Sacred Stuff

Dear Intelligent American,

Ecumenical tolerance is begged as this space takes note of two moments of religious/cultural interest. The first is Pope Leo presiding over the inauguration and blessing of the Tower of Jesus Christ at the gorgeous and nearly completed Basilica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona (after a century-plus of construction, the finishing touches come later this year). The ceremony spiritually unveiling what is now the world’s tallest church was muy coolio.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, on June 11th America’s Roman Catholic bishops, semiquincentennially motivated, formally consecrated the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Seems like a suitable yin to the secular yang of UFC fights at the White House, no?

 

Great Dad Reading Straight Ahead

 

1. At The Spectator, Bill Kauffman explains ’Murica’s Teflon when it comes to affinity for soccer. From the piece:

It’s been 32 years since the World Cup first tainted American soil. The 1994 invasion was a colossal flop, despite the corporate subsidies lavished by Coca-Cola, Mastercard and the usual suspects. The title game—oh, excuse me: match—a thrilling 0-0 tie in regulation between Brazil and Italy, did not win millions of new fans.

The indifference of Americans to the World Cup will be ascribed to our provincialism and ignorance of the wider world, but in fact it owes more to good old-fashioned American stubbornness and the vestigial resistance to homogenization that produced, for instance, the popular rejection of the metric system. No doubt there are pockets of enthusiasm for the tournament: dweebs in what my friend Jason Peters calls Silly Con Valley are likely to be extra amorous with their AI girlfriends should the USA defeat Paraguay in the home team’s opener.

 

2. At First Things, Brian Patrick Eha considers a great author who, like many others, left life by his own hands. From the piece:

In the twentieth century the messengers shot themselves. Most did so metaphorically, of course, though a few machos—Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson come to mind—did literally blow their brains out. Whatever their methods, they took their lives just the same. In the United States, it was a string of troubled poets: Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Richard Brautigan. In England, poor neurasthenic Virginia Woolf, weighted with stones, went down in the welcoming water of the River Ouse. In Russia, the visionary Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941, still guilt-ridden at having failed to save her daughter from starving to death in a Moscow orphanage two decades before. Nine years later, the influential Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese ended his life. And in Japan, a trio of irreplaceable geniuses: the enfant terrible Osamu Dazai, in 1948, by drowning; most sensationally Yukio Mishima, by seppuku, in 1970, having earlier that day delivered to his publisher the manuscript of his final masterpiece; and less than two years later, Mishima’s great rival Yasunari Kawabata—who beat him out for the Nobel Prize and was as old as the century—by gas.

Others, amid terror and upheaval, took their lives in foreign lands. In Spain, Walter Benjamin swallowed an overdose of morphine to escape forever the Gestapo into whose clutches he feared to fall; and in Brazil, seventeen months later, the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig did the same with barbiturates, alongside his wife—their own deliverance from Europe unable to assuage the despair he felt concerning the continent they had left behind. Of those who survived persecution and displacement, many were walking wounded, prematurely posthumous. In 1987, forty years after his Auschwitz memoir, If This Is a Man, was published, Primo Levi stepped into the air of the stairwell in his apartment building in Turin, thirty feet up. No account of last century’s letters can escape these numbing facts. We are not permitted to look away from the litany of loss.

 

3. At Tablet Magazine, Itxu Díaz sees Paris aflame, and the rest of Europe gathering tinder. From the essay:

In this context, many of these immigrants, even those born in France, do not regard France as their homeland, and French law is not truly their law. An IFOP survey conducted last year illustrates the extent of this cultural fracture: 44% of French Muslims said that obeying Sharia is more important than obeying French law. Among those aged 15 to 24, the figure rises to 57%. That fact alone should be enough to prompt a serious reassessment of prevailing theories about gradual integration and multicultural social engineering.

Viewed in that light, the deep hostility toward France expressed by some Muslim immigrants becomes easier to understand. “Europe will soon go under because of its previous liberalism, which has proved childish and suicidal,” wrote Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész in L’ultime auberge. “Europe produced Hitler, and after Hitler there stands a continent with no arguments: the doors are wide open for Islam; no longer does anyone dare talk about race and religion, while at the same time, Islam only knows the language of hatred against all foreign races and religions.”

