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pamphletstoinspire · 6 years ago

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Americanism, Quietism, and Catholicism

The escalating crisis in the Church is lately having the sad effect of fostering enmities between those who ought to be, or who once were, allies. Aided by a social media that lets us too easily forget our good manners and those things that manners are there to guard, Christian virtues, Catholics who are beset on all sides in the culture wars of Church and State are too quickly condemning one another over trivial or entirely personal issues. This is sad to watch.

One recent altercation I saw — and I should mention that it was quite mild by comparison — was a public disagreement between two Catholics on the subject of what might be called “activism versus interiority.” One party argued that there is too much of an emphasis on activism in the orthodox Catholic camp and that we need to put a greater emphasis on prayer and the interior life; the other party asserted the genuine need for activism and seemed to judge the other’s position to be a copout — though he did not use that word.

From what I could tell, the two parties were arguing about questions of method and prudence, but the argument does touch upon the subject matter of two historical heresies and the Catholic responses thereto, the study of which can help us formulate answers to questions of prudence and method.

The more recent historical heresy, and one very “close to home” for Americans is the heresy that bears our own name, Americanism. One of the main features of this error, which summarily defined “American Catholicism” as something different from Old-World Catholicism, was that it detracted from such traditional Catholic things as monasticism, contemplation, asceticism, elaborate liturgical observance, and other expressions of Catholicity that emphasize Christian interiority — things pertaining to the so-called “passive virtues.” The Americanists favored, by contrast, the building up of institutions, preaching, and external works of mercy, which pertain to the so-called “active virtues.” In condemning this aspect of Americanism in Testem Benevolentiae (Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae Concerning New Opinions, Virtue, Nature and Grace, With Regard to Americanism Pope Leo XIII - 1899 To Our Beloved Son, James Cardinal Gibbons, Cardinal Priest of the Title Sancta Maria, Beyond the Tiber, Archbishop of Baltimore):, Leo XIII outright denies this distinction between “active” and “passive” virtue:

This over esteem of natural virtue finds a method of expression in assuming to divide all virtues in active and passive, and it is alleged that whereas passive virtues found better place in past times, our age is to be characterized by the active. That such a division and distinction cannot be maintained is patent-for there is not, nor can there be, merely passive virtue. “Virtue,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, “designates the perfection of some faculty, but [the] end of such faculty is an act, and an act of virtue is naught else than the good use of free will,” acting, that is to say, under the grace of God if the act be one of supernatural virtue.

What is external activism without internal grace but naturalism? And if supernatural grace is the principle for meritorious virtuous activity, then ought we not join to any external living of the virtues a robust interior life that avails itself of all the traditional means of obtaining divine grace, including mental prayer?

Before the dawn of the modern welfare state, Americans were “can-do” people, a people who had enshrined self-reliance, independence, and rugged individualism in our collective psyche since colonial days. While some of these concepts can be baptized and incorporated into a life of Christian virtue others simply need to be corrected. The Americanists failed at this enterprise of Christianizing the American temperament. They chose instead to make a priority of Americanizing Catholicism before they would convert America with the new amalgam. Their enterprise did not convert America, but it did much to eviscerate Catholicism here.

It is evident that Leo XIII considered Americanism to have some tendencies of that Naturalism which had already been condemned by Bl. Pope Pius IX.

If there be a heresy that is the opposite of Americanism — at least on this particular point pertaining to the spiritual life and virtue — it is Quietism. This heresy, which owes its name to the Latin word quies, meaning “repose” or “inactivity,” downplayed, or, in its extreme forms, outright denied the necessity of human activity in the spiritual life. All is God; man must remain totally inactive and allow God alone to act in him. Historically, some form or other of quietism had existed among Christians for over a millennium before the Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos gave us the modern heresy of Quietism. In Molinos’ system, man does not need to practice virtue at all, since God’s activity in the soul is all that matters. As a perverse result of his fundamental error, like the earlier group of Spanish false mystics known as the Alumbrados, Molinos excused vice in himself and in his numerous disciples as something of no account. The Church took very decisive action in condemning him and his heresy.

A milder form of the heresy of Quietism, called Semiquietism, was advocated by the French laywoman Madame Guyon and her spiritual-director (disciple, really), Archbishop François Fénelon. The former was infected with the errors by her previous spiritual director, a Barnabite priest, and she then influenced the brilliant young archbishop who became her new director. Fénelon, like Madame Guyon, avoided the gross moral errors of Molinos. Both accepted the necessity of keeping the commandments. Yet, they accepted the Quietist error of the “pure love of God,” which Fénelon explained in a very problematic way in this book, The Maxims of the Saints. After a long and acrimonious controversy involving the famous Bishop Bossuet as an adversary (who, coincidentally, had consecrated Fénelon to the episcopate and was formerly his friend) the book was condemned by the Holy See and, very humbly, Archbishop Fénelon unreservedly accepted the condemnation. His subsequent life appears to have been very edifying, and he gave every sign of being a very zealous successor of the Apostles as Archbishop of Cambrai (he never lost his position, even when condemned, as he completely and immediately accepted the condemnation). Archbishop Fénelon was also known to be very anti-Jansenist, which is a good thing.

The errors we have above mentioned have been beautifully and tersely contrasted with each other and with the Catholic truth in what has become my favorite book of spiritual reading (after Holy Scripture): The Interior Life Simplified and Reduced to Its Fundamental Principle, by the Carthusian, Dom François de Sales Pollien (1853-1936). He is not contrasting Quietism with Americanism, but, rather, with Naturalism; as we have pointed out, though, Americanism had certain naturalistic tendencies in its outlook on the virtues. The following passage comes in the midst of a commentary on Psalm 126, where he has come to the words, “rise ye after you have sitten” (Latin: Surgite postquam sederitis), which Dom François uses to illustrate the Catholic mean between Quietism and Naturalism:

Surgite postquam sederitis. — Here is the first word, the primary secret of piety: acceptance. Acceptance of the action of God’s good pleasure: this is the starting-point and beginning of everything, all depends upon this. Surgite postquam sederitis; we must be seated before we can rise up, and we must rise up after being seated. These three words perfectly characterize, at this point, both Christian truth, and the falsehood of the extremes which are opposed to it. Naturalism says: “Surgite, rise up”; and it takes away what follows. Quietism says: “Sederitis, sit still”; and it omits what goes before. Christianity says: “Surgite postquam sederitis, rise up after you have sat still”; and it neither omits nor takes away anything. Naturalism denies God’s action, Quietism gets rid of man’s action, Christianity demands the union and submission of man’s action to God’s. And a wonderful thing is this sitting down and this action, this repose of leaning upon God and this acting with God: they are ever allied and combined to form the divine life in me, which is essentially made up of repose and action. Is not all life action in repose?

Further, Naturalism and Quietism are not merely errors of the way, they are also mistaken as to the end, and as to the means. Here, a short parenthesis may perhaps not be wasted in describing in a general way these two errors which gather up the divergent tendencies of human fallacies. As to the end, Naturalism gets rid of, or tends to get rid of, God’s glory, leaving nothing but human pleasure behind. As to the way, it does away with, or tends to do away with, God’s action, reckoning almost entirely upon human action. As to the means, it destroys or tends to destroy grace, and puts all its hope in human expedients. God more or less banished from man’s life and work and instruments, such is Naturalism and such are all of its tendencies. Quietism, on the other hand, annuls, or tends to annul, man’s part in the hope of his salvation, leaving behind nothing but God’s glory as the end. It annihilates, or tends to annihilate, human activity, to leave behind nothing but God’s action, as the way. It suppresses, or tends to suppress, spiritual exercises and means, to allow nothing but grace to work as a means. Man lowered, and mutilated as to his end and activity and means, such is Quietism and such are all the tendencies that belong to it. The specific idea of Christianity is to be the union, unimpaired yet subordinate, of the human with the divine. Man’s salvation united with and subordinate to God’s glory, as the end; man’s action united with and subordinate to God’s action, as the way; man’s devotional exercises united with and subordinate to God’s grace, as the means — such is Christianity.

Strangely, both Quietism and Americanism have one point of agreement, and that is a downplay of the traditional approach to asceticism in the spiritual life. Notice here that both heretical extremes contradicted tradition; hence, a return to tradition is the remedy to both errors.

It may be objected that what I have written above, and what I have quoted from Dom François de Sales, pertains not to the realm of external activity at all, but to the spiritual life. But that objection reveals a deeper problem, as it neglects this fundamental truth: as Catholics, our external life, our whole life, in fact, is to be a life of virtue. Whether a man is attending Sunday Mass or plying his trade or recreating with his family, he is a Christian and is to approach all these things as a Christian. If we have any external apostolate, whether we are clerics, religious, or layfolk, we are obliged to approach that apostolate as a Christian thing, as a series of virtuous activities or “good works.”

Michael Voris recently closed out an episode of the Vortex with words expressive of his own approach to the apostolate (in this instance, the pro-life struggle against “Bullying from the Left”). He said, “Pray and fight; faith and good works.” Either the Catholic “fight” is a meritorious good work done in grace with the aid of prayer, or it is nothing — or worse than nothing, it is sin. To employ a concept I wrote about last time, our grace-aided activity in this world is our “tropology,” the way we work out our salvation.

In the words of Saint Paul: “Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatsoever else you do, do all to the glory of God” (I Cor. 10:31).

BY: BROTHER ANDRÉ MARIE

From: www.pamphletstoinspire.com

#americanism quietism catholicism

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thehalalgirlofficial · 7 years ago

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The Golden Age of Spain Al-Andalus

From 711-1492 AD, the majority of modern day Spain and Portugal was under Muslim rule. The arabic name given to this region was al-Andalus. Today, the southern part of Spain, where Muslim control lasted the longest, still bears the name Andalusia. The Muslims entered this region through Tariq Bin Ziayd, who easily took over the country due to its weakness after a recent civil war. Muslims entered Spain not as tyrants or oppressors, rather as liberators. This is because in their society, many Jews and Christians held government positions. In fact the Golden Age of Jewish history is known as the period of Muslim rule in Spain. Islam allowed the Jews to flourish, with the example of the renowned philosopher Maimonides, Musa ibn Maymun. Spain was home to by far the largest and most brilliant Jewish community in Europe; elsewhere, they were hounded and persecuted. Although non-Muslims paid more in taxes than the Muslims, it was by far less than any previous government had imposed upon them. In addition, it obviously wasn't much of a burden, however, since non-Muslims freely opted and longed to live under Muslim rule.

