Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism

Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism.  By Fr. James V. Schall, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. is a well-respected essayist and academic, specializing in Catholic issues and political philosophy.  His essays can be regularly found in Gilbert Magazine.  He has published dozens of books, and Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism is his latest work.

 

There are many false stereotypes about Catholicism, and one particularly prevalent one is that religious people are joyless, tending to ignore all of the early pleasures in the hopes of attaining heavenly pleasures after death.  Running parallel to these assertions are various modernist worldviews that contend that the world is a dark and meaningless place, and that there is no permanence to happiness.  Fr. Schall points out that Christianity is full of innocent joys and that there is no harm in enjoying the simple sources of happiness in life.

 

“The title of this book, Reasonable Pleasures, comes, in spirit at least, from Aristotle, though not without a hint of pleasures and reasons from more specific sources than he knew.  Aristotle, no doubt, did most to teach us that knowing itself is a unique pleasure, unlike any others.  If we do not experience it, he thought, we likely shall seek other pleasures, usually less noble, to substitute for it.  But mainly he guided us to the pleasures of thinking, which includes thinking what is true, the thinking about all that is.”

 

As evidenced by his longtime presence in Gilbert Magazine, Fr. Schall is a great admirer of G.K. Chesterton, who was known for filling his work with humor and good will.  Many critics of Chesterton argue that a man cannot be serious if he is funny.  Chesterton argues that often the only way to make a serious point is through humor.  Fr. Schall’s writing style reflects this attitude, for though many books on spiritual topics have reputations for being dense and intense, Reasonable Pleasures takes a light yet intelligent tone, explaining how living a virtuous and thoughtful life does not entail living in a state of pallor and misery.

 

“The subtitle of this book, The Strange Coherences of Catholicism, does not come from anybody in particular, but its overtones are Chestertonian.  Chesterton was the great mind who delighted in spelling out all the erroneous, vicious, confused, and silly views about Christianity and Catholicism that he came across in his time in the daily press or culture.  Not surprisingly, such odd views, when sorted out, reflected the things that were always wrong whenever or wherever they appeared.  He enjoyed this endeavor because he could see both why the view was proposed and why it was not complete or valid.  Humor was also found in the effort.  Though laughter may not be the final definition of happiness, surely it includes it.  We laugh when we see the point.  That too is what this book is about.

 

Humor arises because we are rational beings who can and do delight in the things that we know, in the things of the mind.  We are amused in the comparisons we make, either in speech or in reality, between what we expect and what is said or what happens.  The correction of mind by mind is one of the greatest of human enterprises.  We do not want, as Plato said, a lie in our souls about the things that are.  In things of the intellect too, a brother is helped by a brother.  Indeed, this correction is one of the great divine enterprises.  God, in revelation, undertook to do so Himself.

 

We live in an era of relativism and skepticism, I know.  But we need not accept them as if they were true.  We remain free to delight in the fact that the arguments for these and other “isms” never quite cohere, though we need to make the effort to see just why.  We are glad to escape the dismal world that follows in the wake of their supposed truth, a wake that Chesterton delighted in following.  Ideologies and other deviations from what is are seldom amusing, except when we compare them to the truth.”

 

Fr. Schall had personal reasons for writing Reasonable Pleasures.  Recently, Fr. Schall was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, and this book was written during his recovery period.  His illness helped him to appreciate life’s little joys more profoundly, and this was the driving force for writing the book, which is meant to teach readers how to live better.  Pain is inescapable, but pleasures can be avoided if one does not make an effort to find the simple joys, such as reading a good book, conversing with friends, or watching a sports game.  Certain actions– the “unreasonable” pleasures, are sins, but these are limited in number.  To paraphrase Chesterton, the Ten Commandments provide a limited number of “Thou shalt nots,” but the number of “Thou mayest” is infinite.  People need to use their own good judgment when they choose their actions.  Happiness, Fr. Schall stresses, does not come from doing whatever one wants, whenever one wants.

 

“Chesterton understood that such a realization was a strange experience.  He knew that truth is one in all its expressions.  Even error points to truth if we would but see it.  Whenever a strong case was made disproving this coherence, it turned out, on examination, that the case was at some point flawed and could be seen as such.  The argument of the heretics, or whatever kind, always has a point.  This is why they are worth studying.  Bur the same point can always be made in a more logical and clear way without the error.  To see this, we have minds.”

 

The exercise of free will can be one of the greatest pleasures of all, and to make intelligent choices is to act wisely in one’s own best interests.  The oft-cited gulf between “faith” and “reason” is a mere canard.  Fr. Schall stresses the “reason” in “reasonable pleasures,” for reason is the means by which we find the difference between right and wrong.  Catholicism, Fr. Schall argues, is not about merely feeling, it is an intellectual religion that requires the use of God-given mental gifts.

 

“Chesterton then adds something quite profound.  It is a theme that shall recur in my thoughts in this book.  It is that we human beings are more than pure minds, though we have minds.  We are beings plunged through our bodies into nature and history, into a world, into time.  To believe in Christianity is not primarily a conclusion from a syllogism, though Catholics who read Aristotle are very fond of syllogisms and rightly so.  Syllogisms are not to be neglected.  But Chesterton said that he is a Christian because of the “enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts.”  If the “secularist” blames Christians, he says that their evidence is “miscellaneous,” more like a scrapbook collection than an organized argument.  To this powerful objection, Chesterton simply agrees while noting that the secularist himself does the same thing.”

