Let's Not be Beastly to the Protestants

The next leader of the free world thinks he knows the secret:

 “Give me a country in 1600 that had a Protestant led contest for ... power and I will show you a country that is rich today,”

My guess he is probably thinking of England, if "Anglican"is "Protestant," and if you count "England" as "rich," and if you blind your eyes to the extent that England has fallen from the preeminence it enjoyed in the Land-of-Hope-and-Glory days of yore.  You might also want to finesse over the role played by he 200-plus years the English spent hoovering up the wealth of the antipodes in the creation of perhaps the most extensive empires in the history of humankind

But I wouldn't want to be quick to blame the culture of loot and pillage on Protestantism alone.  The Vikings had their moment; the plains still thunder with the hoofbeats of the Mongol horde.  Not to mention the other great Jewish heresy.  Heck, it was the Assyrians who virtually invented the idea of empire hundreds of years before the Sage of Bethlehem ever touched the hem of his garment to the latchet of his shoe.    Grant that the professor is right when he says that Protestant influences had much to do with the shaping of the English character.  But don't be too hard on them, boys, they're not alone.  

From God's Mouth to Your Ear

Four hundred languages?   Then I suppose it is true to say that  the new Bible app revolutionizes Biblical scholarship.  But is it also true that it includes no Hebrew, no Septuagint, no Vulgate Latin?  That is, none of the root sources for so many of the others?  Apparently it does include a Greek New Testament, though.  And I gather Vulgate, etc., are available elsewhere.  See, e.g., link.

Still, it does intrigue me how casual Christians are about translation, and the use of translation.  Unlike, say, Jews, who still bat Hebrew into the little rascals' heads in the afternoon after regular school.  Or Muslims who read/recite it in the original, whether they understand it or not.  Idle thought: I have a friend who, as part of his study of Buddhism, is learning a bit of Pali (not Sanskrit, he says, too hard).  But how many Buddhists read the sacred texts in an original language?  Or Hindus?  Me, I have no idea.

[None of this first-hand knowledge with me.  I am tracking a study list where I lurk and I don't know (nor have I asked to find out) that they be would want to be quoted/outed.]

Thavis on the Vatican

I'm finishing up John Thavis' Vatican Diaries and I think I'll file it under "modified rapture."  Thavis is an accomplished story teller with years of Vatican-watching to draw on and he is able to show how much, here as perhaps everywhere else, grand policy is shaped by less-grand personality, the enthusiasms and aversions of ordinary people.  But he's also a beat reporter who will never burn a source even from his retirement perch in Minnesota, he's put together book which is unlikely to offend any but the most monstrous bitter-enders on any church issue.  Even those cast in a bad light will read in and cluck that he could have been a lot worse (well--possibly excepting the archbishop caught on a wire trying to make his moves on a young priest).  Indeed he largely gives the game away in the first chapter,--a wryly cheerful account of life in the press gaggle on a Papal outing--making the point, perhaps inadvertently, that the most seasoned reporter on the Vatican beat really doesn't get much more by way of inside dope than those of us half a world away at the business end of a TV connection.

One thing he does well is to bring together the fragments of narrative on a bunch of issues that the yokels hear about but don't follow closely day to day--stuff you probably know if you already if you are a faithful reader of Vatican-watcher's blog posts (I'm not--it really hadn't occurred to me that they exist until I read Thavis' book).

Another virtue is that it reminds you how much the Vatican is like the old joke that ends "from then on, it was a hell of a lot like Cincinnati."    Or perhaps Queens: people say the Vatican is like the Mafia and I think there is some truth there, but perhaps not in the sense ordinarily intended.  I don't think the Vatican has a regular modus vivendi of assassination (at least not lately;  cf here and here).  No: the real point is (I'm pretty sure I have written this before)--the real point is that the Mafia is an old,  sluggish, sclerotic behemoth, lurching from limited success to near failure.  So also the Vatican: the real wonder, sometimes, is that they find their way at all.