No where else has there been so long and so close of a relationship between the 3 Great faiths. All Jews and Christians were allowed to maintain their beliefs and live their lives as they desired as long as they respected their Muslim rulers. The tolerance that was displayed towards the Jews and Christians enabled them all to live together in relative peace and harmony, an indication of the Greatness of Islam. As a result of the compassion Islam displayed towards the non-Muslims inhabitants, many of them embraced it as their religion.

Allah says Himself, "Say to the disbelievers I do not worship that which you worship. Nor do you worship that which I worship. And Nor will I worship that which you have worshiped. Neither will you worship that which I worship. To you belongs your religion, and to me mine."

As a result of the tolerance displayed by Islam, the incredibly rich language of the Muslims became the official language of literature and scholarship in Spain for all. Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike devoted their time in studying Arabic. Christians essentially spoke Arabic, which was often considered better than their Latin. They absorbed the Arabic culture so much so that they began to be called, "mozarabs" a corruption of "must'arib" meaning the "Arabized ones." Furthermore, the Christian Priest Alvaro complained in the 9th century that Christians preferred to read Arabic writings and studied Muslim theologians and philosophers rather than their own. He exclaimed, "Oh, the pain and the sorrow! The Christians have even forgotten their own language, and in every thousand you will not find one who can write a letter in respectable Latin to a friend, while as soon as they have to write Arabic, there is no difficulty in finding a whole multitude who can express themselves with the greatest elegance in this language..."

Under their rule, Muslims made Spain a center for learning and knowledge. The Muslims were taught reading, writing, math, Arabic, Qur'an, and Hadith, and became leaders in math, science, medicine, astronomy, navigation, etc. Al-Andalus became renowned for its prosperity as people who quested for knowledge journeyed from afar to learn in its universities under the feet of the Muslims. As a result, Andalus gave rise to a great many scholars. Muslim Spain produced philosophers, physicians, scientists, judges, artists, and the like. Ibn Rushd, Ibn Sina, Ibn Zuhr, and Al-Razi,to name a few, were all Muslims educated in Andalus. Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, was also educated in Andalusia. Great renowned Christian men like St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante borrowed their philosophies from the Andalusian philosophers. Ironically, Thomas Aquinas described Arabs as "brutal men dwelling in the desert."

The Islamic civilization had reached its peak in the 10th century, and by 1100, the number of Muslims rose to 5.6 million. There existed in Cordoba alone, 200,000 houses, 600 mosques, 900 public baths, 10,000 lamps, 50 hospitals, and lighted and paved streets. Libraries and research institutions grew rapidly in Muslim Spain, while the rest of Europe remained illiterate. Muslim Spain had truly become an area unique to the entire world.

The Muslim artisans applied their skills in architecture in to making masajid and palaces. The Alhambra Palace, and The Great Mosque of Cordoba, are two of the famous magnificent masterpieces of the Muslims which can still be seen today. Of the Alhambra, one Muslim poet wrote:

"A sun dwells in this place and even its shadow is blessed.

In this palace a multitude of pleasures capture the eye and suspend the intellect.

Here a crystal world teaches marvels.

Everywhere Beauty is carved, opulence is manifest."

On the greatness of the Mosque of Cordoba, one poet praises it by saying, “'The gold shines in your domes like the lightning which flashes among the clouds.”

Muslim Cordoba was described as the "jewel of the tenth century," often compared with Constantinople and Baghdad.

But like all great empires, Muslim Spain had eventually fallen.

Abu Bakr (RA) said, “...Where are the great kings who built cities and castles and fortified them with towering walls? What happened to the lionhearted valorous ones who made their enemy suffer humiliation in the battlefields? Time waned under their feet and they ended inside dark graves. Think of it and take heed.”

Islam had remained strong in Spain for eight centuries. However, as the military power in the Christian North began to strengthen, Al-Andalus gradually began to shrink. The last Amir, Abu Abdullah, more often known as Boabdil, surrendered Granada in 1492. He was called by his people as, "Al-Ghalib,” The Conqueror. Yet, when recognizing his imminent defeat, he exclaimed otherwise proclaiming that none other than Allah was the Greatest. “Wa La Ghalib illa Allah” "There is no Conqueror except Allah," became the motto of his descendents.

Queen Isabella of Aragon, in her quest to eradicate Islam from Spain, issued forth decrees of mass conversions in her 'Holy War' against the Muslims. Muslim prayers were forbidden and masaajid in their original splendor were destroyed and converted into churches. Muslims were converted to Christianity, but were usually insincere Christians fearing for their lives, and remained Muslim by heart. They too, called "Moriscos" were soon to be expelled, because they weren't accepted as real Christians. Eventually, the Muslims and Islam disappeared from Spain entirely.

As one historian says, "The Arabs suddenly appeared in Spain like a star which crosses through the air with its light, spreads its flames on the Horizon and then vanishes rapidly into naught."

By analyzing the tragedy of Islam in Andalus, we find that the Muslims of Spain disregarded the fact that Allah indeed blessed them with Islam, and therefore went astray. They were so successful that as a result, Muslims believed that they treasured the wealth they accumulated so much so that they became arrogant and deviated from the practice of Islam; disregarding the commandments of Allah, and the Sunnah. They failed to remember their prosperity and wealth came from Allah and Him alone. Therefore, Allah took away the abundance of wealth, power, supremacy, and favors that He bestowed upon them so that they would remember. Allah says in the Qur'an.

"Remember Me, and I will remember you. Give thanks to Me and never deny Me"

When the Muslims in Spain neglected Allah, He therefore neglected them. Allah asks mankind repeatedly in Surah Rahman, “Which of the favors of your Lord will you deny?"

The legacy of al-Andalus serves as a lesson for Muslims. The persecution of Muslims in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries was a great trial of their faith, as is the entire life of a Muslim; this was a great challenge from Allah. In the end, many died fighting for Islam.

Spain and the West will forever stand in the debt of the Muslims of Al Andalus. Their contribution to knowledge eventually lead to the European Renaissance. The 1.2 billion plus Muslims of the world today have the same potential as of the Muslims of the past. By its outstanding example, Muslim Spain proves to the world that as a melting pot of religious faiths and races, we can, in reality, live and prosper with one another.

credits: @certifiedmail

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artbeacondsm · 6 years ago

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Spotlight on Local Artist Trey Reis

Interview by Francess Dunbar

Trey Reis, A Study in Disrupting Old Patterns: Red, 2018.

Though your association with the word collage may be cutting and pasting magazines with a glue stick in high school, technology has opened many doors in this medium, expanding the definition to include many other interpretive works that combine several pieces. Local artist Trey Reis creates his collages both in the conventional paper-and-glue style and with sound fragments.

Deb Anders-Bond Collage Workshop, 2014 Roach Motel Zinefest

Trey was influenced by another local artist: Deborah Anders-Bond. Anders Bond chooses her images from used books and magazines, an environmentally friendly practice that recycles paper & ink which would otherwise be burned or buried in a landfill. It also ensures that her work is full of unique and interesting imagery centered around a color scheme though she was careful to specify that the collages “build themselves” rather than having a unifying theme or idea behind them. When asked about her impact on Trey’s work, she was modest, saying that she thinks he has surpassed her influence. “Trey’s work becomes more and more abstract, although the separate images are visible upon close inspection,” said Anders-Bond. “I think we both tend to use a certain color or color range and stay within it as we build our collages. In comparison, I might say my collages are personally symbolic, although that might not translate to viewers.”

Read our interview with Trey below and be sure to check out Deborah Anders-Bond’s collage booth as well as Reis’s new exhibition at the Art Terrarium Pop-Up Market on Saturday, June 23.

As an artist, you work in many mediums to create collages, including sound. How do these different mediums affect your work and its meaning?

For me, the collage medium is all about deconstruction and recontextualization. It’s analyzing the content and form of objects removed from their intended framework. I think this is what St. Thomas Aquinas was getting at with his writings on essence and existence. It became the main process behind my “Piece” exhibit on display at the Art Terrarium this month.

The sound collages begin with that same process but the end result is quite a bit different. After I’ve found and isolated my individual sounds, I work them into repeating loops of varying lengths and that’s what forms the layers of my sound collages. The application of effects to these loops is how I dissect them. Different filters allow me to draw forth sounds that can oftentimes be hidden by the mixing process, and that’s how familiar noises are turned into rhythms and melodies that reveal themselves in different ways as they repeat.

I don’t put much thought into meaning. If I work with something long enough, it always gains meaning to me through connotations or repeated thoughts I have when working on it. If these ever become complete concepts or ideas, it’s often long after the work has been finished, and is usually connected to something I may have watched or read or heard that otherwise felt entirely unrelated to what I was working on.

Do you feel you're pushing the boundary of what can be called a collage?

No, but I do try and approach collage with techniques from other mediums. People often look at collages as puzzles, which is appropriate, but I find them to be more like paintings. Aside from associations we may have with color or texture, paint has no context until applied to the canvas. This is how I feel when I’ve cut out all of my pieces and am beginning the gluing process for a collage.

Oftentimes, specific colors can take on musical qualities in any given piece. How darker colors can serve percussive or rhythmic purposes, or how a hint of a bright color somewhere can feel like a melodic embellishment.

What local artists have influenced and inspired you? What about artists from other places?

Iowa State University professor, Alex Braidwood, designs these listening tools that invite listeners to question how and why we hear the things we do. I think this is a useful study for all of our senses. It helped me learn to perceive things beyond their intrinsic meaning or purpose, instead focusing on secondary qualities, which I believe is where a lot of the connectivity between our sensory experiences exists.

Bruce James Bales, my studio mate and local filmmaker, has this ability to deconstruct a location down into its unique details and then build up a narrative that weaves these details into the framework. I’ve always found similarities between that approach and the way I will flip through books looking for materials for a new collage. It’s a way of removing the context from things and instead focusing on their sensory values. I think it’s important to watch films with your senses instead of your brain, and I think that method can be applied to a lot of different artistic mediums.

Looking at Deb Anders-Bond’s collages throughout the years taught me to break down what I see into texture, form, and color, which was a very important starting point for much of the work I’ve done in Des Moines. I used to find the individual pieces in collage work that I saw. The way Deb blends her pieces together really helped me see how collage pieces can forgo their intended purpose in favor of something with larger capacity for connectivity.

Jordan Zantow’s paintings bridged the gap for me between psychedelia and punk, blending maximalism with messiness. He was one of the first great local artists I knew, and I met him when I was much younger, long before I ever thought I was going to be an artist.

Field recordings and sound collage techniques have been used more and more in contemporary electronic music, and I draw more inspiration from music than anything else. Musicians like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Arca, and Onehotrix Point Never are among some of my lasting favorites. I really enjoy some of the older weirdos like Lonnie Holley and Laraaji, who were even too out there for much of the New Age crowd at the time.

