The Liberating Balance Published in First Things Online blog On The Square May 4, 2010 May 04, 2010 :: Filed in: First Things
In his great book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell argued that capitalist systems are composed of three complementary but distinct social systems: the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural. That their values are mutually complementary makes their unity possible. That they are distinct institutions with competing interests enables them to act as checks and balances upon each other. But sometimes one system becomes too strong for the other two. When this happens, the poor are the primary victims.
We see something of the effect of this new imbalance in the current economic crisis. There seems to be virtually universal agreement that the crisis began in the U.S. housing bubble. But what caused the housing bubble? Which of the three systems overpowered the other two?
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Imagine the Loss of the Christian Holy Places Published in the First Things blog First Thoughts April 19, 2010 April 22, 2010 :: Filed in: First Things
On Easter Sunday, I was able to sit in prayer for a while at the Shrine run by sweet Italian nuns on top of the Mountain of the Beatitudes, the most famous of Sermons. It was infinitely peaceful, and I needed it.
Later it hit me: What if the mad leader of Iran fulfilled his pledge to wipe Israel from the map with the Iranian nuclear weapon, coming soon? What would we Christians do without the Mount of the Sermon?
Without Capernaum? Without Nazareth? Without Cana?
Without the lovely and mystical city of Jerusalem–without Golgotha, and the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Tomb?
Without Bethlehem?
Without the Sea of Tiberius (the Sea of Galilee), where Jesus after his Resurrection had Peter and the others cast their net on the other side of their boat?
Thank you, lady, for reminding me what it was like
To fall in love with Karen
Fifty years ago.
It was her eyes that did me in,
Blue as the sapphire stones
She bought along the Indian Ocean.
Blue, with sadness deep behind them,
And merriment like candle's flames on golden foil.
Eyes incapable of malice,
Radiant from her heart.
We talked and talked, newly met,
Though we had known
Each other ever since forever.
We knew the darkness and the night —
That may have been our deepest bond.
We weren’t afraid of night.
A woman who has suffered much, as Tolstoi wrote,
Inflames a lover's heart.
On Christmas, For Karen Published in First Things Online January 13, 2010 January 13, 2010 :: Filed in: First Things
ON CHRISTMAS, FOR KAREN
December 25, 2009
Full of grace!
Full of grace.
Full of grace . . . !
Mother, who this day
brought us Our Love
and our Redeemer
Take into your care a mother like yourself,
Our much loved, so-loved Karen.
Honor her for her self-sacrifice
Who gave her life for us
And especially for me
She gave up too much art
So dear to her for mine
She did not count on dying first
But left so much she longed to do unfinished.
Please embrace her and comfort her
And speak to her with love
Remind her of her words of you
As she watched “The Passion,”
Scrubbing harder with her tears
The dearest blood of your dear Son.
And how she loved your “Magnificat.”
Please, Good Lady, Mother,
Speak to her with tender love
As for ages you have been known to do,
Take her by the hand to those she loves,
John Paul the Second, Father Richard,
Irving, Bill, Clare, Avery and Eunice,
And, God willing that he’s there,
Oskar Kokoschka, who called her
“My little darling Karen,” and singled out
Her talent and her promise for all to hear.
Take her, too, to all the others whom she loved.
Sts. Thomas, Teresa, John o’ the Cross,
And John of the Apocalypse,
T.S. Eliot, Rilke, Dostoevsky,
And all of those with whom she long communed.
Take her around, dear Mother, honor
Her self-sacrifice.
If Heaven is a conversation, dearest Hostess,
Take her kindly where she will be happiest –
For her, that is, where she can learn the most.
Shepherd her, protect her,
But do not think she is too shy–
Give her your smile and let her go her way.
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The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part III: “Confirm Thy Soul in Self-control” Published in First Things Online December 18, 2009 December 18, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
To be free as a human being ought to be is to be able to discern, not only what one desires to do or is impelled by passion to do, but also, and even more clearly, what one ought to do. To be free in this way is to have the honor guard of virtues that are necessary to bring such a choice into clear focus and give one the courage to act on such discernment. In short, in the American ideal—which is modeled, to some degree, on the ancient and medieval ideal—liberty is not the capacity to do what one wishes but the capacity to do what one ought. It is, in short, to be capable of self-government, self-mastery, and self-control.