Which offers a framework for one topic on which Vithers is pretty good: his sketch of the troublesome outliers like the late Marcel Lefebvre, creator of the Order of Saint Pius X and perhaps the church's most visible dissident against Vatican II; or Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, father of illegitimate children  by at least two women, abusers of countless children, including his own.

Both these worthies are dead now.  But the real question is why they exercised such power for so long--how come nobody gave them the bum's rush long before they became a public embarrassment.

The answer--a moment's reflection ought to give you the hint--is that they were just way too good at what they did.  They created enthusiasm, they prompted vocations, they filled the pews and most of all, they raked in the money.  And even though the founders are dead, one has to assume that some of the old momentum persists.

And so the question has to be:  what happens now, with a new Pope bearing a whole new set of enthusiasms and, yes, new alliances.  I don't know, but I think I may sign up for Vithers' blog just to stay on the cusp.

Afterthought:  I wonder how many people, retiring from Rome, move to Minnesota?

The Quiet Ones

A faithful commentator doesn't know what to make of my last crack (i,.e., lifted from The Economist) about atheism.

Oh, I wouldn't read much into it; I think I just found it amusing.  But if the question is whether atheists make a nuisance of themselves: I'd have to say that some do (you've heard of this guy?).  But my guess is that there are actually quite a few who do not pester and harangue: some, perhaps, because they fear getting into fights that might cost them, others possibly because they simply don't think it is anybody's business--a subject they are no more eager to discuss than their bowel habits.

And while I'm on the subject, I suspect the same may be true of believers, Christian or otherwise.  Some share the good news in a mood of transcendent ecstasy; some like limpets to your screen door.  Like it or not, the phenomenon of religious feeling appears to be amazingly widespread, at least as pervasive as the taste for Monday night football, even ignoring any possible overlap.  I gather there are some who hold to the view that religion is an essentially social experience, and that you can't have a private religion any more than you can have a private language.  I doubt it. a I'd rather go to the other extreme and venture that the number of belief-patterns in the world is at least as numerous as the number of public sects--allowing that some people may well have more than one.  And among all these, the vast majority may be precisely those you do not notice.

Heh (Religion Dept.)

... religious strictures, many of which involve compiling lists of what is forbidden and dreaming up creatively horrendous punishments for those who fall short.

...

[de Waal] compares the “neo-atheists” to people standing outside a cinema, earnestly pointing out that Leonardo DiCaprio did not really go down with the Titanic—in other words, a crowd of crashing bores spoiling the fun by stating the obvious to people who know better than to take a film as gospel truth.

Link.

 

Habemus Argentinian! Must Credit Underbelly!

(Cough, cough) Underbelly March 9:

I Think I'll Take a Flutter on the Argentines 

 Link.  Although I admit, there is probably somewhere an Octopus who knew exactly which Argentine. 

Update:  And just as I feared: he's younger than I am.  I agree with UB's Wichita bureau that a decent PR operation would have strung this out for a week.  And that  now the vultures can go circle Queen Elizabeth.

Update II:  MSN assures us that the new Pope is "The son of an Italian immigrant and a doctrinal conservative..."  So, which parent was the immigrant and which the conservative? 

Update III:  I mock my own flippancy here but in truth I think I am onto something, which is my way of saying I think the Washington Post has it entirely wrong. 

Update IV:  He actually seems like quite a nice man, if the possible past complicity with the dictatorship can be factored into "nice man."  I do like my Popes to be riders of the subway.  But the more I read, the more I think the Goodfellas were willing to settle for  him because he has almost no Vatican experience, which means almost totally vulnerable to control and manipulation by the insiders.  My guess is he could live out his entire Papacy without ever getting the codes to the secret bank account.  

And Rounding the First Turn...

Intrade may be gone but there's still plenty of room for punter action on the Papacy.  John points us to Paddypower  where Richard Dawkins pips Bono by a third of a thousand.  My Argentines are not exactly burning up the track, though.  Rest of the list looks pretty conventional although if the boys in the Chapel spend too much time IM'ing the  turf accountant, they might just accidentally elect a horse.

