A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Or would you rather talk about Trump and Leo? This space not being political, we prefer to be distracted from the crazed headlines of this particular week, so let us force ourselves to think of the 1967 classic The Producers, in which Max B and the non-papal Leo (Bloom, I presume) concoct a farcical scheme to fleece little old ladies and put on an intentional Broadway flop. In all the film’s humor and merriment you will find no attacking of global religious leaders, nor does The Producers’ movie poster portray Zero Mostel as Jesus.
Pardon the pontification.
When in Rome, Do as Civil Thoughts Recommends
1. At Plough Quarterly, Nathaniel Peters reports on the 50th anniversary of the theologian gathering which famously spotlighted numerous heresies threatening the church. From the essay:
Over the course of the year, Berger and Neuhaus circulated their list of misguided beliefs among more than two dozen theologians and religious thinkers, many of whom expressed an interest in meeting to discuss the issues they raised, and possibly issuing a public statement. James Gettemy, president of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, agreed to host the group. After three days of meetings and discussion in January 1975, the eighteen participants (seven additional contributors signed on after being unable to attend in person) unanimously agreed on the text of what became “The Hartford Declaration: An Appeal for Theological Affirmation.” The names at the end included great American theologians of the twentieth century: Avery Dulles, Stanley Hauerwas, George Lindbeck, Richard Mouw, Thomas Hopko, Alexander Schmemann, and Robert Louis Wilken.
The Appeal was novel in many respects. Its signatories were not official representatives of Christian communities, as was standard for official ecumenical statements, and it offered no creed of beliefs to be held, nor a list of heresies – or heretics – to be anathematized. Instead, it declared: “Today an apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent is undermining the Church’s ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world.” This loss was outlined in thirteen anti-theses, or “themes,” on which the Appeal then offered commentary.
2. At Law & Liberty, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney recounts the importance of the great scholar Harvey Mansfield. From the article:
Mansfield is a political scientist as much as a political philosopher, an Aristotelian who never disparages moral virtue, political nobility, or patriotic attachment to a decent and free political order such as the United States. As one, he has repeatedly instructed fellow political scientists to care more about politics as the distinctively human realm than about narrow “methodological” concerns that risk obscuring the reality and true stakes of human and political life. Mansfield has never been remotely tempted to identify the theoretical life with Epicurean disdain for the dignity and grandeur of the political vocation. At the same time, he is perfectly immune to the moralism that animates so many academics and intellectuals today.
Mansfield also refuses to identify human greatness with cruelty, as did Friedrich Nietzsche, or to dismiss the needs of ordinary human beings as of little or no interest to those concerned with the elevation of the human spirit. Indeed, more than once, and again in his new book, Mansfield suggests that Nietzsche might have pursued his own elevated goals more responsibly and humanely if he had thoughtfully engaged Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings and example of human nobility at the service of liberty and human dignity. From the French political thinker, he would have learned to appreciate that it is political freedom that alone “can create the light by which it is possible to see and judge the vices and virtues of humankind”—and thus to make a “whole” of men and cities. Nietzsche might even have learned to discern the truth of equality when it is freed from a degrading “passion for equality” that tears down the noble rather than lifting up the weak.
Important Message Time . . .
On April 30, the Center for Civil Society will host another must-catch webinar, this one on “The Power of Planned Giving”—something overlooked by way too many nonprofits. Yours Truly will emcee the discussion with Sandy Shrader and Stephanie Conway, two of AmPhil’s primo planned-giving experts—it will all take place from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern) via Zoom, and of course, it’s free. Get more information, and register, right here.
. . . Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Suggestions
3. More L&L: Philip Hamburger examines the testimony and questioning at the Supreme Court’s recent hearing on birthright citizenship. From the essay:
The territorial approach guarantees citizenship for the children of almost anyone who gets across the border, including temporary and unlawful visitors. As put by the lawyer arguing against the government, “Virtually everyone born on U.S. soil is subject to its jurisdiction and is a citizen.”
But is that true? The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship was, indisputably, designed to assure citizenship to Black Americans, mostly former slaves. So, it’s not unreasonable to ask about the breadth of that guarantee. Was it so expansive as to assure citizenship to the children of almost anyone who gets across the border?
