a black minister, who decried abortion as genocide against his people. And while most of the participants were Christians of various sorts, one of the speakers and many of the marchers were Orthodox Jews, who had come down from New York for the day.

By the time the speakers had all finished and the actual march could begin, it was 2:15. We got off to a slow, crowded, and disorganized start, with a lot of stopping and waiting.

I was with a group of fellow Holy Cross parishioners, mostly students from St. John's College. Finally, we started moving forward. But within a few minutes I had lost site of everyone I knew. I could still see one Orthodox sign, but it was moving farther and farther ahead, and I was surrounded by people who were practically standing still. It took me a few minutes to realize that I had become surrounded by a knot of Catholics who thought it was more important to keep their group together than to keep up with the march. I took to the sidewalk to circumvent the crowd and eventually spotted the Orthodox banners, but the crowd was so thick there that I could not get any closer.

I finally caught up with the other Orthodox marchers at the southwest corner of the intersection of 1st and Constitution, NE, where they had stopped for prayers led by Metropolitan Jonah. (In this picture you can see the flag that flies in front of the Supreme Court, just to the left of the Guardian Angel banner.)

(In this last photo you can see Metropolitan Jonah, in the white headgear, just under the left edge of the big banner.) To complete the Orthodox participation in the march we all lined up to receive the Metropolitan's blessing, along with an icon card to commemorate the event. Then I continued on down the street past the Supreme Court.

I walked all the way around the Capitol. I hoped to pose for a Flat Ajay photo in front of the Capitol, but I soon realized that would be more difficult than I had anticipated. They were still tearing down the inauguration stage, so I could not get as close as I had hoped. The best I could do was across the street, from the Ulysses S. Grant memorial statue.

You can see that by this point they had removed two of the five flags from the front of the Capitol. On my way back to the metro station, I passed by the Canadian embassy, which was displaying a banner welcoming our new President.

I walked back to the metro station tired after several hours on my feet. Fortunately, being Orthodox gives me a lot of practice at being on my feet . . .

The Legacy of Patriarch Alexy II

2008-12-05T22:03:00.005-05:00

Alexy II, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, died this morning at age 79, after leading the Russian Orthodox Church for 18 years.

Some of you know that I have always had reservations about Patriarch Alexy because of his KGB ties, which were instrumental in his rise to power. Given his background, it was only natural that he would become entangled with Russian nationalism and with the government of Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer. In recent years, however, I have been impressed by the patriarch’s strong opposition to some of the more extreme manifestations of Russian nationalism. In putting down the monarchist faction pushing for the canonization of Ivan the Terrible and Rasputin, for example, Alexy asked rhetorically, “What believer would want to stay in a church that equally venerates murderers and martyrs, lechers and saints?” And earlier this year, rather than serve as an apologist for Russian aggression against Georgia, he issued a heartfelt call to both sides: “Stop! Don’t let more blood shed! Don’t let today’s conflict boil over! Show wisdom and courage: come to the negotiating table to respect the traditions, outlook, and hopes of the Georgian and Ossetian people.”

But those who are more interested in international ecclesiastical politics than in governmental politics will remember Patriarch Alexy more for his rivalry with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, his blocking of better relations with the Vatican under the late John Paul II, and his clinging to Moscow’s dominance over the Orthodox Church in the former Soviet republics that gained their independence during his tenure as patriarch. I was delighted to find that everything I might say on these topics has already been said better than I could say it in this brilliant analysis from Catholic World News, which considers Patriarch Alexy’s legacy and the future of the Russian Orthodox Church, particularly with regard to Moscow’s relations with Rome and Constantinople. The article concludes:

If a new Russian Orthodox Patriarch adopted a friendlier attitude toward Rome – or even toward Constantinople, for that matter – his leadership could produce enormous strides toward the goal of Christian unity. But in order to take those strides, the Russian leader would need to question his Church’s strong identification with the forces of Russian nationalism. And simply by raising such questions, he might endanger the current ties between the Moscow patriarchate and the Russian political leadership. The new Patriarch, whoever he may be, will face challenges every bit as difficult as the ones that faced the late Alexei II.

Addendum: My friend Alphonse pointed me to another analysis of Patriarch Alexy’s legacy – this one from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty – which takes a broader perspective than just ecclesiastical politics.

Book Meme

2008-11-21T01:26:00.008-05:00

James Gibson of Sanctus tagged me with the book meme. I am supposed to pick up the nearest book, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and post the three sentences afterward. For me this will not be as straightforward as one might hope . . .

The nearest book – right at my elbow, since I consult it so often – is Detailed Diagnoses and Procedures, National Hospital Discharge Survey, 1991. Even though it is falling apart, I use its list of ICD-9-CM diagnosis codes, which is laid out in a user-friendly way for quick reference. Page 123 is the second page of a 24-page table. It doesn’t even have five actual sentences on the page. The next closest book is the Ultimate World Pocket Atlas. Page 123 shows the eastern half of the Pacific Ocean, along with North and South America – again no sentences. The next closest book is The Book of Common Prayer (1979). Page 123 contains five collects for Evening Prayer II. Skipping titles and Amens and counting each collect as a sentence brings us to the next page, where we find . . . more collects:

A Collect for Protection
O God, the life of all who live, the light of the faithful, the strength of those who labor, and the repose of the dead: We thank you for the blessings of the day that is past, and humbly ask for your protection through the coming night. Bring us in safety to the morning hours; through him who died and rose again for us, your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

A Collect for the Presence of Christ
Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen.

I wish I had landed on a Rite 1 page. Even as my eyes were reading the Rite 2 words, my lips were saying the Rite 1 versions that I recited hundreds of times during my years as an Anglo-Catholic.

The Media and the Messiah

2008-10-29T01:25:00.012-04:00

Of late, it has often been practically a full-time job to keep up with reading (and occasionally forwarding) my anti-Obama e-mail. While the mainstream American media intently avert their eyes – and ours – from the flaws of their messiah, those who have bothered to look have found a history of out-of-the-mainstream Leftist politics; close ties to terrorists, criminals, and Islamists; and a pattern of deceit, manipulation, and cover-ups. He also maintains a longstanding relationship with ACORN, which, among other crimes, extorted banks into making subprime loans (Obama actually served as an attorney for ACORN on one such case) and is currently being prosecuted for voter registration fraud in several states. (A friend personally witnessed ACORN reps paying under-age teens to fill out multiple voter registrations earlier this month.) In addition, despite his attempts to straddle the fence between pro-life and pro-choice positions, he has the most extreme pro-abortion record of any political candidate in American history. But even if you want to discount these sensationalistic-sounding allegations, it is not hard to find damning indictments in what is commonly known about Barack Obama.

Senator Obama’s campaign rhetoric would have us believe that he is moderate and post-partisan – a new kind of politician for a new era. The media have refused to challenge this attractive image, giving Obama an unprecedented free pass. But the truth is easy enough to discover. Barack Obama spent his formative years in politics as a loyal cog in the Daley machine. He learned to play power politics in the manner that Chicago Democrats are known for. One might excuse him, since he did not invent that system and could not realistically have challenged it. But in doing so one would be conceding that Obama’s record is one of politics-as-usual, not “change”; and one of service as a Democratic Party yes-man, not an independent-thinking leader. His record and his rhetoric are entirely at odds. Which are we to believe?

Those who would believe in the sincerity of candidate Obama’s promises must face the fact that he has already broken his first campaign promise: he pledged to participate in public financing of his presidential campaign if his opponent did. Obama weaseled out of his pledge and his sycophants in the media made excuses for him.

The domestic media’s pro-Obama bias has become so flagrant that it is even drawing attention overseas. The OSCE, which is sending observers to monitor the U.S. elections next week, has issued a preliminary report that concludes favoritism in the major media gives Obama a “hidden advantage.” Meanwhile, Melanie Phillips of the UK’s Spectator exposed Obama’s longstanding close ties to communists, racists, and other extremists, as well as the refusal of the U.S. media to investigate the candidates’ background, in two recent articles.

One American journalist, ashamed of his profession, blames short-sighted, self-interested editors for the media bias:

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe – and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway – all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it’s all for the good of the country . . .