I Think I'll Take a Flutter on the Argentines

--either one--but why, you ask?  Easy: they're both "Italian Argentines;" so, the best way to reclaim the papacy for the mother country while seeming to let it go to a new continent.

Look! Up in the Sky!

Well here's an aww moment: Italy's Chief Bad Boy Silvio Berlusconi has been convicted of somethingorother.  The staff and management at Underbelly Central expresses warm approval, along with doubts that he will ever see the inside of the il solitario di pietra.   UB's Wichita bureau hopes for house arrest, tarted up as a reality show.

The conviction certainly does come at an inconvenient time for Old (sic) Silvio: his party just sorta kinda won Italian the election. He must be wondering whether he will wind up as il presidente or--wait a minute, there's another choice: he might wind up like his distinguished predecessor, Bettino Craxi who fled with his tail between his legs to live out his life as a cosseted exile in Tunisia. 

It happens I've been to Tunisia, along with countless European tourists.  Not a bad place, Tunisia, at least in time of peace.  And now that I think of it, Tunisia, aka Carthage, was the home turf of another celebrated public nuisance, Hannibal Barca, who won and then lost his great roll of the dice against Rome--and then went off and spent his exile cowering behind the thrones of Rome's eastern enemies (like Cleopatra, he ended his life with poison to avoid falling into the hands of his great adversaries).

And--but I am wandering.  Closer to home, it's diverting to think that Berlusconi tonight shares some of the perplexity facing his distinguished neighbor, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI who must be considering whether he dare leave the Vatican for Italian soil, lest  he be (say) Pinohcheted off to a slammer at The Hague for arraignment before the International Court of Justice. (for one of the less  nutty accounts, go here).  I wonder, is Castle  Gandolfo Vatican sovereign territory?  And would the Carabinieri shoot down a Papal helicopter?  And is Pinochet a verb?

Barack=Benedict? The (St.) Peter Principle?

No no, bear with me here.  I'm not accusing the President of covering up child abuse, n: Ior the Pope of droning American citizens in their sleep.  But I think I can offer a common thread: I'd say that each of these guys is a man of impressive talents, not well suited to the job he chose for himself and which he struggled so hard to get.

Start with Benedict:  I'll take the word of my betters that he is an impressive theologian or at least doctrinalist (is there such a word?)--I'll take that on faith, heh.  My guess is that he just took it as given that Signor Doctrine ought to be the man at the helm.  I suspect he never caught on--until too late--that serious Poping required an entirely different set of skills.   I hear tell that he harbored a certain contempt for his predecessors' affinity for romping around the world and inhaling energy from the crowds. Apparently Benedict never grasped that romping around the world is part of the job description.  Oh, and also getting mastering the febrile and poisonous Vatican bureaucracy--something which, to be fair,  I suspect his predecessor wasn't very good at either.   To be fair, I'll grant thst nobody can do it but at least you're supposed to try.  Or maybe not; maybe the very reason he was elected was because the old bulls knew they could swallow him like a raw oyster, but that's a topic for another day.

Move on to Barack.  We know he has one good book, maybe two--certainly far better than anything Bill Ayers ever produced.  And he's certainly in the top rank for a certain form of gaseous rhetoric.  Obviously I  want to say that he, like Benedict, didn't grasp that he was transferring to a different field.  I want to say that although I admit we may get a glimmer of awareness from his choice of Joe Biden, the one man in Washington who most conspicuously offers the skills that his master so conspicuously lacks. Still, there is plenty of evidence that he went into the job figuring he could win it on his sterling character and his good intentions.  And we know how that worked out.

I shouldn't go overboard here.  I'm underwhelmed by my President but I'd sure rather have him than the Pope.  And for the good of his soul (heh) I can always hope that Obama leaves the White House a wiser man, if a man imbued by melancholy wisdom.  Unlike the Pope who--and I feel for him on this--just wants (wanted) to leave.

Don't Judge a Man Until ...

You know the story:

  She sees the shoes in the shop window.  She puts on the shoes; she begins to dance.  She dances with every man at the carnival.  She falls into a netherworld of grotesques who converge upon her.  No matter where she goes or what she does, the shoes keep dancing.