 

One of my favorite metaphors from Fr. Schall’s book is the comparison of the ordinary Christian to Charlie Brown from the Peanuts comic strip.  The term “loser” is, in common parlance, meant to refer to someone who is unsuccessful in attaining his objectives.  Fr. Schall observes that Charlie Brown is in most respects the consummate loser, often through no fault of his own.  Simultaneously, Charlie Brown is the ultimate everyman, because he endures public and private humiliations constantly and yet he still keeps going.  Most people dream of being unqualified winners, but the vast majority of people wind as losers to some extent.  In any national sports competition, dozens of teams start the season dreaming of victory, but only one of those many teams comes out the champion.

 

As Fr. Schall pointedly observes, the universe itself will eventually be a “loser,” since even the entire cosmos cannot last forever.  The entire material world is ephemeral.  Nonetheless, that does not mean that life is pointless– quite the opposite, in fact.  Time is a valuable commodity, and a good life can mean living well and virtuously, while embracing the ordinary joys that can be found in life.

 

For an interview with Fr. Schall about Reasonable Pleasures, see http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/131029.

 

 

–Chris Chan

The Catechism of Hockey

The Catechism of Hockey.  By Alyssa Bormes, ACS Books, 2013.

 

Metaphors are often a highly effective way of explaining complicated concepts.  Alyssa Bormes has hit upon a surprising but remarkable effective means of teaching Catholic doctrine: comparing the Catholic Church’s beliefs and culture to the game of hockey.  One might think that this could be a tongue-in-cheek, irreverent book.  It is not.  It is an entertaining book, and a delightfully readable book, and it is also one of the wisest and freshest religious teaching tools in years.

 

In his introduction to The Catechism of Hockey, Dale Ahlquist, the President of the American Chesterton Society, [NOTE: Since this review was first published, the ACS has changed its name to The Society of G.K. Chesterton] writes that:

 

“This is a right wing book.  Of course, it’s also a left wing book.  And a center book.  And don’t forget the two defensemen and the goalie.  The whole team is represented in these pages.  Even the referee.  And the commissioner.  You will think about them all in a new way, even while you think about them in the same way.

 

What you are holding in your hand is an amazing teaching tool, even though it probably will not help you become a better hockey player.  (If that is what you thought you were going to get from this book, well, someone just skated around you.  But read it anyway.  The game is not over.)”

 

Alyssa Bormes is an writer and teacher of Catholic issues.  She lives in the Twin Cities area, where hockey is a way of life.  She also works as Dale Ahlquist’s assistant.  According to an anecdote recounted in his introduction, Ahlquist was stunned by Bormes’s original idea, and encouraged her to turn her own personal take on sports and theology into a book.  It took several years for the project to come to fruition, but the results are magnificent.

 

The central conceit of The Catechism of Hockey is that all aspects of the game of hockey can be used to emphasize why Catholic beliefs, traditions, and practices make perfect sense.  Subjects such as the clergy, Catholic attitudes towards marriage and the family, sin, confession, and much, much more are compared to various aspects of the hockey-playing experience.  One might come to this book with the preconceived notion that it will stretch an already shaky metaphor far too thin, eventually belaboring a point or descending into ludicrousness.  Instead, every comparison is logical, reasonable, and sensible.  Chapters such as “The Team,” “The Rules,” “The Box,” “High Sticking and Slashing,” “The Uniform,” “The Stanley Cup,” and “The Great One” all work as perfect means of explaining while Catholic teachings and practices are necessary and sensible.

 

Bormes writes with an obvious love of both her faith and hockey as she explains the basics of her central metaphor and its relevance:

 

“The boy on the frozen pond with a stick, a puck, and a pair of skates is playing hockey.  Even when he has only twigs for a goal and a crushed soda can for a puck, he is still playing hockey.  This is hockey in its rawest form.  He embodies the very thing that is hockey– all of the history of hockey, all of its rules, its traditions, everything that hockey ever has been, is, and ever will be.  In essence, he symbolizes the whole faith of hockey.  This all-encompassing hockey-nesscould be called the deposit of faith of hockey.

 

Perhaps the best thing about hockey is that it is fun, and the sight of one skater on the ice is an invitation for another to join.  When the second skater joins the first on the ice, however, rules are needed.  Give any two children a puck, a ball, or a deck of cards– or a television remote control– and rules are needed.  With a ball, children will quickly make rules governing the number of bounces, the time allotted to hold the ball, boundaries, what constitutes the method of scoring, and a host of other rules.  It is the same with the deck of cards, the television remote, and with hockey.  Between two young skaters the deposit of faith of hockey remains the same: the rules protect the integrity of the game.  One may argue that rules are required even for one skater playing the game of hockey. The rules are implicit for hockey to be hockey, and not another sport.”

 

Though Bormes does not emphasize this point, much of today’s theology isn’t comparable to a sport with firm, sensible rules.  Instead, it’s Calvinball, the sport named after one of the titular characters in Bill Watterson’s magnificent comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, where the “rules” of the game are made up as the players go along, and the only permanent rule is that the game can never be played the same way twice.  Though “organized” religion gets a lot of bad press, Bormes argues that disorganized religion poses the real danger to the faithful.

 

“Just as it is logical to have the commissioner and governing body in hockey, and logical that they would protect and interpret the deposit of faith in hockey, so it is logical that the Magisterium of the Church would protect and interpret the Catholic Faith.  But the Church is not usually thought of in this way.  But what could be more important than protecting the Sacred Deposit?  Not only has this Sacred Deposit been protected, but also it is there waiting to be taught, learned studied, and practiced.  By protecting the Deposit, the Church rightly looks after the needs of Her members, providing for them not just in this life, but preparing them for eternal life as well.”