To answer that question, let’s consider some different concepts of jurisdiction. The justices’ questioning on April 1 revealed something very odd. At least several of them apparently think that if they discern the prevailing idea of jurisdiction in the 1860s, that will reveal the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s word “jurisdiction”—as if a single idea of jurisdiction was dominant for all purposes. But then, as now, different ideas of jurisdiction could coexist, each being valuable for different purposes. Put simply, jurisdiction comes in layers, like Russian dolls.
4. At Sp¡ked, Tim Black serves up a lesson on the godfather of Islamism, Sayyid Qutb. From the piece:
The real shift, however, happened after the First World War. In Europe, the collapse of the pre-war liberal order fuelled radical vanguardism, be it Communist, fascist or modernist. The colonial metropoles witnessed a similar political and cultural insurgency, refracted through a more explicitly anti-Western, anti-imperial lens and framed in national, cultural terms. Nowhere more so than in Cairo, in British-occupied Egypt, where young and young-ish radicals challenged the status quo. It was in this context that Islam was effectively and implicitly repurposed as an ideology—indeed, as an –ism to sit alongside the others that were flourishing in Europe and elsewhere during this period.
This was not Islam as a set of devotional practices. This was Islam as a revolutionary solution to the perceived failure of Western, liberal modernity. Its advocates no longer measured their faith against Christianity. They pitched it into battle against liberalism and capitalism, as a revolutionary challenge to the liberal order to rival that of fascism or Communism—the latter being a political creed that Islamists dismissed as just another outgrowth of godless Western rationalism.
The creation of the Society of Muslim Brothers (otherwise known as the Muslim Brotherhood) in Cairo in 1928 is the key moment. Its founder, a then 22-year-old teacher called Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), gave Islamism its first organisational form. But it is in the later work of Banna’s contemporary, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian teacher and civil servant, that Islamism gained arguably its most influential and explosive articulation. In the multi-volume In the Shade of the Koran (1951-1965) and, above all, in Milestones (1964), Qutb presented Islam as a political order (Nizam), indeed, as ‘the only system’ capable of rescuing mankind from the spiritless descent of ‘Western civilisation’.
5. At Quillette, William Deresiewicz explains why he left academia. From the essay:
Anyone in the academic humanities—anyone who’s gotten within smelling distance of the academic humanities these last 40 years—will see the problem. Loving books is not why people are supposed to become English professors, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Loving books is scoffed at (or would be, if anybody ever copped to it). The whole concept of literature—still more, of art—has been discredited. Novels, poems, stories, plays: these are “texts,” no different in kind from other texts. The purpose of studying them is not to appreciate or understand them; it is to “interrogate” them for their ideological investments (in patriarchy, in white supremacy, in Western imperialism and ethnocentrism), and then to unmask and debunk them, to drain them of their poisonous persuasive power. The passions that are meant to draw people to the profession of literary study, these last many years, are not aesthetic; they are political.
I was dimly aware, when I got to graduate school, that the experience would be different from the few college English classes I had taken—I knew that “theory” was big, though I didn’t much know what it was—but I had no idea what I’d be up against. Fortunately (or not), it didn’t take long to find out. The first week of my first seminar—it was a “proseminar,” designed specifically for entering students—the professor said this: “The most important thing for a first-year graduate student to do is to figure out where they stand ideologically.”
“I know where I stand ideologically!” the young man next to me burst out. “I am a marxist with a small m.” He was pounced upon by two or three of the women. “But Marxism has nothing to say about feminist issues!” one of them said. “That is why I am a marxist with a small m!” he replied. The professor smiled benignly; her pupils were apt. I cowered beneath the table (metaphorically), understanding immediately that, like a dissenter in a marxist (small m or large) regime, I would need to speak my true beliefs behind closed doors, and only to those I could trust.
6. At Community College Daily, edu-guru Bruno Manno argues that states must make Workforce Pell . . . work. From the article:
Workforce Pell extends the nation’s main federal college grant program to shorter-term, job-focused education and training programs. Congress created it so that low-income students could use Pell Grants for programs that lead more quickly to employment, earnings gains and additional learning.
Under the department’s proposed rule, eligible programs would generally run from 150 to 599 clock hours and last at least eight weeks but less than 15 weeks. The department has also framed Workforce Pell as a stepping-stone to future postsecondary credentials, not just a stand-alone grant for quick training.