While I believe there is probably truth both in this explanation and in the problem of “liberal media bias,” let me propose an alternative hypothesis just for fun: the media are scripting the story of Barack Obama according to the celebrity template – build him up and tear him down. They resist any attempt to examine the celebrity’s shortcomings at this stage of the story because they know that the first act must end in triumph. Obama must win the election and perhaps even move into the White House before negative information can be entertained. The media have invested too much in this narrative to risk endangering the dramatic impact with a premature scandal. But, should Obama become President, I predict that before the end of his first term someone in the media will break away from the pack and launch the scandal storyline. That’s just what the media do to celebrities.

And that’s what usually happens to messiahs, as well. In fact, there are great similarities between the messiah storyline and the celebrity storyline – that’s the whole premise of Jesus Christ, Superstar.

I will leave you with this Tleilaxu epigram from Frank Herbert’s 1969 novel, Dune Messiah:

Here lies a toppled god –
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.

Political Parties

2008-10-24T22:16:00.003-04:00

In my last post, I recommended Jonathan Haidt’s essay, “What Makes People Vote Republican?” Haidt took it for granted that Republican equates to conservative – i.e., that Republicans value loyalty, authority, and purity, while Democrats do not. This comports with the commonly agreed upon usage of the major media and party leaders today, but a little history will show that there is nothing inherently conservative about the Republican Party.

A century ago, the Republicans were the progressive party. They stood for three things: 1) Negro rights, 2) individual liberty, and 3) corporate profits. They were the party of the educated urban elite – and those who aspired to that status. They wanted to reform society to free individuals from the stultifying effects of the old boy networks that controlled local governments, community and family life, and American culture in general. The Democrats, by contrast, as the beneficiaries of those old boy networks, generally favored maintaining the status quo. They advocated what we in the 21st century might charitably call family values and strong communities. All in all, we might go so far as to say the Republicans were liberal and the Democrats were conservative. (If we wanted to stereotype them in the most negative way, we might depict the Republican as a portly banker in a frock coat who takes glee in foreclosing on mortgages; and the Democrat as a southern sherriff putting away his sheet after a night of cross-burning.)

So how did the parties get switched around? Well, in some respects they didn’t. The Republican Party’s advocacy of low taxes and limited government follows logically from its historic mission. There is really nothing conservative about these policies – they are essential elements of classical liberalism in the tradition of John Stuart Mill. Among the Founding Fathers, these same policies were advocated by the “liberal” Jefferson against the “conservative” Hamilton. The Democrats’ concern for the welfare of the working classes, meanwhile, is in continuity with their historic concern for immigrants in the north and farmers in the south.

But, starting with FDR, the Democrats embarked upon a slow march to the left throughout the 20th century. To deal with the Great Depression, President Roosevelt borrowed some ideas from the German and Russian totalitarians – it looked like the wave of the future, and it was widely thought to be a necessary evil at the time. The growth and centralization of federal government power created its own constituency for extending that growth still further. The Democrats became quasi-socialist in practice, if not in name. Because they were imposing major changes on society, they labeled themselves “liberal,” which was seen as a good thing; and they branded all of their various opponents as “conservative,” which was commonly understood as a bad thing. Those who opposed socialism at home and communism abroad began drifting Republican, and the GOP began to live up to its new conservative billing in some respects.

Still, in Haidt’s moral dimensions, the Republicans were probably no more conservative than the Democrats. As late as the 1960s, Democrats were uniformly opposed to abortion (Jesse Jackson called abortion “genocide against the black race”), while the individualistic Republicans were divided on this issue, to the extent that they cared about it at all. It was not until Roe vs. Wade and George McGovern’s nomination for President that the Democrats made their decisive obeisance to social liberalism, which alienated much of their conservative working-class constituency.

Meanwhile, the Republicans had been reorganizing and redefining themselves. William F. Buckley, Jr., made conservatism intellectually respectable, and Barry Goldwater’s candidacy for President brought it out of the closet. But it took Ronald Reagan to make it politically viable. He welded together all of the disparate groups that the “liberal” Democrats had derided as “conservative.” By this time, the label "conservative" was no longer seen as derogatory (except by liberals, who were increasingly out of touch with the electorate), so Reagan encouraged everyone who had been labelled as “conservative” to wear the label with pride and unite against those who called themselves “liberal.” The economic conservatives who opposed big government and excessive regulation could join with the social conservatives who opposed indecency and abortion because they both opposed communist imperialism abroad. It was in the Reagan era that the Republican Party became truly conservative.

And that was probably the high-water mark of conservatism in the GOP. Apart from judicial appointments, there is nothing particularly conservative about the Bush administration. Haidt’s moral conservatives are a captive minority in the Republican Party. Many of them are uncomfortable with party leaders who have reverted to the old-fashioned Republicanism of individualism and big business. Some of them might even long for the return of the old pre-McGovern Democrats.

Today, neither major political party is ideologically coherent. The Democrats pose as friends of the poor and working classes while capitulating to the demands of their corrupt, wealthy backers and pandering to every special interest they can fit into the party tent. They have compromised on every issue but one – a woman’s right to abort her baby whenever and however she wishes – much to the consternation of many an old-line liberal Democrat. The Republicans, meanwhile, trumpet family values while facilitating the efforts of Madison Avenue to undermine those values in favor of an exploitive, individualistic consumer culture.

While Jonathan Haidt’s article gives valuable insight into the phenomenon of moral conservatism, I’m not sure how far it goes in answering the question its title poses. It might explain why some people vote Republican, but Republicans of that sort have declined in influence and waned in their loyalty to the party. In their view (or perhaps I should say our view), the Republicans might still represent the lesser evil, but in the era of Bush and Cheney, not always by much.

Moral Psychology and Politics

2008-10-13T01:10:00.002-04:00

Some months ago in one of my “reading list” posts, I pointed my readers to the work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt. My friend Bill, who gave me the original tip on Haidt, recently sent me a link to Haidt’s article, “What Makes People Vote Republican?” To liberal academics, who rarely encounter anyone unlike themselves (except for undergraduates, most of whom can be easily manipulated, intimidated, or dismissed), this seems to be a real puzzle. Not surprisingly, these academics have no trouble producing self-serving theories that explain away behavhiors they disapprove of as irrational, misguided, or just plain stupid. (This obviously does not apply to economists, as our discipline requires us to assume that people always behave according to rational self-interest.)

Haidt takes his fellow liberals to task for their (literally) two-dimensional definition of morality and the resulting mischaracterization of how conservatives think. He himself overcame his knee-jerk disdain for his opponents in the culture war while doing research in India. The “liberal” attitudes that came to him so naturally in the context of his own academic-American culture were impossible to reconcile with the life of his friends in India, “a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society.” As he came to know and like his friends in India, he developed greater empathy for their culture.

Eventually, Haidt produced an inclusive definition of morality that evaded the ideological biases of previous definitions: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. He found five moral dimensions that are hard-wired into human nature as it has evolved over the millennia: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity, 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity. While liberals think entirely in terms of 1 and 2, conservatives are more holistic, operating in all five moral dimensions. Conservatives understand the concerns of liberals because they also value the things that liberals value. But liberals do not understand conservatives because the last three dimensions simply do not register with them as things that anyone would be sincerely concerned with.

I highly recommend the article. There is a link on the page to a longer article in a similar vein, in which he challenges the simplistic atheism of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris: “Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion.”

Dormition Lamentations

2008-08-18T00:04:00.010-04:00

Last night after Vespers I had the great joy and privilege to join in singing the Dormition Lamentations. Some 15 years ago, the service from which these hymns are taken served as my introduction to devotion to the Theotokos. But, since this service is no longer done by either Melkites or Antiochians (and, as far as I can tell, never was done by anyone else in this country), I was afraid I would never hear these hymns again.

At Holy Transfiguration Melkite Greek Catholic Church, they used to have a service on the Eve of the Dormition known as the Epitaphios of the Theotokos. It is exactly parallel to the Epitaphios service of Holy Friday, a service of lamentation for the death of Christ. Central features of that service include the singing of three long, beautiful lamentation hymns and the veneration of the epitaphios, an embroidered icon of the preparation of Christ’s body for burial by Joseph and Nicodemus, which is placed in a flower-covered bier. The Dormition Eve service included lamentation hymns for Our Lady, sung to the same tunes as those of Holy Friday, and veneration of an embroidered Dormition icon.