Link (paraphrased). A friend told me the other day that the Pope has to wear red shoes.  Did I get that right?  Canon law?  In the Book of Revelations?  Some sort of enduring tradition, like the idea that you have to wait 15 days before the conclave?  Or just a silly joke that I fell for?*

Whatever, but it did set me to thinking.  Do the shoes figure in the selection process?  Do we pick a Pope based on (say) whether his hair matches the shoes (pretty good choice on that one last time, I'd say)?  Do the candidates have to audition before gaggles of unruly paparazzi (good, Giuseppe, now this time give us a little more ankle...)? And does he at last get to put on the shoes, only to discover that they are a curse, and that he must dance incessantly, commanded by demons?   And does he at last escape from the theatre and throw himself in front of a tr-- no, that's carrying analogy too far.  Still, the moral is clear: don't judge a man until you have walked, danced, fled in terror in his shoes.  


Afterthought: the Times headline this morning says: "As Pope Departs, Discord Remains at Vatican,."  I read it as "discard."

 

*Apparently tradition.  Per NPR, it goes back to Pope Pius V in 1566 who wanted to accessorize his new white robes.  My friend the judge tells me it also has something to do with the blood of the martyrs.

I Came. I Saw. I Conclaved

Non habemas papam:

Fratres carissimi

Non solum propter tres canonizationes ad hoc Consistorium vos convocavi, sed etiam ut vobis decisionem magni momenti pro Ecclesiae vita communicem. Conscientia mea iterum atque iterum coram Deo explorata ad cognitionem certam perveni vires meas ingravescente aetate non iam aptas esse ad munus Petrinum aeque administrandum.

Bene conscius sum hoc munus secundum suam essentiam spiritualem non solum agendo et loquendo exsequi debere, sed non minus patiendo et orando. Attamen in mundo nostri temporis rapidis mutationibus subiecto et quaestionibus magni ponderis pro vita fidei perturbato ad navem Sancti Petri gubernandam et ad annuntiandum Evangelium etiam vigor quidam corporis et animae necessarius est, qui ultimis mensibus in me modo tali minuitur, ut incapacitatem meam ad ministerium mihi commissum bene administrandum agnoscere debeam. Quapropter bene conscius ponderis huius actus plena libertate declaro me ministerio Episcopi Romae, Successoris Sancti Petri, mihi per manus Cardinalium die 19 aprilis MMV commissum renuntiare ita ut a die 28 februarii MMXIII, hora 20 sedes Romae, sedes Sancti Petri vacet et Conclave ad eligendum novum Summum Pontificem ab his quibus competit convocandum esse.

Fratres carissimi, ex toto corde gratias ago vobis pro omni amore et labore, quo mecum pondus ministerii mei portastis et veniam peto pro omnibus defectibus meis. Nunc autem Sanctam Dei Ecclesiam curae Summi eius Pastoris, Domini nostri Iesu Christi confidimus sanctamque eius Matrem Mariam imploramus, ut patribus Cardinalibus in eligendo novo Summo Pontifice materna sua bonitate assistat. Quod ad me attinet etiam in futuro vita orationi dedicata Sanctae Ecclesiae Dei toto ex corde servire velim.

Ex Aedibus Vaticanis, die 10 mensis februarii MMXIII

 

Link, (with English translation).   H/T Jim O'Donnell.

Or "Maculate Deception"?

The Pope's Twitter handle is Pontifex. UB's Wichita Bureau claims that he has copped PontifexUS.  Evidently somebody else nicked off Pontifex Maximus, but what about Pontifex Minimus or Papa_Ratzi or EpopofEmor?  Anyway, Good Yontiff, Pontiff, and welcome to the new world.

