Dear Intelligent American,
Your Antediluvian Correspondent is not much for artificial intelligence (perhaps because he lacks the real kind?), but was duly impressed, awed even, by the AI composition of Jesus, now making the Internet rounds, taken from the image on the Shroud of Turin, the Lord’s burial cloth.
From youth, one recalls—was it a half century or so ago?—hullabaloo over how the film negative of the Shroud revealed a powerful visage of a man, with scientists claiming it could only be cast on the cloth by something like an intense light flash, akin to a nuclear blast. Then came debunking claims—carbon-dating and somesortadevice-ograph ruling that the holy cloth was not ancient enough . . . which was followed by a debunking of the debunking, as new evidence revealed tiny seeds on the cloth aged nearly two millennia—natural to the region of Jerusalem—and that the previous carbon-dating was of fringe material added centuries later.
The unnerving Jesus AI image, now gaining vast attention, comes as another dispute over the burial cloth has emerged—prompted by a scientist (University of Padua’s Giulio Fanti) who says it shows evidence of crucifixion wounds. “Cruci-fiction,” counter Fanti’s lambasters.
(Caution: Keep a good distance from them.)
As we wait for lightning to surely strike, we make note that the persistent attention to this profound relic exposes a deep desire in many to acknowledge and even embrace the divine, which is a good thing, no? Alas, let us not bring into this rant the actual worship of the divine, because in America today, what seems to be holy-kept on the Sabbath is more likely to be travel soccer and Little League baseball than it is church services.
The calendar reminds us that Labor Day looms. A suggestion: Spend part of it getting to know Mark Janus.
Belly Up to the Buffet, Freshly Restocked
1. At Commentary, Yuval Levin strategizes that America’s universities might indeed be saved from their current radicalism. From the essay:
As the left in general has grown less liberal, though—by which I mean less tolerant of dissenting views and less interested in the defense of unpopular opinions—these academics have found it more difficult to articulate the traditional academic ethos. In losing the vocabulary of liberalism to the terminology of radicalism, they have allowed the university’s self-understanding—its own description of its purpose—to be defined in the terms of the academic revolutionaries. So while many professors continue to do the traditional work of pursuing knowledge and forming students in its light, many questions of policy and administration in the university are resolved by, or in the direction of, the academic revolutionaries. Those revolutionaries have therefore gradually become the administrators of the academy. So when questions arise about what the university should be, they decide the answers.
The university was not destroyed, but rather transformed, by the revolution of the past half-century. It has kept its trappings but replaced its ethos. The titles, the modes of governance, the deans and faculty senates, the tenure, the graduation gowns, and the ivy-covered buildings are still there. But they are now mostly populated by men and women with a very different understanding of the goals of the institution from that of their predecessors a few generations ago.
It is crucial to grasp this character of the revolution if the modern-day champions of the traditional academic vision are going to fight back effectively, because fighting back effectively will need to mean reinhabiting the university—populating regions of its faculty and administration with traditional academics again. In a sense, it will demand that academic traditionalists do some of what the revolutionaries did: act on a critique of the institution not by burning it down but by finding ways to occupy it and then to transform it from within.
2. At National Review, Frederick Hess warns that gadget-focused education is hurting our kids. From the essay:
The unbridled enthusiasm for tech spending is due, in no small part, to the incentives that encourage superintendents and school leaders to chase grant dollars and present themselves as “forward thinking” innovators. By spending money to acquire cool stuff (whether it gets used or not), they earn fawning coverage and set themselves up for professional advancement.
A skeptic can’t help but ask: So, did the Luddites have it right? Nope, not really. Schools aren’t going back to chalk and slate, nor should they. And even “tech free” schools aren’t tearing computers out of the library or telling kids to write all their essays by hand. But schools do need to get vastly more serious about the uses and limits of technology. While the problems with smartphones have gotten a lot of well-deserved attention of late, what’s been overlooked is the ways in which technology can be not only unhelpful but corrosive to schooling.
Education requires concentration. Whether we’re talking about basketball, algebra, or the flute, learning calls for focus, engagement, and practice. That’s how students gain knowledge and master skills. Today’s digital devices and social-media algorithms, however, are increasingly optimized to be engines of distraction—to break up that kind of sustained attention.