The first time I visited Holy Transfiguration for its title feast on 6 August, Fr. Joseph encouraged everyone to return the following week for the Epitaphios of the Theotokos, emphasizing its similarity to the service of Holy Friday, which is by far the parish’s best attended service. The Dormition Eve service was not nearly as well attended, but that just made it feel more intimate. The hymns gave me the sense of attending the funeral of a stranger who was universally loved, making me wish I had the privilege of knowing her. At Holy Transfiguration their custom is to come forward and gather close around the priest for the reading of the Gospel. On this occasion, since the congregation was so small, Fr. Joseph invited us all to remain up close for the homily. After the service I went forward again to venerate the icon and to receive a flower from the bier.

I returned every year, always inviting friends to join me for my favorite service. After serveral years of declined invitations, one friend finally joined me. But the service was not the one I remembered – instead of the Lamentation service they were doing Vespers. My friend Mary was impressed, but I was disappointed. Hoping this was just a one-off aberration, I returned the next few years, but it was always Vespers. I finally asked their cantor about it, and he informed me that they were no longer permitted to do the service because there were problems with the English translation they had been using. Until they had an approved translation, they could not do the service. And no one was working on a new translation.

Around the same time, I have learned, Metropolitan Philip also discontinued the service in the Antiochian Archdiocese, reportedly because he felt there was a danger of excessive devotion to Mary in some Middle Eastern ethnic parishes.

This past Thursday evening I had planned to be out of town, but a mishap forced me to return home. Therefore I was able to attend the Vesperal Liturgy for the Dormition at Holy Cross. During communion, standing at the front near the chanters’ stand, I heard some women of the choir singing the opening words of a hymn:

In a grave they laid thee, O my life and my Christ.
In a grave as well, the Mother of Life;
A strange sight both to angels and mankind.

Even though I had not heard the hymn in a decade and the tune was a bit different than the one the Melkites used, I knew instantly that I was hearing the first Dormition lamentation, and I moved to the back of the church, right in front of the choir, to hear it better. After the Liturgy, during the veneration of the cross, they sang the other two lamentation hymns. Afterwards, I thanked protopsalti Emily for these hymns. On Saturday evening after Vespers, when the lamentations were sung again, I joined in.

My favorite verse comes from the second of the three hymns:

Heaven now becomes passable by men and women:
Come, all you Christ-bearing people,
and rise with the Mother of God!

Here is the old Melkite translation of the same verse:

Now Heaven is opened even unto all the members of mankind;
Come, then, all you baptized who bear Christ the Lord,
Let us enter with the Mother of God.

Our veneration of the Theotokos is not entirely disinterested. We see in her a basis for our own hope of admission into heaven. She is a type of the Church, and, as such, she represents all Christians. Other hymns of the Epitaphios of the Theotokos, as I recall, are quite explicit in presenting Our Lady’s Assumption in terms of bridal imagery: Christ invites his Mother, representing his Bride the Church, into his heavenly marriage bower. This touches on the eschatological and soteriological implications of the Dormition.

The back cover of today’s bulletin related how the service is celebrated in Jerusalem, where it originated:

Nowhere is this feast celebrated with as much solemnity as in Jerusalem itself. On the eve of the feast, a large procession begins at the Jerusalem Patriarchate and winds its way through the narrow streets of the Old City, slowly making its way to Gethsemane. An icon of the Dormition leads the procession, with clergy, monks, nuns, and pilgrims following closely by. The two-hour walk ends at the church there, with the Lamentations Service celebrated at that time. In front of the altar in the edifice – beyond the burial chamber of the Mother of God – is a raised spot, upon which rests the shroud in which the body of the Virgin was wrapped. It is customary for those in attendance to venerate the processional icon of the Dormition and then stoop down and go beneath it as a sign of piety.

The Transfiguration and the Cross

2008-08-07T00:02:00.008-04:00

When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. – Luke 9:51

I like to visit parishes on their title feasts. I figure that if anyone knows how to celebrate a feast with proper attention and enthusiasm, it will be a parish named for the feast. This is certainly true of Holy Transfiguration Melkite Greek Catholic Church, where I go every year to celebrate today's feast. Tonight, Fr. Joseph's homily cleared up something I had long wondered about: why the Transfiguration is celebrated on 6 August. Previously, the only theory I had ever heard suggested that this just happened to be the date on which the lectionary reading for the feast (Matthew 17:1-9) fell, but that never seemed very satisfying.

I knew the Lutherans had introduced the practice of commemorating the Transfiguration on the last Sunday before Lent, based on the verse from Luke quoted above. It was shortly after the Transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36) that Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem," setting in motion the events leading to his arrest and crucifixion. The Transfiguration provided an appropriate high point from which to begin the Lenten descent towards Holy Week, which was historically as well as liturgically correct. Most other Western liturgical churches subsequently adopted the Lutheran practice, including the Catholics and Anglicans, who nonetheless maintained the 6 August feast as well.

Fr. Joseph told us this innovation actually restored an older practice, in which the Transfiguration was observed shortly before Lent or in its early weeks. (The dedication of the Second Sunday of Lent to St. Gregory Palamas, whose theology drew heavily on the Transfiguration, might preserve this ancient tradition in a less explicit way.) Continuing, Fr. Joseph called attention to the fact that we celebrate the Transfiguration on the 40th day before the Feast of the Holy Cross. Thus, the date maintains the traditional and biblical connection between the Transfiguration and the Cross.

Our focus on the Cross actually began on 1 August, when we commemorated the Procession of the Precious Cross, and will continue through the Octave of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. This can be seen most clearly on Sundays at Matins, where the appointed Katavasia are those of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross from 1 August through 21 September, with brief breaks for Katavasia of the Transfiguration (7-12 August) and of the Dormition (14-23 August).

My patron saint gets into the act here too! St. Joseph of Arimathea is featured most prominently in the services of Holy Friday, with the commemoration of his removal of Christ from the Cross and burial of Christ. His personal feast day, however, is assigned to 31 July, the Eve of the Procession of the Holy Cross, which maintains his inevitable connection to the Cross.

The Second Coming of J.C.

2008-07-25T20:24:00.005-04:00

The media are going gaga for Barack Obama. He clearly arouses the kind of hope and love that can, with only a little exaggeration, be described as messianic. Given the criticism the media have endured recently for their uncritical acceptance of President Bush's case for war against Saddam Hussein six years ago, one might think they would take extra care now to put politicians through their paces and evaluate their responses critically. But they are once again failing in this responsibility and allowing themselves to be swept up a wave of popular sentiment.

The U.S. media's fawning over Obama is now beginning to draw attention in the foreign press. Today the Times of London published this hilarious satire, which tells the story of Barack Obama in a way that parallels the story of Jesus in the Gospels: And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times. (Hat tip to CDL.)

Meanwhile, John McCain's campaign assembled a video collage of reporters and pundits expressing their infatuation with Obama and posted it on YouTube. There were two versions, each set to a different Frankie Valli recording: "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" and "My Eyes Adored You." The former version was the overwhelming favorite of McCainiacs, drawing over 80% of the votes. Unfortunately, both versions were taken down after Warner Music Group objected on copyright grounds, but you can read about it here. (Warner apparently had no objection to non-Obama versions of the songs on YouTube, which you can hear by clicking on the song title links above.)

Obama reminds me not of Jesus Christ, but of a different J.C. – Jimmy Carter. In the early post-Watergate years, Carter was a fresh face who combined a moderately liberal political record and a promise of an end to Washington-business-as-usual with personal integrity and sincere religious values. He was the sort of person on whom many Americans – a majority, as it turned out – could project their hopes for a White House free of the corruption and power politics that prevailed under Nixon. Now, in the wake of another discredited Republican President, Americans are looking for a new Jimmy Carter, and they like what they see in Barack Obama. However, it appears to me that Obama shares Carter's weaknesses as well as his strengths – particularly his inexperience and vagueness on the issues. If elected, Obama, like Carter, will probably turn out to be an ineffectual one-term President.