Auden's Agape

W. H. Auden, who thought himself a Christian, claims one warm June evening in 1933 to have been sitting with three colleagues--fellow teachers at  boys' school, two women and a man--and for the first time in his life he "knew exactly--because thanks to the power, I was doing it--what it means to love one's neighbor as oneself." No alcohol was involved, and no sexual interest among any of the four people.  Auden recounts at that moment he "realized with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me deliberately to injure another human being."  The heightened feeling, he says, continued for roughly two hours, and lasted, in diminishing force, for two more days.  "The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do."

What Auden  apparently had undergone is the experience, or vision, of agape, or Christian love feast, in which one feels a purity of love for all human beings, without invidious distinction of any kind, the powerfully certain feeling that one's fellows are worthy of the same respect, sympathy, and consideration as one pays oneself.  Wholehearted love with the power of pure objectivity behind it, how glorious it must be to undergo--and, as Auden was to honest not to add, all but impossible to maintain.

So Auden as channeled by Joseph Epstein in Snobbery.  I can sign on to virtually every word of this, subject to two important contextual limitations.  One is to realize there is really nothing here specially privileged to Christianity.You could easily imagine instances of the same in Sufism, say, or many forms of Buddhism (the most transporting religious music I ever heard came from old Chasidic Jews, while I was working as a shabbas goy).  Or poetry--how many 14-year-olds' lives have been transformed by their first reading of Romeo and Juliet?  Or their first hearing of the Goldberg Variations (okay, maybe a bit older than 14)?   Or, I suppose, LSD or peyote (never tried either one).  I don't mean to trivialize Christian agape here--only to suggest that it may not have a special purchase on the illusion of perfect love.

And second, read the fine print.   Auden's point is not merely that he felt the purity but that he knew/knows that it cannot last.  Feeling the possibility of this kind of transcendence is a rare and priceless blessing.  The mistake is to suppose it is, or can, continue.  The real trick is not the agape,  but learning how to get through the rest of the night.

Muslim Roots

I mentioned a while back that I was curious about the roots of Islam and in particular, how the new learning, ahem, nuances the old.  Brad warned me that the topic would drive me crazy but he needn't have worried: in my case, ADD trumps OCD , and my mind will wander away long before any serious damage has done.   Still, I did stick around long enough to finish the Tom Holland book on the subject and to follow up on some attendant threads.  I'll say more about Holland in a moment but first some context.

Try this: it seems to me that there are two different rhetorical strategies by which one might undertake to exhume the history of a religion.  You can go big picture and try to show how the received version just isn't plausible in terms of what we know about the surrounding historical context.  For example, if you are exploring Judaism you might point out that it is unlikely Solomon married 700 daughters of kings because there probably weren't that many kings in the catchment area.   Similarly if you are considering Christianity, you will likely try to situate it in the tectonic shift of cultures that generated so much religious activity around the time of the birth of the Roman Empire.  This approach is beguiling and can be productive: it  makes for good copy.  But pretty soon it falls victim to the curse of cross-examination: just who did what when and how do the pieces fit together?

Or you can approach the task in micro, trying to dope out the meaning and context of individual relics or shards of vocabulary. Heaven knows we have whole heaps of Judaic and Christian rubble. With both Christianity (Greek, but also Hebrew and Latin)  and Judaism (Hebrew, but also Greek and a bit of Latin) we have reams of linguistic analysis.  This approach of promise of being more challenging and more persuasive but it also may leave you sleeping in the doorway with a brown paper bag.

The inquirer after Islam faces a similar range of choices, in a context even more stark.  We have the "received account" of a religion that appears more or less ex nihilo--from God's mouth to Muhammad's ear, as it were, with essentially nothing by way of preparation or intermediation.  

For a secularist inquirer, such a stance is inherently implausible.  We live in a mind-set where nothing comes out of nothing, and the suggestion that it does an amounts to an invitation to find out why it does not.

I think this framework might help the reader to understand what it is that Holland is up to in his book, and why he seems to take so long in getting to the point.    The remarkable fact that the "Islamic" part of the book comes only in the last couple of chapters. Prior to that, he is romping all over the Mediterranean  and Middle , tracking "original" Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids and heaven knows else in the centuries that precede the rise of Islam.  The point, although Holland doesn't make it s explicit as he might, is that this is the cultural apparatus into which the Muslims obtrude.  On the hypothesis that they must have got their material from somewhere, this is what they got and this is where they got it.