3. At Modern Age, David Bonagura explains—contra the new demi-craze promoting a secular conservatism—why the Right needs the Almighty. From the essay:
Following Jacobinism, other newfangled ideologies have risen to subvert the Christian moral order: Marxism, materialism, progressivism, secular nationalism, communism, fascism, multiculturalism, internationalism, and now wokeism. Though different in their specific goals, these ideologies have typically attacked belief in God, the one power preventing them from establishing total domination of the state over human life.
It is ironic that the Christian moral order’s avowed enemies on the left have long understood what some partisans today on the right do not: that religion’s first gift to conservatism is the creator God to whom all people and things are subjugated. Religion’s second gift flows directly from this: human beings, as God’s creations, possess their own inherent dignity, which no other person, state, government, or entity can take from them. This dignity is reflected in human beings’ innate freedom, which they exercise through acts of the reason and the will. It also has a political dimension, which the modern world calls “human rights”: life, family, liberty, and property are natural to human beings, and therefore no government or other being may infringe upon them, as the aforementioned ideologies have all sought to do. The state exists to protect these rights; it does not endow them.
4. More Bonagura: At The Catholic World Report, he wields the shovel and hopes to bury some mistaken, widely held assumptions about Catholicism, such as that Catholic schools and/or religious education in general supply children with sufficient information to lead a life of faith. From the critique:
It’s dubious whether Catholic schools alone ever provided all the formation necessary to form live-long Catholics. In the pre-conciliar days, when the Catholic identity at schools was palpable, and this identity was reinforced at home and within ethnic neighborhoods, Catholic schools certainly made a major contribution to forming their students.
But theirs was never meant to be a solo mission, though some less zealous parents relied on parish schools to do all the formation work.
Today, by contrast, seven hours a day in even the most robust Catholic schools is merely a blip in lives consumed by secular living and anti-religious messaging that is both in the culture and streaming into kids’ heads via smart phones constantly. A child with a Catholic education not buttressed by home and something of a social life may not have been formed adequately enough to make the decision to remain Catholic, while so many of his friends have quit.
Religious education programs, consuming a tiny hour of a busy week, have virtually no chance of imparting the faith to students without major support at home and in the community. The sad reality is that religious education, whose classroom team with the 72% of children not attending Mass, is just another activity for disinterested, over-scheduled, unchurched kids.
5. At The Free Press, Bari Weiss locates a brave, young West Bank native who called out Hamas’s October 7th massacres of Israelis. From the article:
His story is one of setbacks, hardships, and discrimination, but also of hard work, perseverance, unlikely friendships, and in the end—against all odds—success.
But then his life was ruined. . . by a social media post. On October 7, he woke up in his home in the West Bank to the news of the massacre happening inside Israel. While some people in his community celebrated, he was horrified. He posted online how he felt: “What sad and horrible news to wake up to and out of words and unable to digest what’s going on right now. I’m Palestinian and firmly stand against this terror. I pray for the safety of my friends, colleagues, their loved ones and everyone else affected.” He continued to post about how he felt—six posts in total.
Suddenly, he says, 500 people unfollowed or unfriended him on social media sites. People blocked him on WhatsApp and, in real life, people stopped speaking to him altogether.
And then, people started calling him a “traitor.” And as he told me in this interview, the word traitor means something in the West Bank. “It means they are going to kill you.”
6. At Comment, Nathan Hatch argues for churches doing what churches must do—focus on the divine and leave the political to others. From the essay:
Niebuhr argued that the primary work of the church needed to be vertical, confronting the divine, rather trying to reform society. Before one could assume any broader role, the church had to undergo silence, humility, repentance, and the naming of idols. He argued that zealous advocacy needed to be replaced with humility and self-criticism. The church needed to admit mystery and often remain silent. Along these lines, he gave a speech late in the 1930s called “The Grace of Doing Nothing.” Instead, the church needed to focus on its own distinct, internal work. “The question of the church . . . is not how it can measure up to the expectations of society nor what it must do to become a savior of civilization, but rather how it can be true to itself: that is, to its Head.”
The church today would do well to take Niebuhr’s criticisms to heart. It should return to the work that only it can do, attempting to allow the divine to encounter individuals and groups gathered as the church. This is particularly true in a culture in which so many mediating institutions have been hollowed out and people are left, as Tish Harrison Warren says, as “self-constructed and self-actuating individuals, unmoored from any larger community and tradition.” This is not to say that the church should stress a solipsistic faith: on the contrary. Unless it speaks in a language only it possesses, however, any action taken by the faithful in the public square is more likely to resemble the culture than vice versa.