And then we will once again excoriate the media for failing to do their job.

P.S. While looking for the above picture of Obama and Carter, I came across this article from The New York Observer, which noted the similarities between the two Democratic Presidential candidates five month ago.

The Anglican Meltdown

2008-07-10T16:39:00.006-04:00

I have been reading about the accelerating Anglican meltdown for the past week. It is all playing out pretty much like I expected, but much faster. The usual Anglican proclivities for stalling and compromise seem to have been forgotten everywhere but in England itself, and they're in danger even there. For those not in the loop on Anglican news, here is a summary of recent developments:

The Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON), a group of conservative, mostly Evangelical, Anglican leaders meeting in Jerusalem last week, announced what is being widely interpreted as a move to sidestep the Anglican Instruments of Unity and either take over the communion or create a new church within the shell of the Anglican Communion.

Also last week, more than 1,300 clergy of the Church of England, including 11 bishops, signed a letter in which they threatened to defect from the C. of E. if this week's meeting of the General Synod gave the go-ahead for consecrating women bishops without providing legal protection to those who cannot accept the validity of priestly orders for women.

This week the General Synod, meeting in York, defeated all compromise proposals and took the next step towards the consecration of female bishops with only a flimsy "code of practice" to protect Anglo-Catholics. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York both spoke in favor of stronger protections, but the synod paid them no heed. This not only ensures a significant split in the C. of E., but it also further weakens the authority of Archbishop Rowan Williams.

It looks like most of the traditional Anglo-Catholics in the UK will soon begin a mass migration to Rome. The main obstacle to this in the past has been the UK's liberal RC hierarchy, who don't want a bunch of well-educated, conservative Anglo-Catholic clergy crashing their party. In the early 1990s they successfully thwarted the mass conversion of Anglo-Catholics. This time, however, the Anglo-Catholic bishops have gone straight to Rome, where they have found a sympathetic Pope who is not afraid to upset his English bishops by circumventing their schemes. (He was already peeved at them for defying his recent Latin Mass edict.) By the end of the year, there could be the beginning of some sort of Anglican Uniate arrangement in the UK.

Unfortunately, I don't think many of the UK's Anglo-Catholics will head for Orthodoxy. Most of them are already closet Romans. Also, the Anglo-Catholics who would be most inclined to Orthodoxy are the same ones who are likely to "stay and fight" until the first woman bishop is actually consecrated. And Orthodoxy in the UK is really not set up to encourage converts. For example, there is no provision for use of any Western Rite. The Oriental Orthodox might actually be in a better position to pick up converts, with their British Orthodox Church, which is under the Coptic Pope.

Update

I wrote most of the above to a friend yesterday. There have been new developments today.

Two Anglo-Catholic bishops have written letters announcing the inevitable departure of their flock for Rome. The Rt. Rev'd Andrew Burnham is Bishop of Ebbsfleet, and the Rt. Rev'd Edwin Barnes is the retired Bishop of Richborough and President of the Church Union. Ebbsfleet and Richborough are the suffragan sees of Canterbury occupied by Provincial Episcopal Visitors, better known as "flying bishops," who minister to traditionalists who do not recognize the priestly orders of women. At the same time, Catholic blogger Damian Thompson, who has been reporting on secret meetings of these same bishops with Vatican officials, has now unveiled the outlines of a plan to allow Anglo-Catholics to move Romewards as a group. Rome will appoint a bishop to offer pastoral care to ex-Anglicans, who will gather under the umbrella of the Fellowship of St. Gregory the Great.

Meanwhile, the leading Orthodox sympathizer in the C. of E., the Rt. Rev'd Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, released an eagerly awaited pastoral letter in which he expressed hope that the London Plan, under which traditionalists in his large diocese have been accommodated, could continue into the future.

Coming next week: The Lambeth Conference.

Common Human Nature

2008-07-07T00:01:00.006-04:00

On Friday in the Times of London, religion correspondent Ruth Gledhill’s headline was “Archbishop of Armagh invokes scripture in defence of homosexuality.” While that was a bit more sensationalistic than necessary, the Most Rev’d Alan Harper, Primate of the Church of Ireland, actually did begin to lay the groundwork for a theological, rather than merely political, rationalization of the acceptance of homosexual relationships by the Church. But his theological argument, in turn, rests on his anticipation of future scientific developments.

In a speech to the annual conference of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Archbishop Harper pointed to Richard Hooker as the source of the Anglican method of interpreting Scripture through the application of Tradition and Reason. He also recalled the importance that Anglicans place on science and knowledge. For illustration, he applied this method to the first chapter of Romans, where St. Paul writes, “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another . . .”

The archbishop conceded that science had not yet rendered a final verdict on whether or not people are born homosexual, but he believed (in Gledhill’s words) “that it seemed increasingly likely that they had no choice in the matter.” He concluded that if this were the case, then the Church would have to revisit the question of whether homosexual relations were really unnatural, rather than natural: “If such comes to be shown, it will be necessary to acknowledge the full implications of that new aspect of the truth, and that insight applied to establish and acknowledge what may be a new status for homosexual relationships within the life of the Church.”

Here is the flaw in the archbishop’s reasoning: It implicitly denies the existence of a common human nature. Instead, it imputes a different nature to homosexuals than to heterosexuals, such that they are subject to differing moral standards, based on their differing nature. As if homosexuals were a different species.

But why stop there? Some progressives of a more gnostic orientation go much further, essentially classifying each person as a sui generis being. Every individual is so distinct that there is no human nature. The concept of species, if it is valid at all, does not apply to us so-called “humans.”

Others, who call themselves transhumanists, do not assert that this is now the case, but they long for the day when technology will make it so. Through a combination of eugenics, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, cyborg implants, and other things we have not yet imagined, mankind will “take control of its own evolution.” Unless mankind came to an agreement on the direction this development was to take and enforced it rigorously, it would obviously lead to a branching of humanity in many directions away from its original nature.

If there were really no common human nature, what would be the implications?

1. If we do not share a common nature, there is no basis of a common morality. If homosexuals are a different species with a distinct nature, then they could have an entirely different natural law. In addition, they would not automatically be able to make claims based on human rights.

2. Anyone who does not share the human nature is not saved by Christ. As the Cappadocian Fathers taught, what is not assumed by Christ is not saved. In the Incarnation, Christ assumed our human nature in order to rescue and heal mankind. Those who do not share in this nature do not share in the salvation. Moreover, if you abolish human nature entirely, as the radicals do, then the Incarnation becomes meaningless or moot.

3. If there were no human nature at all, it would obviate the applicability of Darwinian evolution to mankind. Evolution is all about the origin of species. If we are not a species, then the question of our evolution is moot. (Note: It would be inconsistent for anyone to invoke Darwin at any stage of an argument against universal human nature. Some of the leading exponents of evolution have occasionally fallen into this trap.)

How, then, should one who takes the existence of human nature as given (whether from an Incarnational or a Darwinian basis) respond to Archbishop Harper? I think he is right to think about how the Church ought to respond to the likely reality that at least some instances of homosexuality have a biological basis. But I think he is wrong to proceed based on the inference that homosexuality is therefore “natural” for some people. On the one hand, this would separate homosexuals from other humans. On the other hand, it would seem to lump all homosexuals into the same category with each other. In short, it would herd homosexuals into a conceptual ghetto.

I would propose that it works better to think of homosexuality as a minor congenital anomaly. (The older term, birth defect, seems a bit too harsh, so I’ll eschew it here.) Few of us are born perfect. I have a couple of minor congenital anomalies myself – so minor that I was not even aware of them until well into my teen years, and they have no effect on my day-to-day life. Following the archbishop’s logic, I might say that these are not actually anomalies, but rather characteristics that make me a different sort of creature – and a perfect example of that sort of creature, to boot. Perhaps the only instance of that sort of creature in existence.

The more traditional approach is to say that these anomalies are unnatural, and I am therefore an imperfect manifestation of human nature. My anomalies do not make me my own species. They do not subject me to a different morality. They might sometimes make living as a human more challenging than would be the case for a more perfect human, but they do not separate me from the common human nature.