That change could open a meaningful new route to opportunity. For many students, especially working adults and those with limited financial means, a shorter and more affordable path to a recognized credential may be more realistic than a traditional degree-only route.
7. At the New York Post, Howard Husock has a mom-and-pop plan to push back on crime in NYC public housing. From the op-ed:
“There are quite a few single households, predominantly women,” tenant leader Danny Barber has told me. “The young men develop an anger toward their own (absent) father and they take it out on the world.”
Yet there was a time, as Hunter College professor Nicolas Dagen-Bloom has explained, when NYCHA gave priority to two-parent working families.
We should return to that very approach for new tenants—even if it gives a leg up to those who may earn more—and change the rules of who’s admitted to the projects in the first place by putting households with both mothers and fathers at the top of the NYCHA waiting list.
This would be no quick fix; it’s too much to expect responsible young fathers to confront gangs directly—though some might.
8. At National Review, old amiga Sarah Schutte reviews a small-town mortician’s memoir. From the article:
Thought-provoking doesn’t do this book justice. Convicting, maybe? Compelling? Well-balanced, perhaps? This last one is perhaps the most fitting, because [Victor M.] Sweeney does an admirable job with a difficult task. He brings us a book of multiple genres—memoir, humor, philosophy—and invites us into his life and thoughts on a necessary but rather overlooked profession all centered on a topic most people wish to avoid considering.
Each chapter contains some type of story or vignette that illustrates a point Sweeney wishes his audience to consider—from memory to inconvenience to affability to “bone arks.” Interspersed throughout the stories in each chapter are Sweeney’s ponderings on life, an early memory, a family moment, or a description of some aspect of his job. Throughout it all, Sweeney gives details about a mortician’s work, bringing readers into his profession without minimizing or over-aggrandizing what he does.
The further I got into the book, the more I found myself grabbing a pencil, marking phrases and passages, staring at them, and writing comments of my own next to them. Having a conversation within a book is perfectly acceptable—but pencils only, please.
9. More NR: Kathryn Jean Lopez commends the passion of Ben Sasse. From the column:
Sasse is currently dying of cancer. The experimental trial he’s on might not prolong his life significantly. These are precious days for, as Sasse understands it, “redeeming the time.” In a most recent interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times, he appears bloodied. His face is broken. His skin isn’t healing. He tells Ross—whom I like to refer to as my former intern (at National Review)—that a pharmacist recently called him over to the consultation area; she was curious and concerned. “Did they do something electrical to you?” she asked. “Either acid or electric shocks produce a face that looks this hideous,” Sasse told Douthat, who in turn joked: “Well, you told her that you’d gotten on the wrong side of like six different mafias. And they’d all taken turns.”
Despite his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Sasse has not lost his sense of humor, gratitude, love of God, and appreciation for the gift of participating in the American experiment. He reminds us—now he is living the premature sunset of his life—that life is a gift and is meant to be lived in love for God and His people. His priority is to share the wisdom that has been forced on him too early. Ross joked that pending death has Sasse at 54, “where Henry Kissinger was at 100.”
10. At Reason, Nick Gillespie is puzzled why it seems so difficult to find student-loan “victims” who elicit genuine sympathy. From the commentary:
But whenever we talk about the roughly $1.8 trillion in student debt, it's worth remembering that people pursuing graduate degrees—including M.D.s, law degrees, and master's degrees—account for "40 percent of federal student loans issued each year," even though such programs enroll just "15 percent of all students in higher education." When it comes to borrowing for undergraduate degrees, less than half of all students (47 percent) graduating in 2024 had student debt and the average total indebtedness was $29,560, according to LendingTree.
That's not nothing, but it works out to about a monthly payment of around $325 per month for 10 years under current interest rates. If borrowers opt into an income-driven repayment system, they could have lower monthly payments stretched over more years. Given that recent college grads command starting salaries ranging between $78,000 for engineering majors to $60,000 for communications majors, student debt, for holders of B.A.s anyway, is eminently manageable.
Add to that, too, that having a bachelor's degree both decreases the likelihood of being unemployed and increases median annual income for workers between the ages of 25 and 34. While there are many variables to factor into any evaluation of the benefits of earning a B.A., virtually all analyses find substantial lifetime income gains for college graduates over their high school counterparts, typically totaling over $1 million dollars.