I read something recently on this meditative/healing music from Morocco called Gnawa and I’ve been listening to a lot of that lately. It’s very rhythmic and repetitive and the details are subtle, so it feels very familiar with regard to my own collage work.

What are you doing for Art Week 2018?

After nearly two years of assembly, I am finally exhibiting my visual collage work at the Art Terrarium during Art Week. The exhibit is called “Piece: A Study in Disrupting Old Patterns” and will be on display during the Art Terrarium’s open hours throughout the week, as well as during their Local Art Pop Up Market on Saturday, June 23. The exhibit will run through the end of July.

#art week #artweekdsm #trey reis #deborah anders-bond #collage

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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Father Reginald Foster Used Latin to Bring History Into the Present

https://sciencespies.com/history/father-reginald-foster-used-latin-to-bring-history-into-the-present/

Father Reginald Foster Used Latin to Bring History Into the Present

The death of Latin has been greatly exaggerated.

Of course, Latin is no longer the default language for European learning and diplomacy, as it was from the Roman Empire through the early modern period. Since the implementation of Vatican II in the early 1960s, even many priests don’t speak the language in a meaningful way. Still, despite Latin’s decline in political and ecclesiastical circles, hundreds of folks around the globe continue to speak it as a living language—and no teacher is more responsible for the world’s remaining crop of latineloquentes (“Latin speakers”) as Friar Reginald Foster, the Carmelite monk who served as Latin secretary to four popes from 1969 until 2009, translating diplomatic papers and papal encyclicals into Latin, which remains the official language of the Holy See. Foster died on Christmas Day, at the age of 81.

In 2007, Foster himself lamented to the BBC that he thought the language was on its way out altogether. He worried that a modern world, illiterate in Latin, would lose contact with crucial portions of history, and half-jokingly recommended that then-Pope Benedict XVI replace Italy’s traditional siesta with a two-hour daily Latin reading.

The Pope never took up Foster’s suggestion, but the irony is that Foster had already managed, almost single-handedly, to reverse some of the trends that so troubled him. His deepest passion was teaching Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, starting in 1977, and running his famous spoken Latin course nearly every summer, beginning in 1985. Through these courses, Foster launched multiple generations of classicists who have used his techniques to bring their students into closer contact with a past that, until recently, had seemed to be vanishing.

Foster is well remembered for his boisterous, generous presence in the classroom and on field trips. He was beloved among students, and distrusted by Vatican grandees, for his eccentric habits, which included dressing in a blue plumber’s suit and issuing caustic statements about church hypocrisy. When he was teaching—in Rome until 2009, thereafter in Wisconsin—he often nursed a glass of wine. Known by the Latin sobriquet “Reginaldus” to his legions of pupils, who in turn refer to themselves as “Reginaldians,” Foster was a hero and a jester, a pug-nosed provocateur with a satirical streak who would have fit right into a comic epistle by Horace or Erasmus. “Like Socrates, his default mode in public was ironic,” says Michael Fontaine, an administrator and professor of Classics at Cornell University.

A portrait of Foster by artist Lucy Plowe

(Courtesy of Michael Fontaine)

Fontaine, who first met Foster in the spring of 1997, makes no bones about the extent of Foster’s legacy.

“Reginald Foster succeeded in reversing the decline in living Latin. He actually, really, genuinely did it. Reggie’s success is total: There is a burgeoning movement and critical mass of young people who have now learned Latin [as a spoken language]. Reggie taught some, his students taught some, those people are teaching some, and on and on. Some of the best Latinists in the world are in their 20s or early 30s”—a remarkable development that Fontaine credits squarely to Foster’s peerless influence.

Leah Whittington, an English professor at Harvard University, who first met Foster during a summer Latin course in 1997 when she was 17, recalls the friar’s “phenomenal, ebullient energy.” “He never sat down, never seemed to need rest or eat or sleep,” Whittington says. “It was as though he was fueled from within by love for Latin, love for his work, love for his students. I had never been pushed so hard by a teacher.”

Like all of Foster’s students who spoke with Smithsonian, Whittington recalls his visionary dedication to preserving Latin by keeping it alive in everyday conversation.

“For most classicists trained in the United States or in Great Britain, Latin was a learned, non-spoken language; it was not a language that one could converse in, like French or Spanish. But for Reginald, Latin was an everyday functional language that he used with his friends, his teachers, his colleagues, with himself and even in his dreams.”

Foster went to extraordinary lengths to make sure he was keeping his students as engaged as possible with their work outside the classroom, which the friar referred to not as homework but as ludi domestici—”games to play at home.” This playful approach often proved a revelation to students used to more staid ways of teaching a language they’d been told was dead. “It’s so rare to have an immersion experience in Latin that it couldn’t fail to improve and deepen your knowledge of the language and history,” says Scott Ettinger, a Latin and Greek teacher in the Bronx, who attended Foster’s summer course in 1996.

Daniel Gallagher, who in 2009 succeeded Foster in the Latin section of the Vatican Secretariat and today teaches the language at Cornell University, still marvels at Foster’s “extreme dedication to his students.”

“He told us, ‘Call me at 2 in the morning if you’re stuck,'” says Gallagher, who began studying with Foster in October 1995. “He said, ‘I’ll even come to your house to teach you Latin.’ And I learned that he wasn’t kidding—he really would come to my house.”

Foster launched multiple generations of classicists who have used his techniques to bring their students into closer contact with a past that, until recently, had seemed to be vanishing.

(Courtesy of Michael Fontaine)

Classicist Jason Pedicone recalls his first course with Foster in 2004: “He made me feel like learning Latin was a key that would unlock endless beauty and wisdom of history, art and literature.”

“Studying Greek and Latin with Reginald was spiritually enriching,” he says. “I don’t mean that in a doctrinal way; it was just really life-affirming and made me stand in awe of humanity and civilization.” In 2010, Pedicone co-founded the Paideia Institute with Eric Hewett, another of Foster’s students; the organization offers immersive courses in Latin and Greek.

Tales of Foster have long been common among anglophone classicists. Even those who never visited him in Rome had often heard something about this eccentric priest who gave free, immersive Latin lessons.

“I had heard for some time that there was a priest in Rome who spoke Latin and gave free summer courses where you actually spoke Latin,” says Alice Rubinstein, a now-retired Latin teacher living in Virginia. “I remember some woman telling me he was like a priestly version of Don Rickles.”

“[Foster] reminds me of the humanists I study in the 15th century, especially Lorenzo Valla,” says classicist Chris Celenza, a dean at Johns Hopkins University who took courses with Foster in 1993 and marvels at the friar’s unerring ability to bring the past into the present, to make old texts new. “Foster could almost ventriloquize the authors we were studying. He was a living anachronism, and I think he knew it and kind of delighted in that.”

In his obituary for Foster, John Byron Kuhner, who is writing a biography of the friar, sounded a similar note about Reginaldus’ uncanny ability to make ancient writers seem intimate and accessible—a closeness that he fostered in his students: “The writers and artists of the past seemed to be equally [Foster’s] friends. He loved them in a way we could see, the way we love our living friends who happen to be far away.”

Foster’s famous summer Latin course was full of day trips. Traditional jaunts included the site in Formia where Cicero was assassinated by Mark Antony’s men in 43 B.C. (“Reginald would weep while reciting Cicero’s epitaph,” Whittington recalls); the gardens at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence, where students sang Latin songs to “papal bulls”—that is, cows grazing outside the Pope’s house; to the port town of Ostia; Pompeii and Naples; the spot at Largo Argentina in Rome where Julius Caesar was assassinated; the castle in Latium where Thomas Aquinas was born.

“Walking with Reggie through these Italian sites made Rome come alive in a way that it couldn’t have without someone of his encyclopedic knowledge of Latin,” says Alexander Stille, a journalism professor at Columbia University, who profiled Foster for the American Scholar in 1994.

“Foster used to tell us that ‘Reading Augustine in translation is like listening to Mozart on a jukebox,'” Stille says, “and that being in Rome without access to Latin was to see an impoverished version of it. He made the city come alive.”

Foster is well remembered for his boisterous, generous presence in the classroom and on field trips.

(Courtesy of Michael Fontaine)

There are many classicists (I am one of them) who never met Foster but who benefited from his teachings by studying under his protégés, many of whom use techniques pioneered by Foster.

“When I led student trips to Italy, I modeled them on the field trips Foster used to take with us,” says Helen Schultz, now a Latin teacher at a private school in New Hampshire. “On one memorable occasion, he joined me and a group of my students to talk about their studies and his work at the Vatican. He didn’t just love Latin; he also loved and cared deeply about every one of the students who learned from him and were inspired by him to do our best to keep his legacy alive.”

Like many of Foster’s students, Ada Palmer, a European history professor at the University of Chicago, says the friar opened up a whole world of post-Classical Latin literature for his charges. Rather than falling back on the typical, and almost entirely ancient, canon taught in most classrooms, he introduced scholars to the Latin of St. Jerome’s autobiography, or medieval bestiaries, or Renaissance books of magic, or rollicking pub songs from the 17th and 18th centuries, Palmer says, and thereby widened the possibilities for Latin studies across the world.

“Reggie’s enthusiasm was for all Latin equally,” Palmer says, “and he encouraged us to explore the whole vast, tangled and beautiful garden of Latin, and not just the few showpiece roses at its center. He trained scholars who have revolutionized many fields of history and literary studies.”

Celenza agrees, referring to the millions of pages of Latin from the Renaissance onward as “a lost continent” that Foster played a central role in rediscovering.

Foster was famous for many of his one-liners, perhaps none more so than his frequent reminder to students that “Every bum and prostitute in ancient Rome spoke Latin.” (In one variant on this line, “dog-catcher” takes the place of “bum.”) His point was that one needn’t be an elite to appreciate the riches of a language that began, after all, as a vernacular. But Foster’s interest in bums and prostitutes was not merely rhetorical. “He did a lot of good for the prostitutes of Rome,” Ettinger says. Foster was known for giving what little money he had to the city’s downtrodden, even though, by keeping his classes free, he ensured that he had practically no income. (He was also known sometimes to pay a student’s rent in Rome for a semester.)

“In one’s life, if you’re lucky, you’ll meet a certain number of people who are genuinely extraordinary and who try to change your life in some way. Reggie was one of those people in my life,” Stille says. “There were few people on the planet who have the relationship to Latin that he did.”