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The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part II: A Metaphysics of American Ideas Published in First Things Online December 17, 2009 December 17, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
There’s a joke going around among American ninth graders: Want to scare your parents? Tell them the teacher put up a map of the Western Hemisphere and called on you to point to Mexico, and you couldn’t find it. Among young Americans, ignorance of basic facts about our nation’s geography, history, and principles has become legendary. Many cannot locate New York on a map of the United States or place the Civil War within a hundred years of its actual dates.
Yet it is young Americans’ ignorance of the founding ideas of our republic that is most disturbing. The vast majority of college students have never read The Federalist, the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence. No one has taught them the basic convictions about the real world without which the American republic cannot be understood. No one has taught them—to borrow that ancient, but newly serviceable word—the metaphysics behind the truths Americans used to hold. Our generation is the first in history to leave its children ignorant of their intellectual patrimony. How long can a nation based on unique ideas survive not only its citizens’ ignorance of these ideas, but also their neglect and disparagement?
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The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part I: Where’s the Yeast? Published in First Things Online December 16, 2009 December 16, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project recently sponsored a conference on philanthropy and the importance of fundamental ideas. In the keynote address, Michael Novak urged the many philanthropists present to attend urgently to the failure of our cultural institutions to teach the young (for the first time in American history) the basic principles of the American Republic—the ten, twelve, fifteen new propositions without which American Exceptionalism cannot be understood and without whose personal appropriation by each generation in succession this exceptional republic cannot stand. That Dietrich von Hildebrand was held up as a model for this conference seemed appropriate. He was a young man so grounded in “first things” that he was one of the very first—often alone—to stand publicly against the Nazi movement. If ever a demonstration were needed of the importance of rock-bottom ideas in times of ideological confusion, hardly a better model that von Hildebrand can be found. Here, in the first of three installments, Novak reflects on “The Truths Americans Used to Hold”—and why it is crucial now to take emergency steps to teach them to the young.
Yeast in dough. That is the image our American ancestors saw when they thought about planting the germs of beauty and nobility in their new culture. One only has to look at L’Enfant's original plan for the buildings and parks of Washington, D.C., to grasp how much attention our nation’s founders paid to splendor and simplicity, to virtue and nobility and beauty. The founders’ dream was to build a republic that would live long, prosper, and inspire a noble spirit in its citizens. The public buildings of the capital city as built solidly lift up this dream.
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Three Precisions: Personal Liberty Published in First Things Online December 3, 2009 December 03, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
What Is Personal Liberty?
“By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature,” Jacques Maritain once wrote. No one has reflected more deeply on the phenomenology of the human person than Karol Wojtyla—John Paul II. The person, in his view, is an originating source of creative action in the world. The human person is able to reflect on his or her own past, find it wanting, repent, and change direction. He or she is able to reflect on possible courses of action in the future, to deliberate among them, and to choose to commit to—and take responsibility for—one among those courses.
Only the human person is free to choose which among his or her many impulses to follow. An animal’s freedom is to do what simple instinct impels. A human’s freedom is to discern a higher, more complex, and more demanding rationality in the field of action. A human person is free to become a gentle master of all his or her instincts, so as to choose appropriately among them. He or she is free, in short, to do what a person ought to do.
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Three Precisions: Common Good Published in First Things Online December 2, 2009 December 02, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
What Is the Common Good?
A number of years ago, at the Human Rights Commission in Bern, a misuse of the term common good poked its head through the clouds like an Alp. I had prodded the Soviet delegation to recognize the right of a married couple, one of whom was from one nation and one from another, to share residence in whichever nation they chose. The Soviets staunchly resisted the idea—and did so in the name of the common good. The Soviet Union, they insisted, had invested great sums of money and much effort to educate each Soviet citizen, and the common good demanded that these citizens now make comparable contributions in return. The Soviet partner in such a marriage could not, therefore, leave the Soviet state. Individual desires must bow to the common good of all.