11. At The Catholic Thing, Anne Hendershott has something to say (yes, critical) about Arthur Brooks’s “AI Happiness Theory.” From the critique:
Brooks imagines a future in which artificial intelligence frees us from what he calls the “complicated” tasks of life. In fact, Brooks treats routine intellectual labor as if it were merely a nuisance—email, drafting, data work, repetitive problem sets, the slow accumulation of skill.
Brooks’s vision begins from a premise that the Catholic tradition has long rejected: that work is primarily a burden to be escaped. In Catholic thought, work is not an obstacle to human flourishing but one of its primary engines. It is the arena in which we cultivate moral character and responsibility.
For a faithful Catholic, work is the daily practice through which we participate in Creation and contribute to the common good. A society that treats work as a problem to be eliminated misunderstands both human nature and the moral structure of ordinary life.
Brooks draws a sharp line between “complicated” tasks (solvable, mechanical) and “complex” ones (relational, existential). He seems to believe that these tasks are separate. But in practice, the two are intertwined.
12. At American Affairs Journal, Musa al-Gharbi suggests how best to understand the “Well-Being Gap” between liberals and (happier!) conservatives. From the analysis:
Academic research consistently finds the same pattern. Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives. The effects of conservatism seem to be enhanced when conservatives are surrounded by others like themselves. However, in an analysis looking at ninety countries from 1981 through 2014, the social psychologists Olga Stavrova and Maike Luhmann found “the positive association between conservative ideology and happiness only rarely reversed. Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries and never in the United States.”
It is empirically unclear why this pattern is so ubiquitous, not just in the contemporary United States but also historically (virtually as far back as the record goes) and in most other geographical contexts as well. There are a handful of prominent theories.
Conservatives are more likely to be patriotic and religious. They are more likely to be (happily) married and less likely to divorce. Religiosity, in turn, correlates with greater subjective and objective well-being (here, here, here). So does patriotism. So does marriage. Consequently, some have argued that the apparent psychological benefit of conservatism actually comes from feeling deeper connections with one’s country, one’s family, and the Divine. On this model, conservatism itself would be largely incidental to the happiness gap. A liberal who was similarly religious, or patriotic, or had a similarly happy marriage, would be expected to have similar levels of happiness as conservative peers.
Lucky 13. At Civitas Outlook, Juliana Geron Pilon explains what it was like to celebrate Passover under Communism. From the beginning of the remembrance:
Although it wasn’t Sunday, my father didn’t go to work. I liked the day because we could spend it together and we would have a special dinner, with food we could not always afford. My father would bring home some delicious biscuit called “pasca,” packed in a box with strange letters on it. He would buy it in an unusual place, a dark little room in a building quite far from where we lived. The room was not at all like a store—only boxes of this biscuit everywhere—and the people were all very quiet, hardly looking at each other. My father would pick up the package quickly then leave, holding me by the hand very tightly, as if afraid he might lose me. For the special dinner we also had a large piece of meat for a main course, and even wine. I really would have liked to know what this festivity was all about.
My sister was curious about the funny letters on the matzo box, so my father told her it was Chinese. Zionism, like fascism, was considered illegal; it would have been dangerous to let her know there was “Zionist” writing in our house, since she was too small to remember what not to say. I trustingly, if unimaginatively, took the “biscuit” to be some kind of especially nourishing imported food, though it did seem strange that we ate it only once a year. “Maybe that’s the only time it’s available,” I reasoned, well versed in socialist rules of supply and demand.
I admit it did seem a bit strange that my father did not go to work for a whole day, but I didn’t demand any explanation. Since it was not always on the same date, I couldn’t consider it a regular holiday like November 7, the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. I did notice it was a spring-time celebration, and wondered whether such a special dinner was possible only when “pasca” was sold. But why make a big fuss over a mere cracker? I might have understood it better had we celebrated some fancy dessert, or tangerines, but “pasca”?!
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Rachael Waechter checks out Chicago’s Project H.O.O.D. Read it here.
Due. More PD: The great Maria D’Anselmi warns nonprofit worker bees against using AI to write grant applications. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: Why did the man paint his Easter eggs?
A: Because it was too hard to wallpaper them.
A Dios
Maybe next week will be less spiritually exhausting. One can hope!
May We Yearn for Peace and Justice
Jack Fowler, who is in a spider hole with the address jfowler@amphil.com.