 Put the point another way: there was  a lot of contact in the centuries preceding Muhammad between the Arabs and their neighbors, the desert and the sown.  The Arabs had countless occasions to stand by as astonished observers, or to join as participants in the affairs of the sown. For their part the sown didn't take the Arabs particularly seriously as full human; still, they did recognize their desert neighbors as the baddest dudes in the neighborhood, to be deployed in conflict as appropriate, to be treated with caution.

Holland's telling of this story is somewhat uneven.  He seems most at home with the Rome/Byzantine parts of his story, less so with the Sassanids.  He is most convincing when he is sketching the outlines of the bloody and interminable religious wars. But even here, there is an odd sort of diffidence about him, together with some plain bloviating.  I  can't quite tell why this might be true.  My guess is that he doesn't feel sufficiently at home with the Sassanid parts of the story.

Or perhaps, here and in the later (Islamic) parts of the book, he is simply cagy, wanting to tell his tale, but aware of the fact that this  is a field where a scholar of even modest secularist sympathies may find himself pitched out of a window.   Understandable perhaps, but perhaps also more cautious than is entirely necessary. For the fact is that there is a large and apparently growing body of secularist scholarship that treats Islam the way one might treat Christianity or Judaism.  Holland cites some of work in his bibliography, though his coverage seems a bit patchy.  Perhaps he should have taken more heart.  There was a time, and not too long ago, when students of Christianity and Judaism horrified themselves by the seemingly necessary implications of their inquiries.  These days, that kind of study is mainstream.  Sooner or later there will come a time when we can study Islam with the same mix of curiosity and detachment.    As a way station on the road to that eventuality, good popularizations are one thing we very much need.

Who Ran the Temples?

All right Mr. Smarty Pants, you think you know all the answers--here's one for you. It's about temples, specifically Greek temples, the ones in Greece.

Here's the deal: faithful readers will recall that I reported on how much I enjoyed Finnerty's and Maarcus' The Creation of Inequality, about how communities/tribes/clans/families--okay, "states"--generate "elites."    What I learned: well--I think I already said that the best way to turn a transitory inequality into a hereditary elite is to get yourself associated with the neighborhood god.  You don't have to be a god, but once folks come to believe that you pal around with the god, they treat you with deference.

Corollary: sure sign that an elite is getting traction, the growth of temples.  A temple means that god has gone bureaucratic which is always good for someone who wants to create hereditary power.  When we were young, we all learned about "priestly castes," and "temple aristocracies."    And I think there is great merit in this view: the priest (or at least the bishop) always seems to show up in time for lunch.

But here's one to savor: the classical Greeks.  Was there ever a society more fraught with temples than these Athenians and their kin?  We have the Parthenon, Olympus, Bassae, the temples at Agrigento, and fo forth and so on In this context, I was amusing myself with a notion about the Athenians of the Parthenon: they're a temple society in a democracy.  The very idea seems to undercut all the points I was just making about priestly castes.

And go further: unless I am missing something, it seems to me that the classical Greeks in general did not have a priestly caste.   You want to make a sacrifice, you make a sacrifice.  Maybe you do it for fun, maybe  you are shamed into it: still,  as far as the temple is concerned, it's all amateur hour.

So we have a temple society without a priestly caste, nor even priests.  And here is a step further who maintained the temples?  Grant that maybe anybody could do a ceremony, still somebody had to molp the grease off the floor, or fix the leaky roof tiles.  If there isn't a priestly caste, shouldn't there at least be a class of sextons?

Can There Be a Private Religion?

Back in the midwest, when people asked me my religion I used to sy "listless nonbeliever." This worked in the respect that they thought it must be some kind of sect, and figured the course of prudence was to stay out of my way.  I did suppose, when I supposed anything about it at all, that religion seemed like a pretty weird and implausible business, but I never felt the impulse to make much of a fuss about it.  I did not, needless to say, face up to the  great gorilla in the room, i.e., if religion was such a goofy idea, how come it was everywhere--how come, in other words, was it so evolutionarily successful.