Kosovo 1: The Albanians

2008-06-16T12:02:00.008-04:00

Yesterday the new constitution of the world’s newest state, the Republic of Kosovo, came into force. Few Americans know the history of this small, land-locked Balkan nation. The usual American ignorance of all things foreign is compounded, in this instance, by layers of the nationalistic propaganda endemic to the Balkans, which make the truth hard to discover even if one goes looking for it. In my next few posts I hope to cut through the ignorance and the nonsense to shed some light on Kosovo. In my first post I will give an introduction to the Albanian people, which constitutes the majority of the population of Kosovo, focusing in particular on their religion.

The precise origin of the Albanians is lost in the mists of time, but it is generally believed that they are descendants of a pre-Slavic Balkan population. A combination of linguistic and historical evidence suggests that they might have been partially Romanized Dacians living in what is now the Hungarian-Romanian border region, who fled to what are now northeast Albania, Kosovo, and northwest Macedonia to escape the invading Huns in the fifth century.

Speaking an Indo-European language with no extant close relatives, the Albanians are divided into two sub-groups, each with its own dialect. The Tosks of southern Albania were traditionally Eastern Orthodox, and the Ghegs of northern Albania were traditionally Roman Catholic. In the centuries following the Turkish conquest, a majority of Albanians converted to Islam, but in the early 20th century about 30% of the population of Albania remained Christian. Smaller percentages of Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia remained Catholic. Many of the Muslims, moreover, were only nominally so, and Islamic practice was not particularly rigorous. Bektashism, a liberal Sufi/Shi’a sect, is quite popular among Albanians. It is sometimes considered a crypto-Christian sect, as its members retain many Christian practices such baptism, communion, three ranks of clergy, venerating saints and icons, and drinking wine. But it also exhibits Gnostic tendencies and teaches reincarnation.

For the most part, the Orthodox tended to be concentrated in the south near Greece, the Catholics in the north near Montenegro, and the Muslims in the middle, with Sunnis in the cities and Bektashis in more remote areas. But Albanian identity was stronger than any religious identity, and members of the different religions mixed and intermarried freely. The relative weakness of religious identity was probably compounded by the fact that none of the religions offered worship in the Albanian vernacular, but only in Greek, Latin, and Arabic, respectively.

Because the Albanians were not united by religion, Albanian nationalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries was a secular movement, downplaying if not actually suppressing religion. Then, in the 1960s the communists who ruled Albania, enamored of Maoism, followed China in instituting a Cultural Revolution. They abolished all religion, and it became illegal even to celebrate Christmas privately in one’s own home. Churches and mosques alike were demolished or converted into “cultural centers.” Many clergy who did not renounce their faith were imprisoned. As a result of the two decades of official atheism, 60-70% of Albanians today do not practice any religion, though they might retain a nominal religious identity. The Albanian population of neighboring Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, however, did not face such extreme forms of persecution.

Dode Gjergji, the Catholic Bishop of Kosovo, reportedly intends to re-convert the population of Kosovo to Catholicism – and he does not expect this to be a particularly difficult task. He says that Albanians converted to Islam only because of Turkish pressure and that they remain friendly to Christianity. Indeed, many Muslim Ghegs retain two names, an official Muslim name and an unofficial Catholic name, and they remember exactly how many generations it has been since their ancestors were Catholic. But Bp. Gjergji is taking nothing for granted. He plans to secure the prayers of one of the 20th century’s greatest saints – and the world’s most famous Albanian – by dedicating his new cathedral to Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Ecumenism Reading List

2008-05-30T02:12:00.007-04:00

Last week, while following a trail of links, I landed on this interesting post from the blog Torn Notebook. It quotes from a book by Bp. Hilarion Alfeyev, who cites St. Gregory the Theologian, who was reflecting on St. Athanasius. St. Gregory, like St. Athanasius before him, valued the unity of the Church so much that he was not willing to permit division over petty disputes about doctrinal semantics. Both the passage from St. Gregory and the commentary on it by Bp. Hilarion are well worth reading. This is the second in a series of five posts on the subject of “Church Unity and Legitimate Variance,” all of which can be found archived here, though you'll have to scroll down a bit on the page to find them all.

Continuing a bit further on the ecumenical trail tonight, I found a couple of other interesting items. Earlier this month, Melkite Patriarch Gregorios III addressed Pope Benedict XVI on the state of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. His address included this section in which he recounted the Melkites' particular vocation for Christian unity. He concluded with this appeal:

We are indeed rather the Eastern “enfant terrible” in communion with the Church of Rome. That was the goal of the initiative of the late Archbishop Elias Zoghby in 1996: to be in full communion with the Church of Rome and with Orthodoxy. That may be a dream, an Utopian vision, but it is also a prophetic vision.

We would like to live, in the very heart of the Catholic Church, a life that could be accepted by Orthodoxy. Let us do so, Most Holy Father. That is the key to all real progress along the ecumenical way. Accept us, Holy Father, as we are: Eastern Orthodox, who want to live our full and complete Eastern Orthodox tradition in full communion with Rome. That is the really big challenge for the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue, as has been evident at every stage of the ecumenical dialogue since 1980 and especially at Belgrade and Ravenna.

For all that, Most Holy Father, we need your prayer, your approbation and your blessing.

Finally, the Byzantine blogosphere is buzzing with commentary on the news from Timisoara, Romania, that an Orthodox metropolitan received communion in a service at a Romanian Catholic church. No one seems to know for sure what the metropolitan was thinking, but some are describing it as a bold step forward in ecumenical relations, while others see it as a scandal.

I will close with a list of blogs I have encountered that focus on Church unity:
The Anastasis Dialogue
Byzantine, TX
De unione ecclesiarum
Eirenikon

Steward of the Treasury of Grace

2008-05-09T18:02:00.005-04:00

A friend, formerly Anglo-Catholic, now Roman, just sent me a list of links to his favorite blogs. This one, written by an Anglo-Papalist priest and scholar in the UK, recently featured a series of four short posts that, together, constitute a translation of a short passage from a homily by St. Gregory Palamas on the Mother of God. The section I found most striking was the end of part three, which offers the image of Mary as keeper of the treasury of grace:

[T]hrough thee is illumined the spirit by the indwelling of the divine Spirit; for thou didst become steward (tamiouchos) and full content (perioche) of graces; not so that thou mightest keep them by thyself, but so that thou might fill the whole of everything (ta sumpanta) with grace – because the Dispenser of inexhaustible treasures ordains (epitropeuei) it on account of the distribution: for why would he make the undiminshed wealth to be closed up?

To read the whole thing (which is quite short, even though it is spread out over four posts), click here and then scroll down to the second-to-last post. The four posts are titled, "Mary's Month of May."

Lyrics for Holy Thursday

2008-04-24T18:15:00.003-04:00

From the album Wandering Strange

The Last Song

After the supper was over
     and the table had been cleared away
When the last bottle was empty,
     there was nothing much left to say
Jesus started humming an old tune,
     everybody fell right in
They sang the last song, the last song

Matthew started singing the low part,
     John grabbed the high harmony
Their voices filled up the night air
     all the way to Gethsemane
Judas walked some distance behind them
     like he had forgotten the words
They sang the last song, the last song

Just before they got to the garden
Just before they all fell asleep
Just before Barabbas was pardoned
And Jesus was nailed to a tree

I reckon it was some kind of soul song,
     maybe kind of sad and slow
All about how we get weary,
     all about holding on
Only Jesus knew what was coming,
     still he never said a thing
He sang the last song, the last song

He could have made a toast to the good times
     and only the best for his friends
He could have stayed up late reminiscing
     about the long strange trip it had been
But he went just like a lamb to the slaughter
     knowing it was part of the plan
And sang the last song, the last song

Kate Campbell and Walt Aldridge
© 1999 Large River Music (BMI) /
April Music/Waltz Time Music (ASCAP)

Dating the Crucifixion

2008-04-23T14:18:00.005-04:00

The Synaxarion readings we use at my church during Holy Week have one feature that strikes me as very odd: they assign Roman calendar dates to the days of the week of Christ's death and resurrection. Last night at Bridegroom Matins, for example, the Synaxarion that I read to the congregation said that the day when Judas agreed to betray Jesus was Wednesday, which corresponded to 21 March. Counting forward, this implies that the Crucifixion occurred on the 23rd, and the Resurrection occurred on the 25th. I have been unable to track down the source of this chronology.