In his final weeks, Foster’s friends say, he was as boisterous as ever, even after testing positive for Covid-19: He continued working with Daniel P. McCarthy—a Benedictine monk who began studying with Foster in the fall of 1999—on their book series codifying Foster’s teaching methods. And he maintained lively conversations with protégés, often in Latin, via phone and video calls.

Today, classicists, philologists and anyone else who wishes they had taken a Latin immersion course with Foster can console themselves with several options offered by his former students. Each summer, you will find Ettinger helping organize the annual Conventiculum aestivum (“summer convention”) in Lexington, Kentucky, an 8- to 12-day immersive program that welcomes 40 to 80 attendees a year. Other Foster protégés, including Whittington, Gallagher, Fontaine and Palmer, have taught immersive classes through the Paideia Institute. Foster may be gone, but his dedication to Latin as a living language, one that puts us in direct conversation with our past, continues to thrive against all odds.

#History

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theresgloryforyou · 7 years ago

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Two weeks ago a man in France was arrested for raping his daughter. She’d gone to her school counselor and then the police, but they needed “hard evidence.” So, she videotaped her next assault. Her father was eventually arrested. His attorney explained, “There was a period when he was unemployed and in the middle of a divorce. He insists that these acts did not stretch back further than three or four months. His daughter says longer. But everyone should be very careful in what they say.” Because, really, even despite her seeking help, her testimony, her bravery in setting up a webcam to film her father raping her, you really can’t believe what the girl says, can you? Everyone “knows” this. Even children. Three years ago, in fly-on-the-wall fashion of parent drivers everywhere, I listened while a 14-year-old girl in the back seat of my car described how angry she was that her parents had stopped allowing her to walk home alone just because a girl in her neighborhood “claimed she was raped.” When I asked her if there was any reason to think the girl’s story was not true, she said, “Girls lie about rape all the time.” She didn’t know the person, she just assumed she was lying. Fast-forward three years, again in a car. This time a 13-year-old refused to believe that when the newly appointed pope was 12 he’d written a “love letter” to the girl living next door. The child insisted stubbornly that the woman, now in the news, had to be a liar because the pope, even as a boy, would not have written a love letter. In both cases, to my children’s bottomless pool of chagrin, I pulled the car over so I could ask the girls why they were so sure that the women’s accounts were not credible. We talked about their assumptions, about who gets to be believed, double standards regarding sex, and how culture portrays women. Fun times with Mom. No one says, “You can’t trust women,” but distrust them we do. College students surveyed revealed that they think up to 50% of their female peers lie when they accuse someone of rape, despite wide-scale evidence and multi-country studies that show the incidence of false rape reports to be in the 2%-8% range, pretty much the same as false claims for other crimes. As late as 2003, people jokingly (wink, wink) referred to Philadelphia’s sex crimes unit as “the lying bitch unit.” If an 11-year-old girl told an adult that her father took out a Craigslist ad to find someone to beat and rape her while he watched, as recently actually occurred, what do you think the response would be? Would she need to provide a videotape after the fact? It goes way beyond sexual assault as well. That’s just the most likely and obvious demonstration of “women are born to lie” myths. Women’s credibility is questioned in the workplace, in courts, by law enforcement, in doctors’ offices, and in our political system. People don’t trust women to be bosses, or pilots, or employees. Pakistan’s controversial Hudood Ordinance still requires a female rape victim to procure four male witnesses to her rape or risk prosecution for adultery. In August, a survey of managers in the United States revealed that they overwhelmingly distrust women who request flextime. It’s notable, of course, that women are trusted to be mothers—the largest pool of undervalued, economically crucial labor. ***** So how exactly are we teaching children that women lie and can’t be trusted to be as competent or truthful as men? I mean, clearly, most people aren’t saying “girls and women lie, kids, that’s just the way God built them.” First, lessons about women’s untrustworthiness are in our words, pictures, art, and memory. It’s simple enough to see how we are overwhelmingly portrayed as flawed, supplemental, ornamental, or unattainably perfect. It’s also easy to find examples of girls and women routinely, entertainingly cast as liars and schemers. For example, on TV we have Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Don’t Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23, Devious Maids, and, because its serpent imagery is so basic to feminized evil, American Horror Story: Coven. The lessons start early, too. Take, for example, the popular animated kids movie Shark Tale, which featured the song “Gold Digger,” a catchy tune that describes women as scheming, thieving, greedy, and materialistic. There is no shortage of music lyrics that convey the same ideas across genres. It’s in movies, too. Consider, for example, the prevalence of untrustworthy mad women, or the manipulative women of Film Noire, and the failure of most films to even allow two women to be named or speak to one another about anything other than the male protagonists. But pop culture and art are just the cherry on the top of the icing on a huge cake. The United States is among the most religious of all countries in the industrialized world. So, while some people wring their hands over hip hop, I’m more worried about how men like Rick Santorum and Ken Cuccinelli explain to their daughters why they can’t be priests. I know that there is hip hop that exceeds the bounds of taste and is sodden with misogyny. But, people seem to think that those manifestations of hatred are outside of the mainstream when, in reality, it’s just more of the same set to great beats. Sometimes, however, there’s a bonus, synchronous two-for-one! Delilah, a renowned biblical avatar of female untrustworthiness, made it into the lyrics of JT Money’s “Somethin’ ‘Bout Pimpin’”: I got a problem with this punk ass bitch I know Ol’no good skanlezz switch out ho An untrustworthy bitch like Deliliah Only thing she good for is puttin’ dick inside her In other words: “Amongst all the savage beasts none is found so harmful as woman.” — John Chrysostom “What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. One must be on one’s guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil.” — St. Albertus Magnus “Women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” — Martin Luther “I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” — Augustine While most religious leaders aren’t going around spouting overtly denigrating opinions about women, many, through default and tradition, casually and uncritically expose children to religious texts that are fundamentally misogynistic. I have to believe that most Sunday school lessons are not concerned with deconstructing, say, the creation story, a seminal text in our culture whether you are religious or not. Religious misogyny is tied to institutional power that ends up in children and women being impoverished and dying. Ideas about women, credibility, legitimacy, authority and—notably—Catholic and Evangelical “priesthood” are important and have deep roots in religious thought and philosophy. And those ideas have contemporary expression (see links): Tertullian: “Women are the devil’s gateway.” Thomas Aquinas: “As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten.” St. Clement of Alexandria: “Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman…the consciousness of their own nature must evoke feelings of shame.” St. John Chrysostom: Women are “weak and flighty…For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?” St. Jerome: “Woman is the root of all evil.” There’s Origen, one of Christianity’s greatest thinkers, a man who castrated himself and who considered women worse than animals. And, not to be left out, St. Augustine. Why focus on these musty, long dead theologians and philosophers? These thoughts are alive and well and have a super long tail outside of religion—think: domestic work, pay discrimination, and sex segregation in the workplace. Every time a young girl can’t serve at an altar, or play in a game, or dress as she pleases; every time she’s assaulted and told to prove it, it’s because she cannot, in the end, be trusted. Controlling her—her clothes, her will, her physical freedom, her reputation—is a perk. Conventional Abrahamic religious thought cannot escape the idea that we have to pay, as women, with lifelong suffering and labor and be subject to the authority of men lest our irrationality and desires result in more evil and suffering. Until religious hierarchies renounce beliefs and practices based on these theologies, these long-dead men, creatures of their time, might as well be the ones repeatedly showing up in Congress to give their massively ill-informed opinions on women’s health and lives. Especially in our political lives. Is it really surprising to anyone that a Santorum staffer said, in the run up to the last election, that women shouldn’t be President because it’s against God’s will? What about the “news commentator” who thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to vote? The Senate candidate who thinks rape is a gift from God? Or the Senator and presidential aspirant who thinks it’s just another form of conception? Or the doctor who thinks women deserve to die for having abortions? How about the nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia who thinks fetal birth defects are punishment for parents’ (read: mothers’) sins? If women die bearing children, so what, that’s what we’re here for. Even if we insist on not talking about the degree to which legislators’ religious beliefs inform their political actions, it is obvious that they do. An entire political party’s “social policy” agenda is being pursued under a rubric that insists women need “permission slips” and “waiting periods.” The recent shutdown? Conservatives holding the country hostage because they want to add anti-abortion “conscience clause” language to legislation. Whose consciences are we talking about? All the morally incompetent and untrustworthy men who need abortions? It’s no exaggeration to say that distrust of women is the driving force of the “social issues” agenda of the Republican Party. From food stamps and “legitimate rape,” to violence against women and immigration policy. “We need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it,” explained the man who penned Arizona’s immigration law. “Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal alien mothers do.” I could do this ad infinitum. The pervasive message that women are untrustworthy liars is atomized in our culture. There is no one source or manifestation. It fills every nook and cranny of our lives. I find it sad and disturbing that children learn so quickly and normatively to distrust women. Any commitment to parity means challenging the stories we tell them. It means critically assessing the comforting institutions we support out of nostalgia, habit, and tradition. It means walking out of places of worship, not buying certain movie tickets, closing some books, refusing to pay for some music, and politely disagreeing with friends and family at the dinner table. It’s not easy. But, really, what’s the alternative?

Soraya Chemly, How We Teach our Kids Women are Liars (2013)

#L #she's one of those not radical feminists you could still organize with #she also isn't a sloppy thinker or writer

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lawrenceop · 7 years ago

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HOMILY for St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross Esther C:12, 14-16, 23, 25; Ps 124; John 4:19-24

Today we celebrate one of the six patron saints of Europe, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She was canonised in 1998, and her life, it seems to me, encapsulates the story of Europe in the past century.

Born into a Jewish family in 1891, she was named Edith Stein. By her teenage years she had become an atheist. This is the first aspect of her story that resonates with Europe today: the lapse of this continent into unbelief and atheism. Although lukewarmness of faith and unbelief is often a moral issue, for Edith Stein it seemed to have been part of her philosophical journey, which also reflects Europe’s philosophical path. Edith Stein became one of the first women to be admitted to university in Germany and she studied with Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Her studies opened her up to transcendent realities beyond the materialism and nihilism of atheism.

However, one can never think or argue oneself into faith; philosophy is insufficient by itself. Faith is always a gift of God, and God constantly gives us sufficient grace for conversion. In the summer of 1921, aged 29, Edith Stein was staying with some friends, and as she was alone one night, she picked a book off their shelf, a 16th-century autobiography, which she read in one sitting. It was the life of St Teresa of Avila, the great Carmelite mystic. Edith Stein said that "when I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth." Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: "My longing for truth was a single prayer.”