For decades, European politicians of both the left and the center right believed that secularism offered a neutral framework capable of ensuring harmonious coexistence among people of different faiths. That is one reason why references to Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage were removed during the drafting of the European Constitution. They were mistaken. As Michel Houellebecq argued years ago, “There is a more fundamental opposition between a Muslim and an atheist than between a Muslim and a Catholic.” Yet Europe’s sensible and moderate politicians do not listen to people like Houellebecq because they think they are crazy.

 

4. More Burning: At The European Conservative, Paul Birch finds the conflagrations a result of government hostility to the people it allegedly serves. From the piece:

What makes these situations so combustible is not immigration alone. It is the contempt shown towards those who raise concerns about it. Again and again, Europe’s citizenries are told their worries are shameful and that their experience counts for less than the delicate emotions of those people who rarely live with the consequences of the decisions they impose.

For decades, Britain’s working-class communities have been told to accept decisions made above their heads by politicians, civil servants, academics, and activists who rarely bear the burden themselves. When residents object to rapid change, they are smeared as backward. When they worry about crime, they are accused of fearmongering. When they speak about a lack of social cohesion, they are branded extremists. Their questions are not answered, and their dissent is not debated in anything like good faith. People can endure much, but not forever, the sense of being treated with disdain in their own country.

The result is a deep crisis of trust. Millions no longer see the political class as merely distant or incompetent but as actively hostile to their concerns.

 

5. At Law & Liberty, Colleen Sheehan pays respects to the late esteemed historian Gordon Wood. From the remembrance:

Few scholars have practiced this discipline as faithfully as Wood. Through works such as The Creation of the American Republic, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and Revolutionary Characters, he showed us the strangeness and grandeur of the eighteenth century. He revealed the Founders neither as saints nor as villains but as human beings confronting age-old political questions in unprecedented times. Their achievement, in his telling, was not perfection. It was the creation of a republic grounded in principles and institutional practices that defined a new order of the ages.

For this reason, Wood increasingly found himself at odds with intellectual trends that sought to reinterpret the American past primarily through the lens of oppression and power. His criticism of The 1619 Project arose from this concern. For Wood, the issue was not politics but historical truth. He objected to claims that portrayed the American Revolution principally as an effort to preserve slavery, not because he denied slavery’s central place in American history, but because he believed the argument distorted the evidence and misunderstood the Revolution itself.

 

6. At Catholic World Report, George Weigel keeps the spotlight on the prominent political prisoner Jimmy Lai. From the article:

For several years now, well-informed sources have told me that Jimmy is caught in a conflict between the Chinese foreign ministry and the Chinese internal security mandarins in Beijing and Hong Kong.

For the diplomats of the foreign ministry, Jimmy Lai is a problem they’d like to be relieved of so that it doesn’t come up, time and again, in negotiations with other powers. So at the time of Jimmy’s lengthy show trial in 2023-25, the foreign ministry favored “convict and expel:” save the repulsive National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 by finding him guilty of its violation, but then expel him from Hong Kong into exile—presumably in Great Britain, of which Jimmy is a citizen.

The security goons, on the other hand, are said to have been arguing that, if Jimmy is exiled, that will only encourage others in Hong Kong to protest the ever-increasing repression in that once-vibrant city-state. So, their line of reasoning goes, let the twenty-year sentence play out, and if that means Jimmy Lai dies in Stanley Prison, so be it. In their twisted minds, such cruelty might be useful.

 

7. At Religion & Liberty Online, Carrie Lukas offers an economic argument for keeping women’s sports the province of the XX-chromosome’d. From the article:

Yet these professional opportunities are just a small share of the overall economic impact of sports for women and girls. U.S. families spend $30 billion to $40 billion annually on youth sports. This includes travel, fees, and equipment. That’s between $800 and $1,000 per child, per sport. In other words, parents invest a lot in athletics for their children, because they know that this investment can pay off in a multitude of ways. Certainly some of the appeal of team sports is just the immediate enjoyment to be found playing on a team to begin with: building friendships and getting exercise. But many parents are also investing in the idea that any of these sports could stick and become a big part of their daughter’s future.

So what happens when “women’s” teams end up with an entirely male roster? Or when young female athletes hear about males winning competitions meant for women and girls? It sends a message to all those young female athletes—and their parents—that it might not really make sense to continue investing time and money in those extra training opportunities and travel teams. These young women and girls are being told that sports may be a dead end for them if they can’t be sure that female competitions are truly reserved for actual females. Entering competitions when you know the game is rigged against you is demoralizing, and that threatens to undermine a generation of female athletes.