I am aware of two dates that were assigned to the Crucifixion by early Christians. The first was 6 April. Later on, for some reason, this date was displaced by 25 March. (It is no mere coincidence that these dates precede Theophany and Christmas, respectively, by nine months, but the dates of those feasts were based on the date of the Christ's death, not vice versa. I'll skip that tangent for now and save it for a separate post in December.)

Modern scholars have attempted to determine the date of the Crucifixion by reconstructing the Jewish lunar calendar for the range of years in which Christ might have died. Following Luke 3:1-2, which places the beginning of Christ's ministry with respect to the reigns of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Philip, and Lysanias, the range of plausible years can be narrowed to AD 29-36. In addition, St. Paul's conversion is usually dated to AD 34, which restricts the range further. Then it becomes a matter of extrapolating the lunar cycles backwards to the first century and seeing which years, if any, fit the chronology presented in the gospels. In performing these calculations, allowance must be made for the imprecision of Jewish reckoning. Sometimes the month might have begun a day after the new moon if the moon was not visible, and occasionally an error might be made in determining when to add an intercalary month (a 13th month to keep the lunar calendar in sync with the solar calendar) at the end of the year.

One complication is that the gospels present two different chronologies of Holy Week. The Synoptic gospels, which present the Last Supper as a Seder meal, imply that Jesus was crucified on the first day of Passover, 15 Nisan. John, however, tells us that Jesus was crucified on the day before Passover, 14 Nisan. So both chronologies must be considered.

The first person to do these calculations was Sir Isaac Newton, in 1733. Newton narrowed the dates down to 3 April 33 and 23 April 34. He then chose the latter date based on a correspondence between the grain-plucking episode from the gospels (Mark 2:23) and his understanding of the growing season for grain. However, his selection of AD 34 was based on rules of the Jewish calendar that were not yet in effect in the first century. Therefore, Newton's work was not taken very seriously.

Scholars of the 20th century returned to this question. They settled on two plausible dates: 7 April 30 and 3 April 33. Note that both dates correspond to 14 Nisan, and are thus consistent with John's chronology, not with the Synoptics.

For many years, AD 30 was the consensus favorite. I suspect there were two reasons for this. First, it had become accepted the Christ was born in 6-4 BC. Many people were attached to the notion that Christ had died at the age of 33. If he had died in AD 33, that would have made him nearly 36-38. Therefore the earlier Crucifixion date was favored. Second, based on the erroneous belief that Christ was born in AD 1, in conjunction with the idea that he died at age 33, it was popularly believed that Christ was crucified in AD 33. Scholars tend to enjoy the feeling of superiority that comes from dismissing such popular beliefs. (I'm not sure why they did not think, rather, to question the death-at-age-33 theory . . .)

In the last decade, however, the consensus has shifted with near unanimity to AD 33 as the year of the Crucifixion. In AD 30, Christ's ministry was still in its early stages. AD 33 has astronomy, history, and tradition going for it.

In addition, further astronomical research has found that there was a lunar eclipse on 3 April 33. This is consistent with Peter's quotation from Joel (Acts 2:20): "The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood." In addition, the late-second-century apocryphal Report of Pilate to the Emperor Claudius claims that at the Crucifixion "the moon appeared like blood." This was a common description of lunar eclipses in that era, and it might very well record a memory of an eclipse on the day of the Crucifixion. This is the icing on the cake for AD 33.

Unless something forces us to make a radical re-evaluation of the era in which Christ lived or the correspondence of the days of his death and resurrection to the Jewish Passover, the consensus in favor of 3 April 33 is unlikely to change. In the meantime, I will continue to try to get to the bottom of the dates in the Synaxarion.

The Tao of the Cross

2008-04-23T00:15:00.001-04:00

As I mentioned early in Lent, I have been slowly reading Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Actually, I’m not sure the term translation captures what Mitchell has given us. His work is often highly paraphrased, and sometimes it goes way beyond paraphrase, becoming a fresh expression of his interpretation of the gist of a chapter. Chapter 50, on the subject of life and death, is a difficult chapter, and even attempts at literal translation can vary widely. Most translations involve the number thirteen, tigers, rhinos, and armor – like these three translations. But Mitchell skips all of these. Instead he gives us a description of the Master who accepts the inevitability of death and is therefore not afraid to live. It reminds me of nothing so much as Christ in his last days. Without further ado . . .

The Master gives himself up
to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die,
and he has nothing left to hold on to:
no illusions in his mind,
no resistances in his body.
He doesn’t think about his actions;
they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life;
therefore he is ready for death,
as a man is ready for sleep
after a good day’s work.

Dating Easter

2008-04-13T21:54:00.008-04:00

Most of North America's Christians are now three weeks past Easter. Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Anglicans, as well as members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, all celebrated Easter very early this year, on 23 March. Meanwhile, it is still one week until Passover and two weeks until Orthodox Easter. I am still looking at two more weeks of fasting, while my Anglo-Catholic friends are already half-way to the Ascension!

It has long been a principle of the Church that all Christians should celebrate the Resurrection on the same day. A number of councils, such as the Synod of Whitby, tried to get all the Christians in a region on the same page with respect to the date of Easter. How did we get to the current anomalous situation?

The early rule adopted by the Churches of Rome and Alexandria was that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday after Passover. Passover, the 15th of Nisan on the Jewish calendar, would normally fall on the day of the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox. At that time the date of Passover, as observed by rabbinical Jews, depended upon observation of nature, not computation.

The Roman version of the rule ensured that Easter would always be observed after Passover. If Passover fell on Sunday, then Easter would be celebrated on the following Sunday. This was motivated in part by history: According to the Gospel of John (e.g., 19:31), the Crucifixion occurred on Friday, Passover was observed on Saturday, and the Resurrection occurred on Sunday. Therefore, they reasoned, Easter should be observed after Passover. But it might also have been motivated in part by an anti-Jewish attitude that was prevalent among Christians of some regions, who preferred to separate the Christian Passover (Greek Pascha) from the Jewish Passover (Hebrew Pesach).

To complicate matters, around that time, the Jews reformed their calendar to simplify the determination of when to add an intercalary month (a 13th month to keep the lunar calendar in sync with the solar calendar). Formerly, the Sanhedrin would announce the insertion of the extra month based on four factors: the equinox, the ripeness of the barley and of the fruits of trees, and the birth of sufficient lambs for the Passover sacrifice. The new calendar, traditionally attributed to the 4th-century rabbi Hillel II (though more likely adopted gradually between the 1st and 9th centuries) was rule-based rather than astronomical. The dispersion of the Jews all over the Mediterranean world made it difficult to communicate the beginning of the ecclesiastical New Year (1st of Nisan) to everyone. The new calendar was intended to ensure that all Jews could start the new year together, and thus celebrate Passover and other festivals together. But the rule-based calendar sometimes departed from the celestial calendar, resulting in the observance of Passover before the equinox. Some Christians, especially in the East, followed the new Jewish determination of Passover, while others rejected the Jewish calendrical innovation and made their own independent determination of the Paschal full moon. (Local variations in calendrical practice among both Christians and Jews make the picture somewhat more complicated than I have described here.)

The Council of Nicea, in response to Constantine's request, addressed the issue of when to celebrate Easter. The council decided that Easter should be observed by all Christians on the Sunday following the full moon on or after the vernal equinox. That is really all the Church said about the date of Easter at the time. If you read much about this issue, you will no doubt encounter various claims that the Council of Nicea mandated more detailed formulae for determining the date of Easter (e.g., basing it on the Julian calendar or employing a 19-year lunar cycle), which just happen to coincide with the writer's biases. But such claims are entirely unfounded. Variant lunar cycles, for instance, persisted until the 9th century in some places.