This episode illustrates for us how God’s grace can surprise us if we are open and searching for Truth. The Gospel for today’s feast thus presents Christ in dialogue with the Samaritan woman beside the well. It is an image of the soul in dialogue with God, seeking Truth, which refreshes the human soul like living water. The story of Europe in recent decades is a story of a continent seeking its identity and mission. Lost because it has lost sight of truth, life for many has often been reduced to being about economic survival and material comfort. Edith Stein’s life, however, shows us that once Truth in the person of Jesus Christ lays hold of us, then we will sacrifice all for him. For this is how her life ends as a martyr.

After her conversion, Edith Stein began to teach in a Dominican Sisters’ school, she translated certain works of St Thomas Aquinas, and she was a leading figure in the Catholic Women’s Movement in Germany, which brought her to prominence in German politics. But in 1933, the Aryan Law of the Nazis made it impossible for Edith Stein to continue teaching. She had wanted to become a Carmelite nun since her baptism in 1922, and now at last she entered the convent in Cologne. She said: “Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it.” So she took the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and she made her lifelong vows as a Carmelite nun in 1938. Europe has often, in her crisis moments, been renewed and restored by the Christian religious orders, by sacrificial acts of love, and by her saints. Thus Edith Stein’s act of profession as a Carmelite nun brings out this aspect of the European story; of the renewal of Europe through prayer, especially from the deep spiritual wells of the Carmelite tradition.

Finally, the terrors of Nazism, which reflect the anti-Semitic strands in European history as well as the effects of godless atheism, broke upon St Teresa Benedicta. In 1942 she was arrested and taken out of the convent by the Gestapo as a Jewess. Her last words to be heard that night were addressed to Rosa, a fellow sister who had also converted from Judaism. She said: “Come, we are going for our people.” St Teresa had a very strong sense that Jesus, a Jew, had died on the Cross for the salvation of his people, and that she, a Jewess was called to die with Christ for her people. As she once wrote, reflecting on today’s First reading: “I keep thinking of Queen Esther who was taken away from her people precisely because God wanted her to plead with the king on behalf of her nation. I am a very poor and powerless little Esther, but the King who has chosen me is infinitely great and merciful. This is great comfort”.

On 7 August 1942, St Teresa Benedicta joined 987 other Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. She was executed there on this day, and was beatified in 1987. In the words of Pope St John Paul II, she was honoured because “as a Catholic during Nazi persecution, [she] remained faithful to the crucified Lord Jesus Christ and, as a Jew, to her people in loving faithfulness”. St Teresa Benedicta thus occupies a unique position in history, and as a martyr saint, she shows how, in the Lord’s words in today’s Gospel, “salvation is from the Jews”. Above all, as patroness of Europe, she shows us that salvation for Europe is found only in Christ, in the one necessary truth of God’s love made visible on the Cross.

#martyr #Carmelite #cross #Europe #salvation history #Truth

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milatherese · 5 years ago

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Trent Horn couldn’t have responded better.

In this episode, Trent addresses the controversy surrounding Bishop Thomas Tobin’s urging Catholics not to attend LGBTQ pride events and considers the question of whether these events are harmful to children.

If you would rather read than listen, here’s the transcript:

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic answers.

Trent Horn: You’ve probably seen the rainbow a lot more frequently on social media, around town, hanging up on billboards, posters, flags. It’s not a celebration of the Covenant, God’s covenant with Noah. No, for many people it is pride month, a celebration of LGBTQ identity behavior and activism, so I thought it’d be a good idea here on the Council of Trent podcast to talk about that and some recent interactions that Catholics have had in the culture when it comes to the issue of pride month. But before we get into that, I want to give a big thanks and shout out to our supporters at trenthornpodcast.com. You are the ones who make the podcast possible and will make it possible for me to bring on future guests. I’ve already sent out invitations to people who support legal abortion, who support homosexuality. I just sent an invitation today to an academic who thinks that Catholics should drop the Crusader mascot because it reeks of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Trent Horn: My goal in all of that is to get people here on the podcast who disagree with me, who disagree with the Catholic faith, to have civil, courteous, thoughtful productions, productions. Conversations, productive conversations on these issues and your support of the podcast makes this possible. And when you support the podcast you get access to our study series and the upcoming Trent tracks in depth audio talks. All of that is available at trenthornpodcast.com. Consider becoming a subscriber today so you can help the Council of Trent grow, expand and reach other people.

Trent Horn: Now back to pride month, I saw that Bishop Tobin of Rhode Island put out this tweet that to me seems pretty mundane. “A reminder that Catholics should not support or attend LGBTQ pride month events held in June. They promote a culture and encourage activities that are contrary to Catholic faith and morals. They are especially harmful for children.” Well that has sent some people up in arms. And so I have here a clip from ABC’s The View where it’s at the opening, let’s see this was uploaded on June 3rd and I’m sorry the article here I got it from is June 3rd, but it’s The View Celebrates Pride. It’s I think their first pride month episode. So let’s play it and then I’ll offer some commentary because they get to Bishop Tobin after a minute. But I want to comment on the first things that Whoopi Goldberg says.

Whoopi Goldberg: Hey, welcome back. So, Pride Month kicked off on Saturday and I’m proud to be part of the first World Pride Day ceremony held in America later this month on June 26th and I want to say there have been some really ugly incidents lately, all over the place. But people have burned flags outside of gay bars and uptown in Harlem and people destroyed a poster. You know, here’s the deal. And we had a Bishop say something that seems so against what Jesus stood for that it was shocking. But this-

Trent Horn: So remember that was the statement I just read to you where Bishop Tobin just said, don’t attend pride month events. They promote culture and activities contrary to the Catholic faith, and that’s apparently shocking to Whoopi Goldberg. I remember back in the 90s when it came to issues related to “LGBT” issues that the buzz word was tolerance. You should tolerate those that you disagree with. That it was about tolerance, that if you don’t want to do this stuff, hey, that’s fine, but don’t keep us from doing what we want to do. And even longer before that, when you had the Stonewall riots in the 1960s and the Gay Liberation Movement, the message was, you know, we’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going anywhere and let us live our lives the way we want. And the corresponding message back to people identifying as heterosexual was, you know, don’t impose your morality on us. Don’t stop us from loving and living the way that we want to.

Trent Horn: Well here, Bishop Tobin is not, he’s just saying they’re going to do their thing. Catholics don’t support or attend these kinds of activities because it promotes a message that’s contrary to the Catholic faith. He’s not saying, hey, you need the city needs to shut down these events. I, you know, I don’t know any major Catholic prelate who is arguing for anything like that recently. But it’s moving from tolerance to celebrate diversity. That if you don’t actively and enthusiastically support our message, then you become a social pariah. Now, when Goldberg mentions, of course, the property that has been destroyed, I agree. I don’t think it’s productive to go around destroying other people’s property in order to make a point.

Trent Horn: I think it’s perfectly fine that that church in Chicago, not too long ago actually, there was a rainbow flag with a cross emblazoned on it used for liturgy or worship that was ceremonially burned because it was the Church’s flag and it promoted a message completely contrary to what the church teaches. But I would agree it’s not productive to go around and destroy other people’s property. So let’s, let’s continue with this part of The View.

Whoopi Goldberg: This is what I’m going to tell all of our friends. God loves you. You can’t, nobody can tell you God doesn’t. You’re the only person who knows your relationship with God. So you stand proudly. We don’t want you to be afraid that people aren’t going to get it. It doesn’t matter whether they get it. This is about who you are. Be proud of who you are.

Trent Horn: Well, God loves me. God loves you. God loves everyone, but God doesn’t love everything that we do. And certainly one thing he does not love is when we indulge in pride, when we love ourselves, when we think that we are so good and so great that the reason God loves us is not because God is super abundant love, infinite love and mercy, because God is perfect goodness itself. Rather in a modern idea, we get this distorted sense that God loves me because I’m so great and I’m so wonderful and I’m so special and I got that participation trophy at the third grade field day events and you know, I’m so special and I am so great. You know, they call my generation, the millennials, the snowflake generation for a reason. That we are thin and wispy like snowflakes. You’re easily offended. And we were all taught from being very little we’re all unique and precious. Just as no two snowflakes are alike. So God should love me because I’m so special and so great.

Trent Horn: Well pride is the instant way to kill our relationship with God. It’s something we all suffer with, something I have to suffer with. I endure and struggle with a lot because it’s easy. You know, we should love our neighbors, we love ourselves, but we don’t want to unduly love ourselves because that’s the sin of pride. Proverbs 8:12-13 says this, “I wisdom, dwell in prudence and I find knowledge and discretion. The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil, pride and arrogance. And the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.” So the thing that we should be proud of is that we are adopted through no merit of our own, we have become adopted sons and daughters of God, and we are part of God’s family and we humble ourselves under his majesty and his goodness and are thankful for his grace in our lives. And we desire to share that with other people so that they don’t have to be ensnared by their passions, by enslaved to sin in this life.

Trent Horn: So when Whoopi Goldberg says, nobody can tell you that God doesn’t love you. Yeah. I can’t tell you what your, whether you’re in God’s grace or not. I don’t have access to that. But what I can say is God doesn’t love us no matter what we do because God loves us so much, he’s willing to let us freely walk away from him for all eternity. He loves us so much. He’s not going to twist our arm and drag us into heaven kicking and screaming against our wills. So you know Whoopi Goldberg and others will say, you know, God loves you just the way that you are. I don’t necessarily love the way that I am.

Trent Horn: Think about all the times that we are disappointed in our own lives, disappointed in ourselves, that we failed to meet a standard of truly loving our neighbors and truly loving God. Does God love the way I am, we have all different kinds of internal desires that God does not want us to choose over them. Saint Thomas Aquinas defined sin in one way. He said, “Sin is when we love creature more than creator.” So what about people who have a desire to be drunk? They love alcohol. Or greed. They love money. You know, I love money. I love making a ton of money. God must love me even though I make a ton of money and I barely or don’t give any to the poor. God loves me for who I am. Right? Well, I think it’s so funny people like Whoopi Goldberg and other critics will say that God doesn’t love a greedy or hypocritical Christians. At the very least, he calls them to repentance. But what about everyone else?

Trent Horn: Our hearts, as Jeremiah 17:9 says, “Our hearts are a wicked thing. Who can know it?” They’re not a good barometer for how we stand before God. And so we have to let God tell us through his revelation, he’s given us a sacred scripture tradition and the church he established.

Whoopi Goldberg: And there’s a whole bunch of us standing with you.

Whoopi Goldberg: And you know what?

Trent Horn: Well, let me go ahead actually to one of Whoopi Goldberg’s cohosts who talks about Bishop Tobin right now.