After a 50-odd  year hiatus, I've gone back to reading some stuff about the evolution of religion and find there's a whole nuther perpective on the issue--one which I don't think was around when I was a kid.  Specificlly--religion as social glue.  Religion binds people together, helps them to organize and coordinate and so better to make or maintain a place in the world.

This strikes me as promising and plausible, but it raises another question about which I've entertained some vagrant curiosity.  Specifically: can there be a private religion?  I'm sure my betters have worked out elaborate analyses on the point, but it remains new to me.  I suppose also that it is akin (but I guess not identical) to that philosophical favorite, can there be a private language?

I suppose it is perfectly plausible for any of us to have feelings of transcendence, sanctity and suchlike that come to us seemingly out of nowhere (sic, seemingly?).  And to keep it to one's self.  How many? Well, who knows? The point is they aren't telling right?

But the question would be--is this religion?   If not, what is it?  And is the distinction merely conventional?  Is there anything about a purely "private" (pseudo-) religion that makes it worthwhile to distinguish away the public variety?

Trying to think up examples of people who might be candidates for observation in this inquiry, I can come up with just one--Abraham Lincoln.  There's every reason to believe that he read and (somewhat?) comprehended the King James Bible--not just comprehended, but resonated with its majestic sonorities.  Yet it is almost impossible to identify a public person more cagy about his private religious commitments (if any).  I suppose some would respond that the fact that he is rooting himself in the King James Bible means that his commitment is not "private;" rather, it makes him the receptical for a vaunted tradition. But is this enough?  Was Lincoln, then "irreligious" because he didn't bandy it about?  Or can there indeed be  a "private religion?"

Update:  thanks to my old pal Anon for the ref to de Botton; I had read his little book on Proust but nothing else of his.  Also on reflection, I think I was considering the more general category of religions that don't like to proselytize: I'm thinking perhaps of the Druze who, so I am told, do not vouchsafe their secrets to the children until they are about 50 years old  Teaching Druze Sunday school must  be a challenge.

Trial Balloon: Secular Islam

Here's a tantalizing little amateur trial balloon: the good folks over at American Interest are taking a flutter at the notion that there may be room for a bit of dialog over what you might call the "true history" of Islam--a dialog, that is, with Muslims.  We have here, for example, Peter Berger,  respectably credentialed as a sociologist of religion, offering up the snoozer headline "The Koran and Historical Scholarship."  Safely past the headline, Berger introduces plans "for a professional association of Koranic studies."  It's an interesting notion and it clearly has Berger's juices flowing, as he savors the possibility of a collaborative effort joining Christians westerners* and Muslims in a "critical" or "historical" study of Islamic tradition. Berger concedes that these are "words [which if] used in connection with the Koran ... could get you killed in many parts of the Muslim world." Nevertheless he sketches a picture of a world in which it might just be possible.

Berger's blogging neighbor, Walter Russell Mead, picks up the baton. For a student of diplomacy, Mead begins on what would appear to be a far less diplomatic note: "Will Historical Criticism Pick the Koran to Bits?" The body of his post his a good deal tamer. "Scholarly studies" (who?) are moving "cautiously, gingerly" (heh!) towards "a hard look at the Koran with the powerful and skeptical tools that have been used on the Bible."

The language of both posts seems at least as carefully chosen as the language of the Balfour Declaration. Both Berger and Mead seem to be doing everything they know how to sidestep the inflammatory headwinds generated by Islamocritics like Robert Spencer (Berger's commentators are not misled, however).

But also, that can't be much doubt that both Mead and Berger know that aside from the flamers, there is a durable and persistent strain of respectable scholarship that tends to desacralize the history of Islam in the same way that inquirers regularly desacralize the history of Christianity and Judaism in the west. Go here for an interesting recent review of a new book by Tom Holland.