In his book The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, Yuval Levin argues that in an age of hyper-individualism we need to renew the middle layers of society, where people see each other face to face. “Increasingly,” he says, “society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions—family community, church, unions, and others—fade and falter.”
7. At TomKlingenstein.com, Justin Shubow declares the time has arrived to Make America Beautiful Again. From the essay:
Classical architecture is not just about unparalleled aesthetic excellence; it is the architecture of American democracy, the style most associated with our system of government and our highest ideals, the architecture of civic virtue. It is also an architecture conducive to the rootedness of the polis, of the mutual bonds of citizenship extending across generations. In an era of presentism, classical architecture encourages Americans to think in centuries. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan told the Senate in 1983, “We must not preserve buildings out of a fear that we have lost the ability to create things of grace and beauty. . . . I wish to preserve things as an example of what we were and will be, not what we were and longer can be.”
Classical public buildings make us feel proud of our country; they make us confident in our dignity as citizens of a great Republic. As art historian Vincent Scully said about New York’s original Pennsylvania Station, a Beaux Arts masterpiece inspired by an ancient Roman public bath, “One entered the city like a god.” Modernist architecture diminishes us; it would have us forget the past. Epitomizing Modernism, Brutalist public buildings tell us, “Mortal Man, Thou Art Nothing.”
We must preserve classical architecture most of all because it is ours. While there are other noble styles around the world, it is American classicism that is our heritage. It perpetuates and strengthens our wise system of government; unlike in countries such as France, now in its Fourth Republic, America has had only one regime, a single Republic that extends back to the War of Independence. In the face of those who wish to tear down that regime, we must protect and construct edifices that symbolize it.
8. At City Journal, Naomi Schaefer Riley and James Piereson charge that Warren Buffet’s decision to pledge his wealth to the Gates Foundation was a missed opportunity. From the beginning of the piece:
In 2006, Warren Buffett pledged most of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He told Fortune that he had always planned to give the money away, but “I came to realize that there was a terrific foundation that was already scaled-up—that wouldn’t have to go through the real grind of getting to a megasize like the Buffett Foundation would—and that could productively use my money now.”
Almost two decades later, Buffett is rethinking his decision. A recent New York Times article suggests that the two billionaires have had a falling out. That revelation came on the heels of Buffett’s announcement that he would not give the remainder of his fortune to the Gates Foundation upon his death, but to several other foundations linked to members of his immediate family.
It’s worth understanding Buffett’s original justification for pledging his wealth to the Gates Foundation—and what may have made him change his mind. Buffett initially claimed that the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic expertise motivated him. “I’m getting two people enormously successful at something, where I’ve had a chance to see what they’ve done,” he said. “What can be more logical, in whatever you want done, than finding someone better equipped than you are to do it? Who wouldn’t select Tiger Woods to take his place in a high-stakes golf game?”
9. At Public Discourse, Finnish parliamentarian Päivi Räsänen, Christian believer, tells how she was tried for a tweet. From the accounting:
These complaints resulted in eighteen months of police investigation and thirteen hours of interrogations. As a former government minister, sitting parliamentarian, and grandmother, I found the situation unreal. Just a few years before, I had been in charge of the police as Minister of Interior, and now I was sitting in the police station being interrogated, with the Bible on the table in front of me.
The questions were shamelessly about the Bible and its interpretation. I was asked, “What is the message of the book of Romans and its first chapter?” and “What do I mean by the words ‘sin’ and ‘shame’?” A joke spread on social media that Päivi Räsänen was once again meeting for a Bible study at the police station. The police asked if I would agree to delete my writings within two weeks. I said no and reasserted my belief in the Bible’s teachings, no matter the consequences. I will not apologize, I explained, for what the Apostle Paul has stated.
After the investigation, I was charged criminally for my post about the Bible’s teaching on marriage. A second charge was filed about a booklet called “Male and Female He Created Them,” which I had written for my church in 2004. Bishop Juhana Pohjola also was prosecuted as responsible for publishing the booklet. A third charge was filed about my biblical views presented in a 2019 radio interview. It was at this time that ADF International came alongside me and we began to defend my case.