Sunny Hostin: Because I was reading, you know, I was on Twitter this weekend and I read this tweet by Bishop Tobin who is a Catholic Bishop-

Trent Horn: And this is Sunny Hostin to fill you in.

Sunny Hostin: … comes out and he says that he wants to remind all Catholics not to support or engage in any Pride and participate in any Pride parades or anything supporting the LGBTQ community because it’s against Christian values and that it’s harmful to children. And I tweeted out that my Catholic children will be attending Pride events as this Catholic will. You know, my faith always taught me what would Jesus do? I know Jesus would be attending that Pride parade with pride. And I also know that God is love and Jesus is love and love is love. And for a Catholic-

Trent Horn: God is love. Jesus is love. Love is love. That’s not the gospel. That’s sentimentality. That’s saying that something is right or wrong based on my ability to stomach it. That’s what our culture has gotten to when it comes to morality. Right or wrong is ultimately determined by our ability to stomach certain things, that thankfully most people still cannot stomach things like murder or rape. But many people can stomach abortion. They can stomach sodomy They can stomach a lot of these things that there was a time, you know, the sin which dare not be named that you, you couldn’t and you just had an instinctive understanding things are wrong. But if you rely solely on your gut feelings in these matters, if your culture moves further and further away from the truth, it’s almost like you’re trying to calibrate your compass next to a magnet.

Trent Horn: It’s going to be completely off kilter. And so we live in a society where people, as the prophet Isaiah says, “they call good, evil and evil good.” And so I was reading another article from a lay theologian saying, you know, well, Jesus never condemned, said he didn’t say a word about LGBTQ people. Well, no, he did not, but Jesus never said anything about child sacrifice or incest, even though both of those things occurred in the ancient world. Instead, Jesus upheld the moral law of the Old Testament, God’s enduring moral law that applies to all people in all times and all places. How I know that Jesus would not be at a Pride event is that something that our culture considers very common and mundane remarriage after divorce. They would say, most people in our culture would say it’s not a sin to get divorced and remarried just because you fallen in love with somebody else.

Trent Horn: That’s not what Jesus taught. If you go to Mark chapter 10 Jesus makes it very clear how we can know our sexuality and what our sexual ethics are grounded in. He says, “God made them male and female. For this reason, a man,” going back to, he quotes Genesis 2. “This reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one. They are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” Mark 10:10 Mark says, “And in the house, the disciples asked him again about this matter, and he said to them,” now, this is of course an answer to the Pharisees on the question of divorce. And Jesus, and people will often say, you Catholics are being modern day Pharisees. You’re legalistic and you’re rigid.

Trent Horn: Guess what? Jesus was more rigid than the Pharisees when it came to divorce. The Pharisees allowed divorce in rare circumstances, but Jesus said, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her, and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” Case closed. Jesus doesn’t ask, well, is it a consensual relationship? What are the fruits in this relationship? What are the fruits that we see coming from this new marriage? No, Jesus said very clear, no. Marriage is rooted in the one flesh union God made between men and women, and that is the proper outlet for our sexuality. Anything beyond that becomes illicit and becomes a sin against God and sin against ourselves. Well, here, let me, I’ll play a little bit more of this to get to the next point about children.

Sunny Hostin: … Catholic bishop to come out and say something like that. Given the history of pedophilia in the Catholic church, given what the Catholic church has hidden about the abuse of children, some would say that being at a Pride parade would be much safer for a child than it has been to be in a Catholic church for many years.

Trent Horn: You know, what’s funny, if people, I wonder if she’d be willing to say that same thing about the host of children who’ve been abused in ultra orthodox Jewish schools or even just about in secular organizations, you know, among Scouts, sports leagues, public schools. You’re always hearing stories about public school teachers molesting children. And yet it’s an easy target for people. And I will admit that the way that the tweet is, is phrased, it kind of sets yourself up for that. But I mean it doesn’t work, of course for us say this is bigotry, it’s anti-catholic bashing because number one, what has happened within the Catholic church is a horrible thing. Even if it is at a lower rate of other secular organizations, it’s still a terrible thing. And I just don’t want to argue with people about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church.

Trent Horn: I want things to get better. I don’t want kids to be abused anywhere. I don’t care if it’s in a Catholic church, I don’t care if it’s in a temple, a mosque, I don’t care if it’s a Boy Scout league, if it’s in the locker room at Penn State, wherever the hell it is. I don’t want kids to be abused anywhere. And you know where I don’t want kids to be abused? At gay bars when they’re dressed up as drag queens. I don’t want them to be abused there either. So for me, if I was to take this conversation in a direction about whether LGBT events are harmful for children, I’m not going to say if you take your kids here, gay people are going to molest them. I’m not going to, that’s not a discussion that I want to have. Rather I would say are these ideas and this is the discussion you should have with people, are these ideas and these values healthy and good for children? And I would say absolutely not.

Trent Horn: One from the sexual immorality that’s being proposed to have a kind of cavalier mentality when it comes to sexuality to tell children that when it comes to the expression of your sexuality, all that matters is that you love this other person. Is that a mentality we want high school students to have minors, children who are just discovering their sexuality in puberty, who could be taken advantage of by other people, either their own age or even adults that come upon them. And the adults who take advantage of them, I’m talking about the drag queens, I would say that the mentality at many of these Pride events lends itself towards the abuse and mistreatment of children by over sexualizing them are saying sexuality is not the big deal. This whole things are a celebration of sexuality. So let children get in on the act.

Trent Horn: I’ll give you a few examples of young children who were encouraged to be drag queens or usually these are little boys who dress up as flamboyant women for the entertainment of others and it just makes me so sad and gives me the heebie jeebies. Let me provide you with a few examples here. Here’s one that originally I read about it on the Daily Wire and when you read about these incidents involving the abuse of children, as you know, dressed up as drag queens or anything that is sensational that falls in the other camp or the, you know, where there are people who disagree with the Catholic church and yet they’re engaging in activities that are beyond the pale or beyond the norm. When you share that with other people, I would recommend trying to find news sources that are trustworthy on the other side. So I originally found this story on Daily Wire, which is a conservative website.

Trent Horn: I love Daily Wire. They’ve got a lot of great stories to find there. But if I were to share that with someone, they would say, oh, it’s the Daily Wire. That’s conservative. It’s propaganda. I don’t believe it. So I just did a little bit of sleuthing. It wasn’t hard to find that this same story is on GayStarnews.com so definitely not a conservative website by any means, shape or form. And it says drag race winner slammed for posing naked next to 10 year old child. Photographer issues statement after admitting several people found image distasteful. So this is something that took place more at the beginning of 2019 but what’s the word I’m looking for here? It’s, it reveals the kind of mentality within the subculture.

Trent Horn: Conservatives are up in arms over a picture of a naked drag race winner and a 10 year old child. Season seven star Violet Chachki was photographed with several people at the last drag con. She, it’s really he, I think his birth name is Jason. It’s a man probably, who identifies as a woman who dresses up as a woman, but I’m pretty sure, bet you dollars doughnuts this is a man. “She” was only wearing makeup, a wig, heels and a tuck. One right wing news site called the image troubling and over sexualized. So it’s an image. This is cool. I mean, this is clearly a man. He’s naked, he’s wearing a wig and he’s tucked in his thighs together and he’s tucked in his penis between his thighs standing with a child drag queen who is 10 years old. The child’s name is Lactacia. The young drag queen is Nemis Quinn Melancon-Golden who’s performed on the stage as Queen Lactacia. Many online began to describe Violet as a pedophile. Many people though online who support this community have fired back saying, “Do you effing H’s know what a pedophile is like. Violet Chachki is not a effing pedophile. F woke stand, Twitter can F off.”

Trent Horn: She took a picture with a child. That’s all. Except she’s not wearing any clothes, Einstein,. And she, this is a man who’s tucked his penis in Buffalo Bill style, Silence of the Lambs with a 10 year old child. And the other person said, this photo isn’t harming anyone at all. Now photos like these are what get you 10 to 20 years in Sing Sing. And if this were just a grown man with a child in the basement of his house taking a “fun” picture like this, the FBI would be hauling this guy. I will say to you, and I was researching these stories, having to Google search words like 10 year old drag queen or 10 year old drag queen with naked man. As soon as I hit search, I was just bracing myself for the FBI to kick down my door with the black helicopters dragging me out of the building.

Trent Horn: That it’s hard enough you know … That’s why in Ephesians 5:11 Ephesians chapter 5, Saint Paul says to not even mention the the deeds that are done by others in darkness. He goes on to say, but rather expose them. That it’s like trying to deal with radioactive waste. You know, you can’t just leave it out there. Someone will get hurt, but you have to protect yourself when you’re dealing with it. Photographer Jonathan Turtin has also issued a statement on the social media platform. He writes, “So Instagram took down my photo of the drag kid I interviewed for Huck magazine. I’m posting another one because on reflection I realized, that a particular photo I posted with the older drag queen was distasteful for many. I 100% stand by the article. I’d urge anyone to read the article before passing judgment. I’m not after sympathy, further controversy or applause. I just wish people were a bit more understanding of each other’s differences.”

Trent Horn: So he doesn’t even apologize, does not even apologize for the photo and taking a picture of a minor with a naked man and acting like everything’s just fine because the idea here, that sexuality is just something fun that you explore. And that’s the kind of attitude that we find a lot of people who celebrate “Pride identity and mentality.” I’ll give you another example. This is one you probably heard of more also in January. It’s the case of Desmond Napoles AKA Desmond is amazing. He was shown on Good Morning America as the 11 year old drag kid, and however this a 11 year old has gone to perform at gay bars where people throw dollar bills at him while he is dancing. That’s just sick. That’s just sick. And yet if someone identifies as LGBTQ, they get a free pass because people are terrified of seeming to be homophobic in this regard.

Trent Horn: So there’s an article on Townhall a few months ago from Karen Kataline and I think it’s a great article. She wrote Why I Reported the Case of an 11 year old Drag Queen to Child Protective Services. Hundreds of people called New York CPS to talk about, hey, these parents let their 11 year old dance at a gay bar sexually while people throw dollar bills at him. So Karen Kataline wrote this article. She writes, Desmond’s parents, Andrew and Wendy Napoles were present in the audience. They’ve also allowed their son to dance for money and simulate stripping and an adult gay bar in Brooklyn called the $3 bill. What causes an entire audience and two hosts to take leave of their senses and cheer the sexualization of a child. If Desmond had been a girl simulating a strip tease would the audience have applauded so approvingly? There was a time not long ago when they might have. During the height of Toddlers and Tiaras and the JonBenet Ramsey story, I wrote a book about my own experience in child beauty pageants and growing up as a princess by proxy, a term coined by Dr Martina Cartwright in the foreword to the book.