 

8. At Providence Magazine, Nadya Williams urges higher ed to shun AI and embrace the medieval. From the piece:

In hindsight, the story of American higher education over the last two decades has been defined by ever newer and more expensive and technologically dependent pedagogies. And yet, for how much more expensive and tech-dependent these new forms of education are, they are so much worse than good old-fashioned books. Instead of showing students how to interrogate texts and participate in seminars, universities increasingly are moving all or most instruction online, especially for undergraduate core classes. Students only read short snippets of documents embedded into their institutions’ learning management systems—that is, when they actually read these short documents instead of having AI summarize them. Catching up with the times, such standardized tests as the SAT have reduced the length of reading excerpts for reading comprehension questions. And AI cheating at universities is rampant.

In other words, American institutions of higher learning have invested significantly more money into technology than it ever cost to just tell the kids to read books. And in the process, student learning outcomes have only declined. Anecdotally speaking, if you talk to any faculty who have been teaching for a decade or longer, they will tell you that every single year of their careers, they have seen students arrive at college less prepared than the year before. An academic friend recently asked his freshman students a question as an icebreaker on the first day of class: what is your favorite book of those you have read recently? None of the students were able to answer the question, but then one student sheepishly thought back to elementary school and named a children’s book he had enjoyed then. It was, it appears, the last time he had read a complete book.

 

9. At The American Spectator, Paul Kengor tracks the vanishing local newspaper. From the article:

As we talked about that article, I was struck by students not comprehending how one such news feature could be so influential. I proceeded to explain the power of the Sunday newspaper. This led to a discussion on what a “Sunday paper” is. These young folks had no idea. They had never heard of such a thing. What was this curiosity?

I tried to explain this entity. I proceeded to describe its much-anticipated “Classifieds” section for job seekers. I noted its huge sports section, inserts like Parade magazine, and the indispensable TV Guide. It was often wrapped by a wonderful comics section, printed in color and thus strikingly distinct from the remainder of the black-and-white newspaper. Often the lead comic was Charles Schulz’s Peanuts or Bil Keane’s Family Circus, which was a humorous look at the quirks and mirth of everyday family life. By the 1980s, both comics were bumped below the top of the fold by Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, which was sheer genius. Incredible work.

My old man, like many dads, would pick up the paper early Sunday morning or on the way home from Mass. Oftentimes, he grabbed it on Saturday evening. The papers would be in stacks piled up in front of cash registers. Everyone at the store was grabbing a Sunday paper, usually for about $1.25.

 

10. At The Daily Yonder, Kaitlyn McConnell reports on the struggles facing rural cemeteries. From the piece:

Just a few generations ago, death care was largely done in the home. Friends and family would gather at the home of the deceased, where they would sit up overnight with the body and lay it out after a person passed, following a series of superstitions (from stopping clocks to keeping cats away). They built the coffin and dug the grave. Tombstones were sometimes hand-made, but other times were ordered from far-off vendors or local engravers.

Given those bonds, it made sense that connections carried through to cemeteries. It was often seen during Decoration Day—what has evolved today into Memorial Day—when friends and family gathered at cemeteries for reunion-like events with food and focus on those who’d gone before.

That means the general maintenance such as mowing (and its associated expense), but also caring for overseeing stones that may be falling over or deteriorating. Rural migration has also disrupted long-held connections wherein when people remained close to the communities where they were rooted and raised. And it’s my sense that the diminishing care for rural cemeteries is compounded by the rise of cremation, which may mean fewer connections with gravesites overall going forward.

 

11. At Brownstone Journal, Joseph Varon assesses the consequences of assumed omniscience in the medical community. From the piece:

After more than four decades practicing medicine in emergency departments, intensive care units, and hospital wards, I have become increasingly convinced that many of the most difficult conflicts in healthcare are not caused by a lack of knowledge. More often, they arise when certainty begins to replace humility and when technical expertise is mistaken for complete understanding.

Sir William Osler frequently reminded physicians that medicine operates within a realm of uncertainty and probability. Scientific knowledge continues to advance at a breathtaking pace. We can image the human brain in amazing detail, manipulate physiology in ways previous that generations could scarcely imagine, and sustain life through technologies that would have seemed miraculous only decades ago. Yet despite these advances, medicine remains an imperfect science. Every diagnosis carries assumptions. Every prognosis carries probabilities. Every prediction carries limitations.