 

It is sad but true that many people take sports more seriously than they do religion.  The logic behind certain rules, practices, and sacrifices certain athletes make are largely unquestioned, whereas the demands and obligations Catholicism requires from believers are often dismissed as excessive, unnecessary, and ridiculous.  Bormes argues that the rules are for the good of each individual and the entire church as well.

 

“In hockey, just as in life, there is an analogous body; what is good is good for the body, and what is evil is bad for the body.  What is this body in hockey?  The team...

 

Because the team is the body, however, the skater’s “evil” actions affect them negatively.  A skater who neglects drills, incurs penalties, or who skates apathetically will negatively affect the team.  One might even argue that an apathetic or lukewarm skater is one of the worst things for the other skaters…

 

No matter the examples, they all lead to one truth: there is no private sin in hockey.  A skater’s individual good action is collectively good for the body, the team.  A skater’s individual evil action is collectively evil for the body, the team…

 

There is no private sin in hockey and there is no private sin in life.  The Mystical Body is bound spiritually.  It is more tightly bound than a hockey team and more tightly bound than the line to view the body of the Holy Father.  Individual good is good for the Church; as is evil, evil for the Church.  Every action affects the Church.  The members of the Church are to do good and avoid evil, not just for their own sakes, but also for that of the entire Mystical Body.”

 

The Catechism of Hockey is so clever and insightful that it seems possible that it could spawn a series of spin-off for individuals who are interested in other sports– football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and so forth.  This is in no way meant to deprecate the efficacy of the hockey metaphor, but only to explain that this religious education tool could conceivably spawn a franchise.

 

Even people who know next to nothing about hockey and even less about Catholicism will find much to enjoy in this short but surprisingly profound book.  

 

For more information on Alyssa Bormes, please see http://alyssabormes.com/.

 

For more information on the Society of G.K. Chesterton, please see http://www.chesterton.org/.

 

 

–Chris Chan

By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition

By What Authority?  An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition.  By Mark Shea, Ignatius Press revised and updated edition, 2013.

 

Mark Shea is a Catholic writer who is particularly prominent in that community of Christian apologetics known as St. Blog’s.  Four of Mark Shea’s books have been previously reviewed here: Mary, Mother of the Son, Volumes I, II, and III (March, April, and May 2011), and The Heart of Catholic Prayer (November 2012).  Shea’s blog, Catholic and Enjoying It! can be found at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/.  Shea is as comfortable discussing matters of theology and Church history as he is with editorializing on current events and critiquing popular culture.  On Catholic and Enjoying It!, one is likely to find a post on the latest news about Pope Francis, followed by a comment about an underreported scandal in the U.S. government, followed by a clip from The Star Wars Holiday Special.   In addition to writing an lecturing, Shea has also worked as an actor for the EWTN series on G.K. Chesterton The Apostle of Common Sense, and has starred as Chesterton’s famous protagonist in the recent film adaptation of Manalive.

 

By What Authority? is Shea’s spiritual autobiography.  There are many roads to Rome, and Shea’s path begins with a decided absence of Christian faith in his youth.  He eventually became a Evangelical Christian at age twenty, and eventually learned that there were large gaps in his knowledge about Christian history.  The more he learned, the more he came to believe in the Catholic Church.  By What Authority? explains how he became the believer he is today.

 

“This is a book about a change of heart and mind.  Specifically, it is a book about how an Evangelical who believed the Holy Scriptures to be the sole source of the Christian revelation came to discover and embrace the ancient Catholic teaching that Sacred Tradition is a source of revelation too.  It is written for those Catholics who wish to find a way to speak of the Faith to their Evangelical brothers and sisters that is not alienating but intelligible.  It is written for Catholics who wish to understand more clearly the very real impediments to faith an Evangelical often encounters when he thinks of the Catholic Faith.  Further, it is written for the Evangelical who wishes to confront that Faith and, in particular, its claim that the gospel is not fully expressed apart from Sacred Tradition.  And it is written for those, both Catholic and Evangelical, who seek to know how to speak to one another of their faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and come to a closer unity and love in the Holy Spirit, as our Lord commands us.”

 

Shea has a very confident and amiable prose style.  Like in his blog, Shea’s prose work blends cutting-edge scholarship with pop culture, creating a warm and approachable tone creating exactly the kind of atmosphere that someone who is interested in learning more about the Catholic faith would want to here.  Shea’s voice is erudite yet casual, and his book comes across more like a one-sided conversation with a warm-hearted friend than as a didactic lecture by a holier-than-thou figure.  

 

When explaining the reasons for writing his book, Shea writes:

 

“First, this book is an attempt to chart the course of a long journey that occurred in my soul.  To do this, I had two options.  I could tell the story in the chronological order of events, hoping that the reader would be able to make sense of the sprawling mess of intuitive leaps, backtracking, sudden storms of doubt, blank confusion, false leads, tedious hours of study, lucky breaks, prayer, and happenstance conversations that went into the turbulent process of thinking this issue through.  The problem with this approach is that it leaves the reader as confused in reading about my journey as I was in living it…

 

The second reason it is important to know where the author has been is because our culture is thoroughly dominated by the notion that “change” equals “repudiation of the past.”  Thus, not only is everyone from movie stars to political figures forever going through “phases,” but even in the Church we find people who assume that to change means to reject the past…

 

Don’t misunderstand.  I believe in the biblical demand for repentance and a decisive turning away from evil.  But this is not what we are talking about here.  Rather, we are talking about a typically modern mind-set that tends to identify “previous” with “bad, disproved, ridiculous, and rejected.”  It is this mind-set that I wish, paradoxically enough, to reject at the outset.  I emphatically do not think it necessary or desirable to repudiate my Evangelical roots in order to embrace Sacred Tradition.  Indeed, the Tradition I have come to regard as revelatory positively insists that God’s grace builds on, rather than repudiates, the good things in God’s good world– including the great good thing called Evangelicalism.”