Berger and Mead understand this: they both anchor themselves in the observation that secular inquiry into religious tradition is nothing new in the west. Noted, but it still seems to come as news to a lot of readers and listeners. Books like The Bible Unearthed and The Invention of the Jewish People get treated as if they are scholarly bombshells whereas both are just recent entries into a long conversation. Bart Ehrman has made himself a minor-major celebrity with a series of skeptical/critical accounts of Christianity, for a popular audience; yet the enterprise of trying to police Ehrman seems to enjoy they same kind of strength and persistence as the enterprise of trying to police Paul Krugman  (see, e.g., link, link, link; cf. link).

Of course it is still anybody's guess whether a "secular conversation" over Islam will get any traction--without, that is, interruption by the odd sacerdotal murder. On the other hand secular analysis of Christian and Jewish traditions have so well established a presence in the West, it's hard to imagine the same tendency not spreading to Islam.
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*There are Muslims in the west. I know. An expository oversimplification.

Swinging Nuns

American nuns come out swinging against Vatican 

in face of ‘radical feminist’ accusations

Question, how much of this is just about money? The nuns are sitting on a ton of valuable property--hospitals and such--while the Vatican bankers appear to be going through some sort of existential crisis. Might be nice to get our hands on some of that stuff, not so? Of course we may have to excommunicate a few (i.e., and strip them of their pensions) but you have to break a few eggs.

H/T Marge, John.

Sunday Lesson: Does Kevin Exist?

Kevin Drum wades into what is, for him, untypical territory.  He asks: did Jesus exist?  And he answers: yeh, I guess so, but I don't really care.    I agree on "yeh."    Like him I'm a nonbeliever, and like him I do not get the point of nonbelievers who feel that denying the historicity of person named Jesus is an entailment necessary to help them in their larger nonbelief.  

But I would press Kevin's point a bit farther.  I think the study of early Christian history--call it, if you will, "How Jesus  became Christ"--is fascinating.  Watching early "believers" (hazardous to call them "Christian," so early) as they stitch together the various patches of Hellenistic dogma, folklore, whatever, into what they can perceive as a unified whole--well okay, again, absolutely nothing turns on it, but as a chapter in the history of a culture can be most absorbing.   Do we need the Jewish Bible (soon to be "the Old Testament?") or not?  If we need it, can we still eat pork?  Do we have to chop off the tip of our tackle?   And what about all those stories?  Are they messages to the Jews and Us?  Or just to Us?  

I should add that I'm just as intrigued by the  history of how the Judaism of the temple gave way to the Judaism of the diaspora: if anything, that one is even more interesting, because it is not just the creation of a new faith but rather the turning of a theological battleship 180 degrees in stormy waters. Anyway, now this:

And now for that saying of Moses, You are not to eat of the swine; nor yet of eagle, hawk, or crow; nor of any fish that has not got scales.  In this there are three distinct moral precepts which he had received and understood.   (For God says in Deuteronomy, I will make a covenant with this people that will embody my rules for holiness; so you see, the Divine command is in no sense a literal ban on eating, and Moses was speaking spiritually).  The meaning of his allusion to swine is this: what he is really saying is, 'you are not to consort with the class of people who are like swine, inasmuch as they forget all about the Lord while they are living in affluence, but remember Him when they are in want--just as a swine, so long as it is eating, ignores its master, but starts to squeal the moment it feels hungry, and then falls silent again when it is given food.

Next, you shall eat neither eagle nor hawk, kite nor crow.  This means that you are not to frequent the company nor imitate the habits of those who have no idea of earning their own bread by toil and sweat, but in total disregard of all  law swoop down on the possession of other people; going about with every appearance of innocence, but keeping a sharp lookout and darting glances in every direction to see whom their rapacity can prey upon next....

When he says, you are not to eat of the lamprey, the polypus, or the cuttlefish, his meaning is that you are not to consort with or initiate the kind of people who have rejected God altogether. ...

--"Of the Laws of Diet," from The Epistle of Barnabas (A.D. 70? 200?)
(Maxwell Staniforth trans.,, rev. Andrew Louth)