A few decades later, with some Eastern Christians still taking their cue from the Jewish observance of Passover, the Church again addressed the matter in an appendix to the Apostolic Constitutions. Canon VII of the Holy Apostles states, "If any bishop, priest, or deacon celebrates the holy day of Pascha before the vernal equinox with the Jews, let him be deposed." The key phrase here is not "with the Jews," but, rather, "before the vernal equinox." The implication is that Christians are to ignore the new Jewish calendar. The Church had little choice but to make this ruling. The contrary ruling would, essentially, have given the Jews the power to determine when Christians celebrated their most important festival. Here the Church proved more conservative than the rabbinical Jews, retaining the ancient Jewish practice long after the Jews had abandoned it.

The Jews have not observed Passover before the vernal equinox since the 9th century. Their rule-based calendar has drifted, so that now they sometimes observe Passover later than the astronomically determined date, but never earlier. Like this year, for instance. The vernal equinox took place on 20 March, and the moon was full on the following day, 21 March. But the Jews will commence their celebration of Passover at the next full moon, 20 April.

Many Orthodox Christians, perhaps including most of the clergy, seem to believe that the reason we Orthodox Christians observe Easter so late is because the canons require us to observe Easter after the Jews have observed Passover. This year, for instance, Orthodox Easter falls on 27 April, a week after Passover, which is consistent with this claim. But while this might be a useful rule of thumb, it is not an actual rule, let alone a canon. The Passover date that Easter must not precede is that determined by the ancient method – 21 March this year. Far from requiring Christians to celebrate Easter after the new Jewish Passover date, Canon VII of the Holy Apostles actually requires us to ignore the innovative Jewish dating of Passover.

It is easy to demonstrate that the Church has no rule requiring Easter to follow Passover. A number of times in the 6th through 8th centuries, the Church actually celebrated Easter on the same day when the Jews were beginning their celebration of Passover. This last occurred in AD 783. It has not happened since then because the Julian calendar, which came to be used by Christians, drifted even faster than the Jewish calendar. Orthodox Christians still use the Julian calendar for determining the date of Easter. That is the real reason why Orthodox Easter always follows Passover.

It is common knowledge that the Julian calendar currently runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar. (Most European Catholic countries and their colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582, as decreed by Pope Gregory XIII. Other countries were slower. Britain, for example, did not adopt the new calendar until 1752. Greece was the last European country to adopt the Gregorian calendar, in 1923.) What is less well known is that the Orthodox also follow a different calculation of lunar cycle, which runs a few days behind both astronomical reality and the Gregorian lunar cycle. This year, for instance, the astronomical full moon will occur on 20 April, while the Orthodox lunar tables assign the Paschal full moon to 25 April.

The difference, then, between Orthodox and Western Easter dates occurs because 1) the Julian solstice occurs 13 days after the Gregorian solstice, and 2) the Julian full moon occurs 3 to 5 days after the Gregorian full moon. (Both calendars use virtual solstices and full moons based on computation, rather than on actual astronomical observation. In practice, the Gregorian computations are usually closer to physical reality.) By my calculations, based on these two facts, Orthodox Easter should coincide with Western Easter about 20% of the time; it should fall one week later 50% of the time; it should fall four weeks later 10% of the time; and it should fall five weeks later 20% of the time. I think that is pretty close to the actual pattern of variation in recent history.

The Julian calendar, however, continues to drift away from physical reality. After the present century, the two Easters will never again occur four weeks apart. Beginning in 2437, they will sometimes come six weeks apart. And after 2698, the two Easters will never again coincide.

I have referred numerous times to the "rule-based" reformed Jewish calendar. Lest I give an incorrect impression, let me reiterate that, since at least the 5th century, Christians have also used rule-based calendars. Currently, no church determines the date of Easter through direct astronomical observation. In the early first millennium, when these calculated calendars were being devised, communication was not what it is today. Determining the date of Easter by rules, rather than by astronomical observation, was the most practical way to ensure that all Christians celebrated Easter together. But it also embodied a bit of humanistic hubris – a pride in the growing power of human reason to model the mechanics of the universe through its own ingenuity, without further reference to God's physical creation. It would seem to me that a religion based on the Incarnation should hesitate to separate itself from physical reality.

And, indeed, the men who devised the Church's calendar had no such intention; rather, they intended for their calculations to anticipate the physical reality that would eventually obtain. In reforming the Roman calendar, Julius Caesar had been attempting to implement a calendar that would conform to astronomical reality. While the Julian calendar was a vast improvement over its predecessor, it did not quite succeed in matching the movements of the heavens over the long term. The Fathers who argued for various lunar cycles (e.g., 19-year, 84-year, 532-year) did so on the basis of how closely they would conform to reality. If they were here today to see the outcome of their work, I'm sure they would want to have another go at it, to see if they could improve their methods.

And what of those who insist that the Church must retain the Julian calendar? I will never be persuaded that the measurement errors of a pagan Roman emperor constitute an irreformable element of Holy Tradition.

In the centuries following the Council of Nicea, the Church converged on a consensus of using the Julian calendar with a 19-year lunar cycle. Its leaders saw this method as the best way to implement the decision of Nicene Fathers regarding the date of Easter, given the options available at the time. And it worked pretty well for a while. Now it is not working so well, and we see that rigid adherence to these unadjusted formulae results in a growing divergence from the ruling of Nicea.

Together with the Orthodox Theological Society in America, I support the Aleppo Agreement, under which churches would abandon their virtual calendars and extrapolations, and instead base the date of Easter on actual astronomical observation. The OTSA clearly states the Orthodox rationale for Aleppo: "We endorse this proposal on the basis that it reflects most faithfully the norms for calculating the date of Pascha as set out by the Holy Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council." You can't get more Orthodox than that.

For those who want to know more, here are some suggestions for further reading:

Archbishop Peter:
Concerning the Date of Pascha and the 1st Ecumenical Council

Wikipedia: Computus

This Easter/Passover Calculator allows you to plug in a year, and it gives you the dates of Julian Easter, Gregorian Easter, and Passover.

Appendix
I decided to add a list of actual dates for 2008, which might clarify things for those who think concretely, rather than abstractly.

Ancient Jewish (Astronomical) Calendar
7 March – New Moon / New Year / 1 Nisan
20 March – Vernal Equinox
21 March – Full Moon / Passover / 15 Nisan

Reformed Jewish Calendar
Year 5768 – 11th year of 19-year cycle
6 April – New Moon / 1 Nisan
20 April – Full Moon / Passover / 15 Nisan

Julian Calendar (with Gregorian dates)
3 April – Vernal Equinox
25 April – Paschal Full Moon
27 April – Easter / Pascha

Gregorian Calendar
14th year of 19-year cycle
21 March – Vernal Equinox
22 March – Paschal Full Moon
23 March – Easter

Charitable Solicitations

2008-04-03T04:40:00.002-04:00

I get a lot of charitable solicitations in the mail. In fact, they account for about two-thirds of all the mail I receive. In 2001 I decided to track my communications from charities. That year I received 862 communications from 240 different charitable organizations. Of these, 264 arrived in the first quarter, and 116 in March. Two different Catholic-related charities sent me 22 solicitations each.

This year, I am repeating that exercise. In the first three months of 2008 I received 233 communications from 106 different charities – 186 solicitations, 24 newsletters, and 23 receipts or thank-you letters. One organization has already sent me 8 solicitations. This is about a 3% decrease from 2001.

In determining which organizations to contribute to, my first filter is to drop any organization that sent me more than 12 solicitations in the past year. Actually, any more than 2 a year is excessive and wasteful, as far as I'm concerned. The extra letters not only waste their money on printing and postage, but they waste my time opening, sorting, and recycling them. They actually slow down my charitable giving, since the time that I could spend writing checks must instead be spent sorting excess mail.

My second filter is to check their ratings on Charity Navigator, which evaluates most American charities. It gives every charity it rates two ratings, one for efficiency and one for capacity. Each rating is on a scale of 0 to 4 stars, with sub-components rated on more detailed numerical scales. I find it especially useful when a number of organizations with the same mission want my money. I can determine which of them will use my contribution most efficiently and direct my dollars accordingly.

I'll report back again at the end of the year with the 2008 totals.

Soldier’s Bible

2008-03-25T12:54:00.006-04:00

I recently lost another friend from my old Episcopal parish. John went home to Rhode Island nearly two years ago to look after his stepmother during her recovery from an illness or surgery or something. While he was there, he was diagnosed with cancer of the bone marrow. He went through three rounds of chemotherapy and was optimistic about his chances for recovery, but he didn’t make it. He never returned to DC.