 

It is important to realize that this is not a book that bashes Evangelical Christians.  On the contrary, Shea has and continues to have the greatest respect for those members of the Christian brethren, even though he now believes that relying solely on the Bible as a source of divine authority is an incomplete means of understanding one’s faith.  This book tells the story of how Shea learned the importance of Sacred Tradition, and realized that what he once thought were the foolish and utterly unnecessary trappings of the Catholic Church turned out to be the foundations of true understanding of Christianity.

 

“So before we talk about why I came to believe in the truth of Sacred Tradition, I believe it essential to count the core Evangelical growth rings on the tree of my Christian life and praise God for the good wood he gave me in my years as a Protestant.  Indeed, if what follows is to make sense, it can do so only in light of what God gave me through the first Christian community to which Christ called me after a life of fuzzy agnosticism.  That community was Evangelical Christianity.  It was largely through Evangelicalism that I became a believer in Jesus Christ at the age of twenty.  Likewise, it was largely through Evangelicalism that the Holy Spirit laid all the groundwork for me to see and embrace Sacred Tradition as revelation.” 

 

The book has a new conclusion, providing short glimpses into Shea’s life as an apologetic in the seventeen years since the book’s original publication.  A considerable portion of the conclusion is devoted to Shea’s attempts to counteract the misinformation campaign about the history of Christianity found in the novel The Da Vinci Code and the movie based upon the book.  Shea describes an event where a panel of Christians attempted to refute the false assertions and outright lies found in Brown’s work.  Many of the Evangelicals on the panel were at a loss to deal with the thorough pseudohistory found in the narrative, but Shea found that his extensive knowledge of the true history of the Church proved to be extraordinarily helpful in explaining that the alleged revelations that could destroy the Church were nothing more fictions divorced from historical reality.

 

There are twin emotions that tend to run inside Shea’s work: thankful joy and righteous anger.  There is much of the former and little of the latter in By What Authority?  It is a book about a man who has found both happiness and truth, and seeks to share in his good fortune by writing a book and sharing it with other people to help them grow in their faith and knowledge.  Knowledge is power, and it seems that knowledge about the history and traditions of Christianity is a kind of power that does not corrupt, but instead does exactly the opposite.

 

 

–Chris Chan

The Romance of Religion: Fighting for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty

The Romance of Religion: Fighting for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.  By Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Thomas Nelson, 2014.

 

Dwight Longenecker is an increasingly prominent figure in Catholic apologetics.  He is a former Protestant minister with a family, but he has become a Catholic priest.  His unconventional backstory can been found in my February 2011 review of his book More Christianity (http://catholicbookreviewsmonthly.com./archivedReviews.aspx).  Fr. Longenecker’s blog, Standing on my Head (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/), covers numerous religious subjects, and as its title indicates, Fr. Longenecker has a special interest in helping people view Christianity from a different perspective.  One of the reasons why many people are not attracted to Christianity is because it seems so stodgy to them.  There is nothing attractive in something perceived as pallid, and Fr. Longenecker’s goal in this book is to change how people view Christianity.  

 

In his introduction, Fr. Longenecker writes:

 

“Although I am a Catholic priest, this book is not an attempt to convert my readers to Catholicism.  Instead, this book is a call for ordinary people to examine the radical claims of the table-turning teacher from Galilee.  It is a call for others to get up out of their fishing boats and to follow the Master.  It is an argument for a life that has meaning and purpose– a life of faith that is a glorious adventure or it is nothing at all.” (xviii).

 

Before I move on to the many wonderful virtues of this book, I need to get one negative comment out of the way.  There is one stylistic aspect of the book that I found rather annoying.  Fr. Longenecker has a lot of wonderful lines in this book.  There are dozens of brilliant, pithy, eminently quotable lines in The Romance of Religion.  Amateur apologetics, debaters, and evangelists would be well-advised to take note of these great quotes.  Unfortunately, the book makes sure that the reader doesn’t miss these quotes.  On approximately forty percent of the book’s pages, a particularly nice line is given special attention by being reprinted shortly after (or occasionally before) its initial appearance, being emphasized in bold italics in twice its original size.  It seems as if the book wants to wallop the reader over the head with the best lines.  Indeed, without these emphases, the book would probably be about twenty pages shorter.  It would be a shame if Longenecker’s wonderful quotes were overlooked, but the frequent forced emphasis produces a comparable effect– the quotes become lost in all the highlighting.  If a handful of the best lines were singled out here and there, or if a couple of great lines were printed at the start of each chapter, that would help to give the lines the proper attention, but with the over-quoting, the book seems rather like one of those wretched library books that has been heavily underlined by some thoughtless previous reader.

 

Here are a handful of Fr. Longenecker’s choicest lines:

 

•“Wherever I turned religion had become not real but respectable.” (xvii).

•“We need to discover once again that we have something to live for, for it is only when we have something to die for that we have something to live for.” (5).

•“Despair is the compliment the cynic pays to the romantic idealist.” (12).

•“Whether we are choosing a spouse or a religion or a philosophy to guide us, we’ve got to make a choice.  It has to be all or nothing.  A half and half romance won’t do.” (16).

•“In ancient times heroic stories were told by wealthy and powerful wizards who lived on a holy mountain or in a sacred grove.  Today heroic stories are told by wealthy and powerful wizards who live not in a holy wood, but in Hollywood.” (28).

•“Life itself is a mysterious energy. And there is good reason to understand it as something that is bigger and better than the simple biological functions of any living being.” (76).

•“Like Pontius Pilate, we sit before this mysterious man from Nazareth, and we must try to figure out who on earth he is.” (153).