More than 2,000 years before the advent of modern intensive care, Socrates recognized a truth that remains relevant today: wisdom begins with an awareness of the limits of one’s own knowledge. Scientific progress should increase our humility, not diminish it. Yet modern medicine occasionally behaves as though every important question has already been answered. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in discussions surrounding life, death, and the limits of medical intervention.

 

12. At Minding the Campus, Peter Wood seeks a definition for “civilization.” From the article:

That said, I am confronted by this impending conference with the question of whether America and Europe are in the midst of civilizational divorce. The question assumes I know what a civilization is. And an echo of my 1975 self is warning me to be careful. I spent a good portion of my life immersed in ethnographies: detailed descriptions written by anthropologists of what people all over the world do with their time. Often, what they do is think up complex stories, rules of daily living, vendettas against their neighbors, and implausible explanations of stuff.

In today’s politically correct parlance, these are all “First Peoples,” and we owe their beliefs the utmost respect, because they too are bearers of “civilization.”

That, of course, stretches the word “civilization” to the breaking point. If everything people do is evidence of civilization, the word means nothing beyond something people sometimes do. If the word “civilization” has value, it comes from drawing a distinction. These folks have a written language, historical records, and the ability to build hypersonic missiles. These other folks, by contrast, have only some oral traditions and are handy with bows and arrows.

 

Lucky 13. At Modern Age, Michael Hartmann checks out a new book that assesses DEI’s threat to nonprofits. From the review:

Since 2020, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been transformed from what was basically a leftist academic theory into a protest. “These are now fighting words,” writes Greg Berman in The Nonprofit Crisis: Leadership Through the Culture Wars. In the book, he offers incisive, crosscutting critiques of the nonprofit sector, describing well-intentioned but disruptive “younger employees actively revolting against leadership that they view as racist, sexist, autocratic, and out-of-touch.” He laments that because of their politicization, nonprofits have become “both victims and purveyors of polarization.” From across the ideological spectrum, a “powerful DEI backlash has emerged that shows little sign of abating soon.”

Sounds serious, and it is.

Berman knows the sector well, and it shows in The Nonprofit Crisis. Readers who learn from the knowledge and wisdom in the book will be unable to avoid the crisis he expounds. With the help of his recommendations, they may at least have a chance to mitigate its damage.

 

Bonus. At RealClear History, Jacob Lane wonders what would have become of America had the Garfield presidency not been so quickly ended. From the piece:

Beyond his work to dismantle the spoils system, Garfield was a staunch advocate for civil rights.

A staunch Unionist and abolitionist, Garfield believed education was essential to preserving freedom after the Civil War. He supported federal funding for education in the South and elevated Black leaders, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to prominent federal positions.

That legacy is often forgotten today, raising the unavoidable question: What might have happened had Garfield been allowed to serve a full term, or even two? Would civil service reform have come sooner? Would the federal government have taken a stronger role in protecting Black voting rights in the South during the post-Reconstruction years?

No one can know for certain. But as America approaches its 250th birthday, Garfield reminds us that history is not shaped only by the leaders who succeeded. Often, it is shaped by leaders who never got the chance.

 

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Heather Murphy reports on that difficult corporal work of mercy: burying the dead. Read it here.

Due. More PD: Vladimir Snurenco suggests a replacement for DEI. Read it here.

 

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: What happened to the dad who lost his left leg?

A: Nothing bad. He’s all right.

 

A Dios

On our first Father’s Day (1986) as a married couple, Big Jim—the father-in-law (“Call me ‘FIL’”)—passed away. The Marine was a seasoned cancer battler: If one could accumulate points for radiation sessions he’d have had enough to redeem for a new Mack (FIL was an independent trucker, King of the Interstate, back in the days when the men behind the wheel could read the road signage). Some respiratory bug brought him to the hospital—he beat it, went home, but had picked up a staph infection, and within a day went back, albeit drained of resources. The bacteria could not be beaten, and so FIL left the bonds of earth on the very day he should have been honored by his brood. Mrs. Yours Truly loved her dad dearly, and deservedly. So did the many men and women he helped find sobriety. To God, country, and family he was Semper fi. If only his grandchildren could have known him . . . hopefully some day, in a better place, they will. He is not forgotten on Father’s Day. Rest in Peace, and blessings to all dads this Sunday.

May the Father of Us All Give Graces to All of Us Fathers,

Jack Fowler, who contemplates pater familias duties at jfowler@amphil.com.

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