10. At American Reformer, Ben Crenshaw defines the components of American heritage, one being our language. From the essay:
What does it mean to be an American? Heritage America is best understood as involving seven inheritances: the English language, Christianity, self-government, Christian government, liberty, equality under the law, and relationship with the physical land.
Americans are English-language speakers, descended mainly from the English people. While the settlement of the colonies in the seventeenth-century certainly included peoples of other languages (Dutch, Germans, Spanish, etc.), the majority spoke English. English was the political, religious, and commercial language of the colonies. Those who were not native English speakers quickly realized they had to master the tongue if they wanted to survive and flourish. Even though there was great regional variety among the various colonies as David Hackett Fisher demonstrates, Fisher nonetheless concludes that “nearly all spoke the English language, lived by British laws, and cherished their ancestral liberties.”
A common language is paramount for any kind of national identity, character, government, or collective action. Without the same language, there can be no common history and no share memories. There would be no shared ways of life, general legal norms, widespread business and commerce, prevailing religion, common literature, or seasonal rhythms. In a real sense, a common language is a prerequisite to successful civilization and national self-preservation.
11. At American Enterprise Institute, Howard Husock studies the effects of the 2017 federal tax law and finds it has incentivized charitable giving more for the haves than the have-nots. From the report:
The tax incentive may be part of the reason the US is often named the world’s most charitable nation. According to the Charities Aid Foundation, as of 2016, US households contributed far more as a percentage of gross domestic product (1.44 percent) to charity than the next-closest nation (New Zealand, 0.79 percent) or the third (Canada, 0.77 percent).
Over time, the charitable tax deduction, which is applied to estates, corporations, and individual households, became the federal government’s 10th-largest tax expenditure—that is, a category of revenue the Treasury Department forgoes because of the tax code. The decline in itemized charitable giving following the TCJA’s enactment represents a decline in the value of this tax expenditure; in other words, the Treasury had to forgo less revenue (at least related to the charitable giving deduction) because fewer households itemized their tax returns and claimed a deduction for charitable giving.
Economists and tax policy analysts anticipated the decline in itemized donations. Soon after the TCJA’s enactment, Alex Brill and Derek Choe concluded that “the law will reduce charitable giving by $17.2 billion (4.0 percent) in 2018 according to a static model and $16.3 billion assuming a modest boost to growth.” The actual fall in itemized donations turned out to be even larger, from $256 billion (2017) to $197 billion (2018).7 This indicates that the TCJA had a greater effect than was anticipated.
12. At Law & Liberty, Titus Techera discourses on the three waves of modern journalism. From the piece:
Modern morality is all about connecting the two meanings of argument, one of which points to learning the truth and the other to having a fight. Fighting for what’s right only makes sense based on the pursuit of truth—otherwise, it might be mere madness. Politics and journalism both fulfill this function, from their different positions within the modern state-society divide. The difficulty inherent in journalism is that it depends on access to the state for knowledge to offer us mere members of society, but it depends on our interest and indignation to have any success.
The three waves of journalism—the successive attempts to connect political technologies, that is, institutions, to the people, corresponding to the major communications technologies, print, radio/TV, and the Internet—have dealt with this in somewhat different ways. Originally, American pamphleteering was vicious, pompous, and nakedly corrupt—but it was also organized and practiced by the noblest Americans and therefore involved the most serious thinking and the deepest disputes of American politics. Journalism was at the core of the creation and management of the first-party system and also involved the spoils of party victory to feed it.
Elite Americans’ confidence in the imperative of Progress came to prominence with FDR; they promised to exchange all that corruption for expertise. The alignment of party, leader, government, and state in FDR’s presidency-for-life was supposed to also guarantee a permanent alignment of the elite and the people and create something like divine power—providence. This was supposed to give Americans what they had always wanted, which had only been prevented by popular prejudice in favor of obsolete institutions like the Constitution or private corruption among various elite groups who stood to profit from their privileges. Under this new dispensation, the media elite was no longer engaged in the rough-and-tumble brawl over serious political ideas, but saw itself as the “objective” purveyor of truth emerging from the providential alignment of people and state. In reality, it transformed political thought into the increasingly unpolished mediocrity we resentfully receive today. Thus journalism ironically became something increasingly hard to distinguish from the most vicious kind of partisanship, zealotry, with this remarkable innovation, that it would be zealously enforcing the state imperative of the administration of justice.