 

Fr. Longenecker frequently cites some of his personal favorite literary references.  C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narniaare clearly sources of great fondness for him, and in particular, the character of Reepicheep, the swashbuckling mouse, is referenced many times.  The idea of a mouse with the heart of a lion, who is ready, willing, and able to do battle with foes that are far larger than he is, is a delightfully romantic image.  Vast reserves of courage and virtue can be found in the smallest of bodies.  Reepicheep is used as a model for Fr. Longenecker’s ideal of the Christian on a quest, someone willing to defend his faith against a hostile and dismissive society.  He writes:

 

“The wise man, therefore, does not ignore death.  He prepares for it, and the best way to prepare for that journey into the dark is to go on that journey every day.  This is what the religious romantic sets out to do.  Through the practice of his religion he sets out on the quest.  He faces the dark.  He meets with monsters.  He tilts with windmills, draws his sword, engages in the battle, fights for the fair maiden, and defends the truth.  How religion helps him to do this is the subject of the rest of this book.” (115).

 

Throughout the book, Fr. Longenecker debates an anonymous fictional typical cynic– a strawman character, to be sure, but one that embodies all of the sneers and jeers of the modern atheists who believe that they are far wiser and more sensible than all of those silly deluded believers.  A common theme amongst such people is that Christianity is based upon myths.  Fr. Longenecker’s response is that Christianity may contain elements of myths, but in Christianity’s case they are myths that have become true.  Given Fr. Longenecker’s fondness for Tolkien (his upcoming autobiography is titled There and Back Again), it is not surprising that Tolkien’s specific theories on the role of religion and the True Myth are influential to this book.  At one point, Fr. Longenecker writes,

 

“The materialist critics of religion sneer, “I hear all this talk of heroes and quests, but your castles are nothing but castles in the air.  It is nothing but a dream of the big granddaddy in the sky who gives you what you want if you’re good little boys and girls!  It is all child’s play.  It is fairy tale foolishness!  Why don’t you people get real?”  This not only shows how little the materialist understands religion; it also shows how little he understands fairy tales, how little he understands children, and how little he understands reality.” (33).

 

The Romance of Religion is a fresh and invigorating look at religious belief.  While Longenecker does belittle the roles that piety and intellectualism play in religious life, he makes a brilliant point in observing that if people are to thrive in their faith, they need to stop looking at religion as a duty that makes demands on them or as a casual social convention.  G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”  That epigram could serve as a perfect summation of the philosophy behind Fr. Longenecker’s book.

 

The book ends on the following hopeful note:

 

“This Love and this Light will make this world seem shallow, flat, tasteless, and bland.  It will be to this world what a full Technicolor 3-D movie is to a black-and-white still photograph– and more.  This Love and this Light will be utter, complete, and simple fulfillment of all things.  It will be Reality at last.  The adventure will be over.  As we ride into the West– as we sail over the sea and into the sunset– we will know that sweet Reality which is the destination, the end, and the purpose of the Romance of Religion.” (216).

 

–Chris Chan

Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love.  By Joseph Pearce, Saint Benedict Press, 2013.

 

Joseph Pearce has written acclaimed literary biographies of G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oscar Wilde, Roy Campbell, and William Shakespeare, but now he as written a book about the life of a man that only he could have written– his own memoir.  Joseph Pearce as a teenager and twenty-something was an incredibly different man from the thoughtful, religious man who would study the some of the most important Christian literary figures of the twentieth century.  As a youth, Joseph Pearce was involved in radical white supremacist politics, and he would not move away from hate groups until after he fell under the influence of reading G.K. Chesterton in jail while serving a prison sentence for inciting racial hatred.  Pearce’s memoir opens with stark and detailed prose describing his mental and physical state during his time in jail, as well as his personal and spiritual transformation. 

 

“I sat in a cell in London’s Wormwood Scrubs prison on the second day of a twelve month prison sentence…

 

In those days I had been an idealistic fanatic, and I considered myself a political prisoner of an anti-British tyrannical state… I saw myself as a political soldier and a political prisoner who needed to emerge from jail in better shape physically and mentally for the renewal of the struggle…  I was at war with Britain’s multi-racial society, working tirelessly to bring it to its knees through the incitement of a race war from which the National Front would emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.  Such was the strategy which had animated my actions and which had led to my imprisonment…

 

As I looked despondently at the unmentionable abyss of time that the following twelve months represented, it was as though I were descending into a tunnel from which the light at the end was not yet visible.  I did not know it but I was entering the dark night of the soul of which St. John of the Cross speaks…

 

The previous day, the first full day of my sentence, had been the feast of St. Lucy, patroness of the blind.  It was a singularly appropriate date for one so blinded by bigotry to begin his dark night of imprisonment and his journey towards the light of liberation that it would signify.  I was indeed a blind man, oblivious of the saints’ days on which the miracle of conversion was being wrought, ignorant of the intercession of the saints of whose presence I was unaware, and unable to see the hand of Providence in these coincidences.  I had no light in my inner darkness except for the desire for a light I could not see.”

 

Anyone who is familiar with Pearce’s work is bound to ask, “Who is this man?  I don’t recognize him.  The man described here is nothing like the author I know from his biographies.”  There are few character arcs more complete, more thoroughly transformative, than Pearce’s personal journey.  Throughout the book, the scholarly, thoughtful Pearce interposes himself into the narrative, reflecting on how distasteful he finds his old opinions, how radical politics wrecked people’s lives, and the various regrets he has about the way he lived his life before his conversion.  Here and there, the contemporary Pearce reflects upon how certain people’s lives went in directions that he would never have expected, or how his becoming a better man was not due to a conscious effort on his own part to purge himself of his prejudices, but instead was caused by the intervention of the Holy Spirit.  Over the course of the book, Pearce’s anger and bigotry fall away, and it’s clear that he wasn’t trying to be converted, but it happened through his reading and re-examining his life.