Before this experience, it had never entered my mind that anyone could use the term common good to override the rights of free persons. I could understand the willing surrender of one’s own life or lesser goods for the sake of the common good. But the enforcement of the common good as a weapon against individual rights—or, to put it more exactly, against the rights of the free person—had not occurred to me as a subject for such abuse.
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Three Precisions: Social Justice Published in First Things OnlineDecember 1, 2009 December 01, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless.
I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.
I will start, today, with social justice.Read more »
Laub-Novak’s works in oil, bright and imposing, dominate the exhibit. The overwhelming theme among these works, which are all focused on human forms, is of struggle; the body is the locus of tension and decision. Laub-Novak’s figures are, on the one hand, carefully studied and anatomically examined; she depicts them as flesh and bones, occasionally with an almost x-ray quality. She seems to revel in muscle mass, the tension of individual sinews wrapping around and connecting the body. On the other hand, as people they are left undefined: almost anti-gravitational at times, they are positioned without grounding and presented without context; their extremities trail off or are truncated; their faces are obscured. Nevertheless, by omitting definition in the figures, Laub-Novak seems to invite the viewer to consider what forces or ideas these figures are battling. While she stresses the physical and yet leaves it incomplete, she introduces the metaphysical and highlights the fragility of the distinction between the two in the human experience. Some of her choices in color and composition are too harsh for my taste, but I was struck by Laub-Novak’s ability to convey one single moment like a cross-section of motion. Reflecting on this juxtaposition, I was reminded of Eliot’s image of “the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless.” Read more »
Remembering 1989 Published in First Things Online November 6, 2009 November 09, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
For the ten years beginning in 1982, I had the privilege of serving on the Board of Radio Free Europe (for East-Central Europe) and Radio Liberty (for the vast Soviet Union, including its soft Muslim underbelly in “the 'Stans”). President Reagan declared it the goal of the United States to win the Cold War, not just accept it as our long-term fate. Our job was to report the realities on the ground as accurately as we could. Our listeners loved getting these tastes of reality and they increasingly helped us with every bit of information they could.
By late 1988 we had free dial-in capacities from most parts of our two regions. Telephone calls poured in: calls of increasing daily frustration, anger at local injustices, descriptions of the conditions of loved ones in named local hospitals, fresh examples of local official lies, accounts of local outbreaks of protest.Almost half of all hospitals had no hot water; patients were frequently assigned two to a bed; relatives had to bring food to sustain them.
At our spring Board Meeting in Munich in 1989, our key people reported that all signs pointed to the lid blowing off the Soviet Empire before the end of the year. The huge volume of incoming calls and their despairing tone, plus detailed reports from our growing number of stringers in the whole dispersed broadcast area made even our most hardened and jaundiced editors believe that something new was up.
Karen Novak, 1938–2009 Published in First Things November, 2009 October 21, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
By: Mary Eberstadt
I almost emailed Karen today. It’s just part of how we live now, that electronic tic. There was a story I wanted to tell her, a small knot of thought that had been nagging for weeks and finally had gotten untied in a way that I thought would amuse her. So I tapped the key that would bring up her address, only to realize that this particular story—unlike others we had tossed back and forth during the past year before her death—would have to wait indefinitely. Such is the hypnosis of the Internet, that it can lull us for a split second into forgetting even the otherwise rather singularly unforgettable fact of death.
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Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas Published in First Things Online August 17, 2009 August 17, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
In his new Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI stressed that the Church should be understood neither as holding a particular ideology about political economy nor as imposing specific practical solutions on individual countries or regions. He does not intend to pronounce upon the disagreements in political economy among Catholics or others. On the contrary, his aim is to put questions of political economy in a larger context, theological and philosophical, dealing with such questions as the role of caritas in theology, and in philosophy sound concepts of the common good, the human person, and human community.
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The Pope of Caritapolis Published in First Thoughts - A First Things Blog, July 7, 2009 July 07, 2009 :: Filed in: First Things
Now our most learned among popes has published the fullest and most theological account of Catholic Social Thought, from its starting place right in the bosom of the Communion of Persons that furnishes us our experience of God—and also of our own nature.
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No One Sees God