Trent Horn: I was put on the stage at the age of three but I didn’t understand my true feelings about that or how similar experiences affected my development until I was well into my 30s. By then I had clinical experience as well, so I used my story of a stage mother on steroids live through me as a case study to offer my professional analysis of how the early sexualization of children damages their development.

Trent Horn: So going and doing some more research on this. Let’s see here. The article seems to have been lost here for a second. Here it comes out. This is from Out magazine. It’s a review of the $3 bill. That comes from an expression, a quote, “He is as queer as a $3 bill.” Queer meaning strange. Queer is also an adjective that some people within the LGBTQ community identify for themselves. Usually queer oftentimes represents having a sexuality or a gender identity that is far from the norm. Not wanting to be within the “gender binary.” So dressing and acting in very provocative ways and the drag race and drag queens, cross dressing can be an example of that.

Trent Horn: So I have here actually in front of me, the original e-vite. This event took place December 1st, 2018. $3 bill presents Club Whoa featuring Desmond is Amazing live. So what is this place where these parents went and had their 11 year old child go and dance? Well, an article, it’s also called Sutherland. This is an article and it’s a gay bar in Brooklyn, in Out magazine. So this is a gay magazine. I’m, you know, trying to find out what this place is like from those who have been there who are objectively reporting on it.

Trent Horn: When you walk into Sutherland, one of Brooklyn’s most buzzworthy queer clubs, you’re walking in without your phone. But unlike nights when you may have left it in an Uber after too much pregaming, here, you know exactly where it is. Stowed away at coat check or stuffed in your pocket in a sealed pouch if you’re itching to cheat and see who’s zero feet away there’s onsite technology that keeps you off of Grindr. Grindr is the gay equivalent of Tinder. It’s a hookup app. It’s by Yonder, the same tech outfit that comedians like Dave Chappelle used to prevent audiences from recording their acts. So you go to this club, your phone is in a magnetic pouch and you can’t retrieve it inside. It’s, they say number one, it’s to keep people from just being on their phones all night so they can have these real life interactions with others, but as you read on in the article, it seems clear the other reason of not letting people have their phones is kind of an anything goes mentality erupts and nobody’s going to be able to record it.

Trent Horn: Flirting happens in real life with those glances across the crowd and in the flesh charm we’ve come to undervalue. There’s even a forced cinematic romanticism to sharing your number. If you want to do it, odds are you’ll be scrawling your digits on a vodka blotted bar napkin and with the unsurprising strictly enforced, no photos policy, your only hope for documenting the night is squeezing into a lone dusty photo booth. Think of Sutherland as a combo of traveling to a weekly Berlin haunt where phone check is routine, traveling back in time. What it’s not per se, what it’s not per se is a sex party. But what happens at Sutherland stays there. So if you’re looking to land some action in a corner, no one’s likely to stop you and better still, no one will post it to Instagram.

Trent Horn: And I have seen the video to confirm this 11 year old dancing here in this dark, you know, kind of grody gay bar, at least the corner of it, dancing with a crop top and hot pants in front of a bunch of people and other reports on the Yelp reviews. I’m sure Yelp has purged almost all the negative reviews from $3 Bill and I found only one that remained where somebody said, most of the negative reviews say that the the drinks are overpriced and the bartenders are rude, which you know, that’s most dive bars. But this one said that that a lot of people were leaving during the performance like this when there was a child dancing because they were disgusted by this.

Trent Horn: So when you see this, if you see this on Good Morning America, people who try to talk about minors, children in drag, drag races and using children to promote LGBT propaganda, just ask, would we do this with a heterosexual minor? Would we do this with just a young boy or girl to promote just hooking up among self-identified straight people to promote polyamory, to promote adultery or free love? Why can’t we just let children be children? And if you’re concerned, of course about helping children to be children, then I would recommend picking up a copy of Made This Way, the book I wrote with Layla Miller, which includes chapters on how to explain transgender identity and homosexuality to children.

Trent Horn: So I want to leave you with two scripture verses to talk about how should Christians respond when we see gross immorality in our day, whether it’s sexual immorality or not sexual morality, whatever it may be. Well when it comes to sexual immorality, this idea that Christians would celebrate Pride events much less ignore them, is completely foreign to scripture. In fact, what I said about Jesus said, well, Jesus never said anything about incest. That was a problem in the ancient world. It’s still a problem in some parts of the country today and you know, some parts of the world. In 1 Corinthians chapter 5, Saint Paul indicts the Corinthians, he rakes them over the coals because they had a live and live mentality with incest in their community.

Trent Horn: 1 Corinthians 5 he says, “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you and of a kind that is not found even among pagans, for a man his living with his father’s wife and you are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.” That 1 Corinthians 5 actually records the very first instance of excommunication in the early church. Someone was taken out of communion with the church because they were such a bad influence on everyone. They’re literally handed over to Satan for the hopes that they would be saved to realize the serious error of what they had done. So they would come back to the Christian faithful in repentance and seeking reconciliation with God and with the church.

Trent Horn: And so here Paul’s not saying, oh well, was it a consensual relationship? Is it exploitative in any way? He’s not asking about any of that. It’s just clear that this is at complete variance with the holiness code and the laws of sexuality God had already made very clear in the Old Testament for people to live by.

Trent Horn: The other verse that I want to leave you with is here in Galatians. So people say, oh, you know, we should celebrate this. We should be proud. You shouldn’t judge other people. That’s not the advice that God’s word gives us. In Galatians 6 verses 1 through 3 and 7 through 9, this is what Paul says, “Brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself lest you too be tempted, bear one another’s burdens. And so fulfill the law of Christ for if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.” Thinking you’re something when you’re nothing is the essence of pride by the way.

Trent Horn: “Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows that he will also reap. For he who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life.” And here’s Galatians 6:9. Great way to close it. “Let us not grow weary in well doing for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” So don’t lose heart. The victory is ours. God has won the victory. God is in control. We should pray for people who are struggling with sexual sin, temptation, whoever they are. For children who are victims with abuse everywhere. Pray for the love of God and the justice of God to be done for them and in our own lives as well. So do not lose heart. Thank you all for being with me today and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.

#catholicliving #lapride

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why-bless-your-heart · 8 years ago

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Tell us about your mom!!

Oh my gosh.

Well, first of all, she’s beautiful. She’s 5′11″ with icy blue eyes and long straight hair, strong cheekbones, and a wonderful smile. She’s had seven kids, and she’s getting older, but she’s still gorgeous. Just ask my dad.

Second, she’s really smart. She went to college to study math (Math!) on a full merit-based scholarship. She never got her degree, due to an administrative difficulty that would have meant an extra semester for three more credits, but she’s really smart, and her old highschool math teacher is still friends with the family and remembers her as a good student. She’s a homeschooling mom who will address her five-year-old’s new variant on the Gnostic heresy as readily as she’ll help her 15-year-old with a fan letter. She reads, thinks, and discusses a lot, and always has a rationale for thinking the way that she does. She’s really good at getting to the core of any argument and coming up with exactly the right questions to find its flaws, and can argue the opposing side better than they can on pretty much anything. At the same time though, her thoughtfulness doesn’t just apply to intellectual subjects--she has a strong insight into human character, and is very sympathetic to those who think differently than she does, often presenting a valid defense on their behalf.

Third, she loves us. I have never once doubted that I was loved completely and unconditionally. She makes time for us one-on-one when she feels like we need it (mostly when one of us starts acting out a little bit), and makes a point of hugging each of us at least once daily. Her love is absolutely unconditional, even when we need disciplining or when we make stupid mistakes or pick fights with her or are stupid teenagers falling apart with hormones. She’s very involved in all of our lives, encouraging us in our different pursuits, whether or not she’s particularly interested in them herself. Most recently she was conducting research on careers in the animation field and sending me info that she found, just because that’s what I’m studying.

Fourth, her priority is always our family. Her marriage to my father is the bedrock of our household, and, even when they've fought, us kids know that Mom and Dad will never, never walk away from their vows. They’ve been married for nearly 25 years now, and they’re still the best of friends and visibly in love. They live out the sacrament of marriage in a visible way, in an incredible inspiration to everyone around them. It’s become a mild annual tradition in our co-op community for them to tell the story of how they met, partially because it’s funny (They met in a bar: it was open mike night, my dad was performing, and my mom walked in and stole his spotlight), but also because their marriage and our family has become an inspiration. That couldn’t have happened without my mom’s constant prioritization of her husband and their family above all else. The main reason for her to refuse to do anything is if it will negatively impact the family.

Finally, her faith. This is a woman who I remember explaining St. Thomas Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God before I even knew that Italy was the boot on the map. She prays with us, if not daily, close enough for it to count, takes us to Mass, involves us in the Parish community, nurtures and develops our spirituality while educating our consciences, and does everything she can in order to look God in the eye when He asks her to account for the souls that were placed in her care. Now, my siblings are still young and there’s still plenty of time for any or all of us to jump off the ship that is the Church, but if we do, it won’t be due to a poor understanding of Catholicism due to our mother’s neglect of her duty.

Those are the five main things about my mother. There are so many others---she gives us firm, loving, reasonable boundaries while still respecting our (age-appropriate) freedoms, remaining involved but not controlling, she keeps music in the household, she has a great sense of humor, she teaches us to teach ourselves, she never lets us be ashamed of our enthusiasms and talents, she pushes us to be the best versions of ourselves we can be, she calls us out on our nonsense when we need it, etc. etc.---but those are five of the main reasons that I love my mom and consider her the best one out there. I know that she sometimes beats herself up because she’s not good at establishing and sticking to strict routines and because housework (especially laundry) has never come easy to her, but honestly? I’d take her love, nurture, intelligence, and common sense over a gleaming house without a second thought. Because of her I had a secure childhood that gave me every advantage for being the strongest adult I can be.

#byjoveimbeinghumble

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sundayeveningthoughts · 6 years ago

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Scruples

Sunday Evening Thoughts

March 17, 2019

Scruples

Dear Paul and Rachel,

One sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’ And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’ Mark 2:23-28

It is with some dread I write tonight’s Sunday Evening Thoughts. Perhaps “dread” is too strong a word; perhaps apprehension is better. Yes, apprehension is better. But I have spent all week thinking about why I should not write a Thought on the topic. The answer: Because it might diminish the status of one of my heroes — Dorothy Day — in your minds. Dorothy often said that you should not write negatively about a person unless you would say it to them in person. And I don’t think I would say it to her. So tonight I will break her rule that I fully agree with, to write about her — not a very Christian thing to do during Lent, a 40-day period of prayer and fasting.