 

Pearce’s entrance into racial politics seem to have been influenced in part by his father’s opinions, though it seems that it would be unjust to denounce his father as a hate-filled bigot, though it appears to be fair to make a comparison to Archie Bunker.  Pearce speaks warmly and affectionately of his father, a man who frequently expressed bias against certain groups of people, yet who was occasionally close friends with individuals who were members of those groups.  

 

“My father, Albert Arthur Pearce, had his own childhood rudely interrupted by the eruption of the Second World War… he left school at fourteen, having never really excelled as a student, and became a carpenter… he used to quip somewhat mischievously that there was only ever one good carpenter and that He had been crucified for His labors.

 

He grew up with all the pride and prejudice of a child of the British Empire, devoted to the pomp and circumstance of British imperial tradition, and was embittered by witnessing its dissolution and decay during his own lifetime.  His own father had been born during the reign of Queen Victoria, when the Empire was at its zenith and when it was said quite correctly that the sun never set upon it.  The emasculation of Britain in the twentieth century was a bitter pill for my father to swallow.  He held on to the romantic vision of the Empire long after it had ceased to exist in reality.  He proclaimed with bombastic bravura that there were only three types of people in the world: Englishmen, those who would like to be Englishmen, and those who didn’t know any better.  I always felt a little uncomfortable at the arrogance of such a statement but I embraced the belief that the British or the English (the words were always used interchangeably and synonymously) were somehow a chosen people, a people set apart.  We were somehow better than everyone else.”

 

The portrait of postwar, postcolonial England is not a particularly flattering one.  The religious faith of Anglicans is depicted as generally a nominal one, and his family’s religious practices were practically non-existent.  Christmas was a time for presents and Easter was for chocolate eggs, and about the only times when they went inside a church was for weddings or funerals.  Pearce’s family was not antireligious, or even particularly disbelieving, just disinterested in religious services.  He writes:

 

“Religious indifference, with its inherent tendency towards agnosticism, is, however, not synonymous with an antagonism towards religion.  Whereas atheists are antagonistic towards religion because they are anything but indifferent towards it, my parents saw Christianity as being good and benign, even if it shouldn’t be taken too seriously.  As for atheism, I’m sure that my parents would have seen it as mean-spirited, the creed of killjoy Scrooges who refused the brotherhood of man implicit in the spirit of Christmas.”

 

Today, there are numerous forces in the British government, arts and culture, education, and society that would like to see all forms of religion purged from the public sphere, and even the private sphere.  Pearce’s biographies stand as cogent arguments as to the relevance of religion to literature, art, and society.  Race With the Devil is filled with references to the vestiges of a religious culture, such as a forest named after the Virgin Mary, where neither Pearce nor any of his friends knew the true background of how the forest got its name.  For many of Pearce’s friends, racial warfare took the place of religious faith. Pearce’s book is not just a tale of his own religious journey, it is also a depiction of the spiritual state of England.

 

“Flannery O’Connor wrote of the American South that it was “hardly Christ-centered” but that it was “certainly Christ haunted.”  It would be equally true to describe England as Christ-haunted, though in England’s case it would be truer to say that the ghost of Christ is considered an unwelcome guest, a shade or shadow of the past who refuses to go away.  Thus it was that the faded figure of Christ overshadowed my own childhood, although, as with so much else, I did not know it at the time.  The shadow of His presence and the presence of His Church was everywhere, though in a form that had been grotesquely distorted by the defamation and deformation that was the consequence of England’s break from Rome.  It might, in fact, be truer to say that Christ’s faded presence was itself overshadowed by the fading presence of the English Reformation and the anti-papist propaganda that it spawned.  This, at least, is the impression that emerges as I survey the cultural landscape of my childhood, eyeing it with the wisdom of hindsight across the abyss of years that separate me from it.”

 

This is a painfully revealing book.  Pearce does not shy away from depicting his own flaws, ranging from his involvement in despicable political organizations to a failed relationship.  While he is very open about his own issues and development, he is quite right to be reticent about protecting the privacy of his other family members– this is not really an autobiography, but rather a memoir centered around his spiritual transformation.  The redemptive power of God’s grace is at the center of this book, and it can serve as helpful reading for individuals who are trying to be better people, as well as for fans of Pearce’s who may shocked and inspired by how he became the man he is today.

 

 

–Chris Chan

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization

How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization.  By Mary Eberstadt, Templeton Press, 2013.

 

When studying Western society and culture over the past couple of centuries, nearly all researchers, commentators, and observers have noticed that religious observance has declined in Europe.  Religious people have watched these developments with trepidation and sadness, while some secular people have glorified in the de-churching of the West. Secularization is indeed a trend, but the extent and continuation of this trend may be not be as certain as some people believe it to be.

 

While most researchers believe that secularization is widely occurring, they disagree widely as to why this process has happened so suddenly, so extensively across the West.  In How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes extensively on society and religion.  Due to her topics of interest, the problem of secularization is very important to her.  In the introduction to How the West Really Lost God, Eberstadt writes that:

 

“Most books have their origin in some kind of enduring mental distraction that has grown so large and ungainly in the author’s mind that only hammering it out at book length will fully exorcise the thing.  The volume you are reading on your screen right now or holding in your hands is no exception.  The particular puzzle that started this effort happens to be– at least to some people– one of the most interesting questions in all the modern world.  It is this: How and why has Christianity really come to decline in important parts of the West? ”(p. 3).