A few months before John departed for Rhode Island, his roommate had a stroke, which left the right side of his body paralyzed. He now lives in a nursing home not far from their old apartment, which has been unoccupied for some time now. On Saturday he took me to the apartment to begin looking through John’s things. I returned on Monday and spent the whole afternoon in John’s room. At his roommate’s urging, I claimed some books, graphic novels, CDs, videotapes, and DVDs for myself (John and I had a lot of overlapping interests and tastes). I also set aside a few liturgical books for his roommate (some of them were probably his anyway). And I filled three boxes with the rest of his Bibles, books about scripture, prayerbooks, hymnals, books on liturgy, and miscellaneous books of theology and devotion. There are lots of other books, including several shelves of science fiction paperbacks, that are still there waiting to be dealt with.

One of the books I found was a 1942 Gideons’ edition of the New Testament and Psalms (KJV, naturally). It was apparently intended for soldiers. In the front, on a page facing a color image of the U.S. flag (48 stars), was this letter:

THE WHITE HOUSE - WASHINGTON

January 25, 1941

To the Armed Forces:

As Commander-in-Chief I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States. Throughout the centuries men of many faiths and diverse origins have found in the Sacred Book words of wisdom, counsel and inspiration. It is a fountain of strength and now, as always, an aid in attaining the highest aspirations of the human soul.

Very sincerely yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On the following pages were the Lord’s Prayer, five pages of “Well-Loved Hymns” (Onward, Christian Soldiers; Jesus! Lover of My Soul; Lead, Kindly Light; Abide with Me; Rock of Ages; How Firm a Foundation; Nearer, My God to Thee; Now the Day Is Over; and the Doxology - “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow”), and two “National Anthems” (America - “My country, ’tis of three” - and The Star-Spangled Banner). At the back of the Bible was a page with this message:

Your Chaplain
Look up your chaplain at the first opportunity. Your welfare is his first concern, and you will find him friendly and helpful at all times. His counsel and advice will guide you in avoiding or overcoming difficulties. In many ways you can help him in his services for others. A close friendship between and chaplain and his men preserves and promotes a fine spirit in any service unit.
- The GIDEONS

I wonder if such straightforward Presidential commendation of Bible reading would still be permitted by the courts today. Would the Gideons even be allowed to give soldiers a copy of the New Testament? When I was in fifth grade, the Gideons gave everyone in my school a copy of the New Testament and Psalms (and maybe Proverbs too). I’m pretty sure that is no longer allowed.

A River Runs Through Lent

2008-03-21T00:16:00.008-04:00

Last week was the first week of Lent. (Those of us who follow the Julian Calendar are running five weeks behind the rest of the world this year.) All week, wherever I turned, I kept running into river imagery.

On the weekdays of Lent, the Byzantine lectionary gives us Genesis and Proverbs. On the first day of Lent, we begin with the first chapter of each, and we work our way through both over the next six weeks. I read Proverbs last year, so this year I’m reading Genesis. Once again I came upon Genesis 2:10: “A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.” I lingered over the image, and it remained with me in the following days.

Last week’s tothesource column was a critique of Richard Dawkins’ condemnation of the politically incorrect God of the Old Testament. (Bottom line: Dawkins elsewhere describes the world as indifferent to good and evil; this leaves him no basis for condemning God or anything else.) The article cited Dawkins’ 1996 book, River Out of Eden, whose title is an obvious reference to the Old Testament he now so despises.

While doing some number crunching, I listened to The Turning, the 1987 album by Leslie Phillips (who later re-christened herself Sam Phillips). This album was her first collaboration with producer (and later husband) T Bone Burnett. The first song on the album is Burnett’s “River of Love,” which begins with the line, “There's a river of love that runs through all times.” The line itself winds through the song like a river, repeated before each verse and again at the end of the song. The song’s three verses are about different sorts of rivers – rivers of grief, tears, and fire, respectively. Each of these rivers is evoked in detail, unlike the river of love. Yet, when each verse ends, the river of love is still flowing. As if to reinforce the song in my mind, I heard it again the next day on Burnett’s own self-titled album of 1986.

The boom box on which I listened to these CDs at work is showing its age. Before I can play a CD, I need to hit the play button repeatedly for a minute or two. Recently, while waiting for a CD to start playing, I have been working my way through Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. Chapter 34, which I read last week, begins with the image of the Tao as a flooding river. It flows everywhere, nourishing all, yet without exalting its own role.

Upon creating man, God placed him in Paradise, which was watered by the river. After our first ancestors’ expulsion from Paradise, their descendants clung to the river, eventually spreading south into Mesopotamia along two of the river’s branches. Though they were deprived of Paradise itself, they still had the river that had sustained their life in Eden. Though fallen, they were not deprived entirely of God’s love for them. Likewise, as we work our way through Lent, continually reminded of our fallen state, we are nourished by signs of God’s love, flowing through it all.

Archbishop Rowan and Sharia

2008-02-08T21:05:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered the first lecture in a series of discussions, "Islam in English Law," as part of the 2008 Temple Festival, at the Royal Courts of Justice. Entitled, "Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective," it was a long, academic think piece of the sort Abp. Rowan is known for. His topic was how and whether the legal system should accommodate the religious identities and motivations of its citizens. In keeping with the theme of day, he focused primarily on the example of Islamic sharia law, but in this increasingly secular age the topic is obviously of as much interest to Christians as to Muslims. The Anglican Communion News Service summarizes his lecture here, followed by the full text. Here is Abp. Rowan's own statement of the problem he is addressing:

There is a recognition that our social identities are not constituted by one exclusive set of relations or mode of belonging – even if one of those sets is regarded as relating to the most fundamental and non-negotiable level of reality, as established by a 'covenant' between the divine and the human (as in Jewish and Christian thinking; once again, we are not talking about an exclusively Muslim problem). The danger arises not only when there is an assumption on the religious side that membership of the community (belonging to the umma or the Church or whatever) is the only significant category, so that participation in other kinds of socio-political arrangement is a kind of betrayal. It also occurs when secular government assumes a monopoly in terms of defining public and political identity.

Abp. Rowan's overarching concern in this lecture is how traditional religious identity and morality might be accommodated in the face of a post-Enlightenment secular legal system that often regards religious loyalties as irrelevant or alien. He certainly realizes the difficulties and dangers that might be entailed by accommodating sharia, and his thoughtful discussion of these difficulties accounts for much of the lecture's length. His examples of legal accommodation of religion went beyond Islam, with references to Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism.

Before the lecture, he was interviewed by BBC Radio 4. In that interview he said, "It seems unavoidable and indeed is a matter of fact that certain provisions of sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law." The news site thisislondon twisted this one sentence, taken out of context, into the misleading headline, "Adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is 'unavoidable'," and trumped up the dire implications of sharia while burying his caveats several paragraphs into the article. (I have not included a link to the original article because it is no longer available. Thisislondon continually revises and updates its articles to keep them current – and perhaps to bury their tracks. Here is the BBC version.) This sensationalism elicited the predictable Pavlovian response from the populace, and within a day the archbishop's enemies and detractors on both the left and the right, in both the church and the government, were calling for his resignation. It is clear from their intemperate, uninformed responses that they had neither read the lecture nor heard the interview, and probably had not even read the on-line articles beneath the sensationalistic headlines. Ignorance, unfortunately, is not a bar against political and religious posturing.

Abp. Rowan's statement that sharia is already present in Britain is hard to dispute. This article from the Evening Standard tells of an instance where a group of Somali youths who stabbed another teenager was released by the police to face justice in a sharia law court. (Their families ended up having to compensate the victim.) The article also mentioned that sharia courts in Britain already hear thousands of divorce cases every year.

What is really going on here? Rowan Williams is being borked. All of his enemies see a weakness that they hope they can exploit if they are quick enough and loud enough. They assume – probably correctly – that like Robert Bork before him, Abp. Rowan's thoughts are too lengthy and too complex to interest the average citizen, and that he can therefore easily be mischaracterized in the media without penalty.

O LORD, watch over us and save us from this generation for ever. (Psalm 12:7)