Lucky 13. At the Butler Eagle, Eddie Trizzino reports on a Pennsylvania fundraiser that involved pigs, and lips. From the beginning of the story:
The kiss Tiffany Harkleroad got from Willow the pig Tuesday morning, Aug. 6, was slimier than she expected, but she didn’t mind it overall, especially because it was for a good cause.
“It’s a small price to pay to support the library,” said Harkleroad, youth services librarian at the Butler Area Public Library.
The library started a fundraiser in June, with a goal to raise as much as $1,500 by August. The library broke that goal early, meaning three library staff members would have to kiss a pig at the library’s first “Piggy Party,” so the bar was raised to $2,500. The library ended up raising more than $2,800.
Bonus. At Christian History, David Eastman reveals how the early Church interacted with Greek and Roman theater. From the piece:
Although mime and pantomime proved to be popular with the public, many Greek and Roman moralists and philosophers condemned theatrical performances because their content promoted moral corruption. This condemnation extended to the performers themselves. Moralists labeled dancers and actors as a disreputable class of society because their disgraceful public displays threatened standards of public morality. The Greek orator Aelius Aristides (117–181) famously wrote a letter to the leaders of the city of Sparta denouncing dancers as threats to the moral health of the city.
Thus Christianity emerged within the context of a lively debate concerning the role of theater in society. On the one hand, these wildly popular shows contributed to a growing Roman imperial culture around mass entertainment (“bread and circuses”). Civic leaders frequently funded performances as part of annual religious festivals and temple dedications. On the other hand, moralists and intellectuals saw these performances as threats to the moral fabric of society because they promoted depraved and foolish behavior.
Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), a highly educated Egyptian philosopher who converted to Christianity, was the first Christian author to comment specifically on theatrical performances. One of his most famous works, the “Exhortation to the Greeks” (a term used for pagans in general), displayed the folly of many practices of nonbelievers.
He opened with an assault on the mythological roots of theatrical performances. Most dramas, he said, draw their inspiration from the cesspool of old myths about the gods, retold by drunken poets. The plays, he wrote, promote pagan ideas and pull the authors and the crowds that adore them into “the company of demons.” Clement then called upon “Truth, with Wisdom in all its brightness” to shine its light into all these dark places “on those that are involved in darkness.”
For the Good of the Order
Uno. Attention, all Givers, Doers, and Thinkers: C4CS will host a consequential conference on K to Campus: How the Education Reform Movement Can Reshape Higher Ed. It takes place at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, from October 23 to 24, and just about every bit of info you want/need to know can be found here. Fun fact: The kick-off event will be Yours Truly interviewing the great Victor Davis Hanson. Come, and prepare to be inspired.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Viken Mikaelian explains how wokeness has crimped charitable giving. Read it here.
Tre. The Center for Civil Society will be serving up an important, via-Zoom Master Class on Thursday, September 19th (from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern). Its title—“Direct Mail Outreach”—is as simple as the subject matter is vital for fundraising types. Attend and you’ll discover why direct mail still makes sense in an increasingly digital age, how to acquire new donors through the mail, how digital techniques can complement and elevate direct-mail fundraising, and tons more. Get complete information here.
Point of Personal Privilege
At National Review, Your Humble Correspondent sheds light on four colleges (there are many more) that are exemplars of this fact: In America, there are still to be found colleges and universities that are faith-based, offering classical education and shunning modern wokery, all at a cost that is . . . affordable. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why can’t you trust atoms?
A: Because they make up everything.
A Dios
The Bracket Police were hard at work with the Second Epistle reading at Mass last Sunday: It’s from Ephesians 5: 21-32, which counsels wives to be subject to their husbands, and all the hierarchical stuff that is a no-go in the Age of Feminism. As one might expect, the no-go was not gone—brackets (applied by ministerial bureaucrats and liturgical weenies) appeared around the chauvinistic passages, giving the epistle reader the option to . . . not read. And they were not. Once, it was Church Militant, now, Church Embarrassed. If only there were a shroud to hide behind.
May We Accept the Wisdom the Almighty Shares,
Jack Fowler, who lives in eternal debt to his editor, Lorna, at jfowler@amphil.com.