 

Certainly many people have come up with reasons why the West became less religious.  Marx and Engles, for example, argued that secularization was a natural and irrevocable process in civilization.  Other prominent figures have argued that the World Wars crushed the spirituality of Europe, that a more comfortable standard of living sapped people’s interest in a hereafter, or that modernization, changing culture, scientific advances, and other forces affected the religious beliefs of a continent.

 

Eberstadt treats all of these factors in a way similar to the fable of the six blindfolded men and the elephant, where each man touched a different part of the elephant and came to a different conclusion about what the animal looked like.  One man touched the elephant’s ear and thought the creature looked like a fan, another the leg and believed an elephant looked like a tree trunk, another the trunk and claimed an elephant was snakelike, and so on.  Eberstadt believes that all of the commonly cited theories for secularization have some truth to them, but she argues that all of these factors need to be taken as a whole, and there is another crucial factor that has long been overlooked.

 

“It is the contention of this book that just about everyone working on this great puzzle has come up with some piece of the truth– and yet that one particular piece needed to hold the others together still has gone missing.  Urbanization, industrialization, belief and disbelief, technology, shrinking population: yes, yes, and yes to all those factors statistically and otherwise correlated with secularization.  Yet, even taking them all into account, the picture remains incomplete…  It is as if the modern mind has lined up all the different pieces on the collective table, only to press them together in a way that looks whole from a distance but still leaves something critical out.

 

This book is an attempt to supply that missing piece.  It moves the human family from the periphery to the center of this debate over how and why Christianity exercises less influence over Western minds and hearts today than it did in the past…

 

Its argument, in brief, is that the Western record suggests that family decline is not merely a consequence of religious decline, as conventional thinking has understood that relationship.  It also is plausible– and I will argue, appears to be true– that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline.  And if this way of augmenting the conventional explanation for the collapse of Christian faith in Europe is correct, then certain things, including some radical things, follow from it, as we shall see.” (pp. 5–6).

 

The idea that faith and the family are linked is an intriguing one, and Eberstadt makes an excellent case for why the two should be inextricably linked.  Family life is integral to society.   The more strong and vibrant the family is in a culture, Eberstadt argues, the stronger and more vibrant religion tends to be in society.  Where the traditional family is shattered, so is the religious structure.  Divorce, broken or never-together families, and children growing up without siblings all affect the strength of the family in society.  Secularization is not a natural and inevitable progression of civilization’s development, as many atheists insist, but instead is connected to the basic unit of society: the family.  As Eberstadt argues, more family equals more God.  Eberstadt expands upon her theories, pointing out that her family thesis changes how we may view the commonly-observed “falling-away of religious youth” phase, where teens raised in religious homes stop practicing their faith during college, and often do not resume until they get married and have children of their own.  Eberstadt suggests that the separation from their families may be a pivotal factor in the cessation of religious observance.

 

“Like the collapse of Christianity in many of the same places, the collapse of the natural family has reshaped the known world of just about every man, woman, and child alive in the Western world today.  For years now, secular sociologists have debated the meaning of the changes that have diminished the hold that the natural family once had over an individual’s life.  Divorce, single parenthood, widespread use of contraception, legal abortion, the sharp drop in the Western birthrate: these are just some of the prodigious transformations in family structure on which experts train their sights.  And while scholars as well as nonscholars take sides on the question of whether these are good things or bad things for society, no one seriously suggests that radical family change hasn’t happened across the Western world.  Obviously, it has.”  (p. 11).

 

Throughout her analysis, Eberstadt addresses numerous aspects of the process of secularization, and notes that many people’s assumptions are wrong.  One particularly important point that Eberstadt addresses is the falsity of the ubiquity of Christianity across Europe for approximately a millennia and a half.  It is true that at certain points in the Middle Ages that the vast majority of Europeans were nominally Christian, but it is impossible to tell just how devout the average person was.  There is a very strong possibility that at various points over the centuries, significant percentages of the population were religious in name only.  Though Eberstadt does not refer directly to this, for much of America’s early history, many settlers had limited access to organized religion.  Secularization, therefore, ought not to be viewed as a sudden process that started relatively recently in the wake of over a millennium and half of unquestioning, blind, religious faith.  Religion, in Eberstadt’s view, has frequently been on the decline, but it has also made numerous resurgences, and there is nothing to prove that Christianity will not make a comeback in the West.  In order to explain why religious influence ebbs and flows, it is important to understand the causes of the process.  There is, however, a lot of controversy as to why these cultural shifts happen, and Eberstadt makes a compelling case as she addresses and critiques the potential causes of secularization.

 

Once the “unquestioned religious homogeny” viewpoint is discounted and the perspective of shifting bull and bear markets for religious practice is adopted, it stands to reason that the current trends of secularization may not be permanent.  Indeed, Eberstadt produces numerous examples to indicate that in some cases, the state of Christianity in Europe is getting stronger, even as many powerful public figures are increasingly, violently antireligious.  Additionally, the increased Muslim population in Europe is affecting approaches towards religion from numerous perspectives.  The future of religion in the West is uncertain, but if history is any guide, there may be many surprises as to what might happen.  If Eberstadt is correct in her analysis, in order to revitalize religion, believers will have to revitalize the family.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint.  By Roberto Italo Zanini, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Roberto Italo Zanini’s book Bakhita: From Slave to Saint is a biography of Saint Josephine Margaret Bakhita, (ca. 1869–1947).  St. Bakhita is not one of the best-known saints from the twentieth century, but Zanini’s work will hopefully contribute to making more people aware of her heartbreaking and inspiring life story.  After a happy childhood in northeastern Africa, St. Bakhita was kidnapped when she was very young and sold into slavery.  After suffering unimaginable torments, she was rescued from a life of forced servitude and torture, and eventually came to Europe, where she converted to Christianity and entered religious life, where her simple yet joyous existence and her unshakeable faith served as inspirations to many people.

 

Zanini opens his book with a brief overview of St. Bakhita’s life:

 

“Bakhita, the first saint from Sudan, was an African woman who was beaten and tortured as the slave of a powerful Arab merchant and of a Turkish general.  Ransomed in Khartoum at the end of the nineteenth century by the Italian vice-consul and brought to Venice, she worked as the family nursemaid and was baptized.  She joined the Canossian Daughters of Charity founded by Saint Magdalene of Canossa and became a saint, living for fifty years in the convent on Via Fusinato in the town of Schio, in the Italian province of Vicenza.

 

Kidnapped as a child by slave traders, Bakhita was bought and sold five times over, as are many children in Africa and across the globe even to this day.  Of her family Bakhita remembered nothing.  She did not remember the name her father and mother gave her.  She remembered only the Arab nickname the slave traders gave her as a sort of backhanded compliment: Bakhita, that is, “Lucky.””

 

There are many paths to sainthood, but Bakhita’s was particularly painful, though the traumas she endured do not appear to have done any sort of harm to her spirit and faith.  Indeed, despite enduring a grave injustice and a horrible extended abuse, Bakhita was indeed lucky, far luckier than many of the other people who are victims of the modern slave trade.  Many people think that slavery died out by the end of the American Civil War, but though slavery has been made illegal throughout the West, slavery continues to exist in many parts of Africa and Asia, and different forms of slavery particularly in fields such as the forced sex trade, occur all over the world, even in the U.S.  The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution drove human trafficking underground, but untold numbers of people, especially children like Bakhita, continue to suffer.

 

Bakhita left numerous letters and writings about her life and spiritual experiences.  They are told in spare, true language and even though her prose is unadorned, her words have tremendous power.  In one particularly beautiful scene, she describes the emotions she felt when she touched a little silver crucifix for the first time.  Bakhita writes:

 

“As he gave me the crucifix he kissed it with devotion, then explained that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had died for me.  I did not know what a crucifix was, but I was moved by a mysterious power to keep it hidden, out of fear that the lady would take it away.  I had never hidden anything before, because I had never been attached to anything.  I remember that I looked at it in secret and felt something inside that I could not explain.”

 

A striking stylistic choice made by Zanini is to present Bakhita’s trials and tribulations simply and without anger, indignation, or ornamentation.  The horrible conditions she endured are described without embellishment or editorializing.  Much of Bakhita’s life as a slave is too awful to reproduce here, but one particularly cringe-inducing scene, where Bakhita and some of her fellow captives were forcibly tattooed, is described in stark and gripping prose, told simply but with unmistakable power.

 

After escaping slavery, Bakhita eventually entered a convent, where she spent the rest of her life living quietly and inspiring people with her faith and her warm and engaging personality.  Zanini describes the endearing effect that she had on those around her, writing that:

 

“Bakhita is a friend, someone with whom you can share your disappointments and failures, someone you can ask for advice.  Why?  Because a woman who has survived the oppression of slavery does not set herself apart from anybody.  Because listening to the whispers of suffering mankind continues to be the role most consonant with a woman who was the portress of the Canossian house in the town of Schio, Italy, who for years counseled and helped mothers worried about their children, who took countless little orphans by the hand, who aided fathers of families in finding work, who helped shelter soldiers in the convent, which was transformed into a hospital during the First World War.  She, the “Little Brown Mother” who spoke the dialect of the people of the Veneto region in northern Italy, is ever close to those who might feel a little inadequate or tongue-tied speaking to the saints.”

 

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint is a fast and easy read, and this book can do a great deal to spread her story around the world.  Bakhita is presented without a single character flaw, but in Zanini’s presentation, Bakhita is not the kind of perfect alabaster saint that one can admire but never live up to in life.  Instead, Bakhita comes across as a source of warmth, kindness, and sweetness that someone can easily want as a friend or mentor.  

 

Faithful people around the world are being touched by her life.  Zanini observes that:

 

“Devotion to Bakhita has spread in an astonishing way in India, Brazil, and the United States (especially among African Americans), to name but a few places.  Today Bakhita “sails” on the Internet, where many websites dedicated to her have sprung up.  The black nun from the Italian province of Venesia hears prayers in many different languages, for people are not ashamed to open their hearts to someone who, as a slave, once stood on the lowest rung of the social ladder, beyond the pale of any caste system of hierarchy.”

 

A particularly touching scene comes at the beginning of the book, as the simple room where Bakhita spent most of her life as a nun is described, as are the emotions Zanini felt when entering her small bedroom.  By the end of her life, Bakhita’s only possessions were a crucifix and a rosary.  She had given away most of her books as her eyesight failed, and at the end of her life, she met death with gentle acceptance and joy at the prospect of coming closer to God. 

 

Bakhita’s later decades were filled with quiet, peace, and prayer, and it seems like her traumatic years as a slave may have left innumerable scars, but good can come out of evil, and Bakhita’s story may serve as a comfort and a rebuke to many people.  The tribulations of Bakhita’s youth make most people’s daily problems seem downright paltry and ridiculous in comparison, and the way that she overcame her horrid early years and spent the rest of her life with strength and faith is truly inspirational.

 

 

For more information on organizations that seek to expose and eliminate human trafficking and to help the victims of modern-day slavery, an extensive but not exclusive list of the many groups addressing these atrocities can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_opposing_human_trafficking.

 

–Chris Chan