Dorothy had overindulgent scruples for a long period.

It was a period in her life after World War II and lasted until the mid-60s. It was a long period of her life. How can a woman who believed in political anarchism, who preached aggressive pacifism, and spent everyday preparing food and shelter for the homeless, all the while writing and editing a monthly newspaper, have overindulgent scruples?

Well, she did.

Perhaps it was from her early Bohemian life in Greenwich Village of “free love,” or perhaps it was because she had one known abortion that she writes about in The Eleventh Virgin, or perhaps with her conversion from atheism to Catholicism where she felt a strict sexual morality was the only option, I do not know. Readily I am playing-the-role of a cheap Freudian psychoanalyst, but when I recently finished the biography she wrote called Thérèse: A Life of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, I sensed, she had overindulgent scruples regarding sexuality.

In one example, Dorothy models how St. Thérèse’s parents — Louis Martin and Zelie Guerin — spent the first six months of their marriage in sexual abstinence as a virtue. They did this because Louis had wanted their marriage to be “pure” and their lives “totally devoted to God.”

“Wait a minute,” I thought, “this is a bad decision on many levels.” First, what is impure about a married couple having sex? Second, is it even healthy for the marriage to abstain from sex for six months? (I argue it is not!) And third, a life totally devoted to God has absolutely nothing to do with a married couple having sex.

Let me make a leap: This is part of the problem the Catholic Church is facing today, a rigorous denial of healthy sexual behavior. To be clear: It is unnatural for newly married couples not to have sex. It is unnatural for a priest (or nun) to go his/her whole life asexually, or more exacting, celibate. This is unnatural, and I argue, total mandatory celibacy is against St. Thomas Aquinas’s concept of Natural Law — but that is a different topic. (Note: Several recent studies suggest most priests — up to 60-70% — are not living celibate.)

Honestly, at the end of the day, it is not even about sex, it is about nature. That is my frustration with the Catholic Church; it is only about sex — not nature. Pope John Paul’s famous encyclical on “The Theology of the Body” is only about one body system: The Reproductive System. At least Pope Francis added another system: The Lymphatic System, as the encyclical ‘Laudado Si’ is a strong call for a healthy environment and a warning and condemnation of human-made global warming, to which he is heavily criticized. I am not convinced even Pope Francis sees the whole picture… Reproductive System, Lymphatic System, … each compartmentalized.

We need a good Christian theology of the whole person. Early Jewish writings of the Yahwist in Genesis have a theology of the whole body, most concepts in Buddhism have it (although they too promote celibacy), and I saw a healthy Christian theology of the whole body in early Charismatic Christian Ecumenical Communities of the 60’s and 70’s. But just as the ancient Jews succumbed to militarism in their newly formed state of Israel ca. 1200 BCE and instituted more and more rules and laws that limited freedom, so too have many Buddhists in Myanmar lost the spirit of the Buddha and persecuted the Muslim Rohingya by committing genocide, and so too have some Charismatic Communities as their language and actions over the decades have become more about biblical literalism and blind complicity to the state (except, of course, abortion). No, we need a good theology of the whole person.

I am not saying we should not have scruples — as in a strong conscience, I believe we should, but overindulgent scruples are unhealthy for the whole person. Besides, sex is good for the whole body.

You two are scientists — genetics and biomedical engineering respectively, so you know this much better than I do, but sex lowers blood pressure and reduces cardiovascular diseases, increases the level of immune-boosting antibody immunoglobulin A - which makes the body stronger against common illnesses like the common cold and fever, reduces stress - a much needed psychological benefit, relieves pain by releasing oxytocin an endorphin, releases dehydroepiandrosterone – another hormone that repairs broken tissues and cells and even helps create healthier skin. Hey, even women who breastfeed have lower rates of breast cancer.

Sex is good for you in so many ways, and is integrated into the whole body: All twelve systems.

Perhaps I should be gentler and more understanding regarding the overindulgent scruples of Louis and Zelie, St. Thérèse (who never had sex), and Blessed Dorothy; after all most of the science surrounding the benefits of sex were not known in the 1800s or even the 1950s. Yet in my gut I think people know from nature it’s good. Afterall, the Yahwist new this is 1200 BCE. Afterall, Jesus knew if you are hungry, you eat!

I wish I could recommend Dorothy Day’s Thérèse: A Life of Thérèse of Lisieux because of my great affection for Dorothy, but I can’t. I can recommend her novel The Eleventh Virgin, a wonderful, sad, love story!

Have a good week…

Love,

Dad

P.S. Your assignment: Read Genesis 2-4, the story of creation as told by the Yahwist. The Yahwist’s philosophy is simple: Food is good, sex is good, the LORD is good. The Yahwist understands humanity; the Priestly author does not (see Genesis 1 - ritual structure, defined order, and burdensome laws). Jesus gets it; St. Paul does not. The common layperson in the Christian Church gets it; many ministers, priests, and bishops do not. Dorothy in her diary when older regretted her pietistic period - she got it, Dorothy when writing a biography of St. Thérèse did not.

The most sensual movie I have ever seen is a G-rated movie — Babette’s Feast. Babette got it; the small Danish Christian group did not.

Enjoy!

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jesuschristtheprinceofpeace · 8 years ago

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Why is God such a massive dick? Why does he let all of these atrocities happen? Why don't you pick up a book that explains how the world works and stop living in your bubble?

Hello, Thanks for the questions. It's always worth pausing and being reflexive about religious, philosophical and/or spiritual beliefs. The question of suffering has a long history in relation to Christian and other religions and can be found all over the shop including Diagorus of Melos, who was allegedly a Classical Greek atheist who has several anecdotes about shipwrecks attached to him (read in the most recent Ancient History magazine about the problem of knowing whether he was atheist in the sense of being an impious polytheist or atheist as we define today though). It's something that we have to routinely approach and consider, we have to acknowledge the tragedies and atrocities occurring in the world around us, and indeed, we have to evaluate this in relation to our Christian (or your case atheist) belief. Firstly, I thoroughly do not believe God is what you deemed. As a passionate believer and experiencer of the gospel, my faith is found in that God sent Jesus out of love not condemnation in order to alleviate humanity from the destructive power of sin. My understanding of the world is viewed through the lens that sin exists and through sin, we cause harm to one another whether it's war, genocide, oppression, bullying, rape, abuse, and so forth. Perhaps essentialists would configure it in relation to human nature and maybe social constructionists would view it as power dynamics and tensions, but as Christian (who does certainly recognise social constructionism as an important and highly valid paradigm), my primary lens is that it is sin. Following from this position that suffering to one another (not natural disasters) is caused through sin, my progression is that Christ's teachings and life are wholesome truths which can rescue, save, mitigate, us from sin. Apologetics is not particularly my strongest theological area, I will gladly concede that. Free will is a common defence here, God cannot interfere in the structural inequalities and sinful inequalities we construct daily without meddling with our free will. Others have emphasised that God is more interested in spiritual as opposed to physical healing. Suffering can be a means of drawing closer to God, as we learn how to rely on. God alone. I will defer to others though, such as Thomas Aquinas, C S Lewis, Jon Lennox, Alistair McGrath, and Augustine. Whilst not a particularly developed idea, I do wonder if the enlightenment ideal of the perfecting humanity and constant upwards progression has been quite instrumental in making suffering problematic in relation to God. The growth of the medical profession and the increased medicalisation of life (and indeed death, thanks Victorians), are probably also factors. Suffering is seen a state to overcome rather than as a necessary or useful part of life. Perhaps a major generalisation and by no means adequately formed, just something I ponder on from time to time. Your assertion that I need to burst my bubble and read is demonstrably false. I am a PhD student in archaeology and have a particular love to studying 18th century history and the enlightenment. Pretty much everyday I read something, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to Shanks and Tilley to 19th century newspapers. Each day, I step beyond my bubble to try and learn, interpret, and gain insight into the past. This probably sounded unfortunately arrogant but it is the position I am very much fortunate to be able to access right now. Whilst this may not change your mind regarding your beliefs nor may you find it interesting, but I pray that it is part of a fruitful dialogue and conversation that can be instructive to both of us and those who read and engage. God bless

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amutheology · 5 years ago

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New Book by Ph.D. Alumnus Taylor O’Neill: Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin

PhD alumnus Taylor O’Neill recently had his book, Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin: A Thomistic Analysis published by CUA press. It is available for purchase today!

According to the summary:

Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin seeks to analyze a revisionist movement within Thomism in the 20th century over and against the traditional or classical Thomistic commentatorial treatment of physical premotion, grace, and the permission of sin, especially as these relate to the mysteries of predestination and reprobation. The over-arching critique leveled by the revisionists against the classic treatment is that Bañezian scholasticism had disregarded the dissymmetry between the line of good (God's causation of salutary acts) and the line of evil (God's permission of defect and sin). The teaching of St. Thomas is explored via intimate consideration of his texts. The thought of St. Thomas is then compared with the work of Domingo Bañez and the foremost 'Bañezian' of the 20th century, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. The work then shifts to a consideration of the major players of the revisionist treatment, including Francisco Marín-Sola, Jacques Maritain, and Bernard Lonergan. Jean-Herve Nicolas is also taken up as one who had held both accounts during his lifetime. The work analyzes and critiques the revisionist theories according to the fundamental tenets of the classical account. Upon final analysis, it seeks to show that the classical account sufficiently distances God's causal role in regard to free salutary acts and His non-causal role in regard to free sinful acts. Moreover, the revisionist account presents significant metaphysical problems and challenges major tenets of classical theism, such as the divine omnipotence, simplicity, and the exhaustive nature of divine providence. Finally, the implications of the traditional view are considered in light of the spiritual life. It is argued that the classical account is the only one which provides an adequate theological foundation for the Church's robust mystical and spiritual tradition, and in particular, the abandonment to divine providence.

In the words of Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., “No previous work has so admirably integrated so many major figures in a treatise that does not shrink before the complexity of their historical and speculative particularities. This book will be a required acquisition for all college and university libraries, and students of the history of theology in the twentieth century will find it invaluable.”

Below is a brief interview with Dr. O’Neill:

What was the inspiration for this book, and how did it come about?

An old high school teacher and mentor of mine called my attention to ST I, q. 22 [“The Providence of God”] right around the time that I was beginning my M.A. studies. I was unfamiliar with St. Thomas’ thought on providence, so I was absolutely shocked to find out that he states that “all things are subject to divine providence.” I was used to people speaking about this or that particular event as being providential, but everything? My initial thought was that St. Thomas must surely have been wrong about this (which I am now embarrassed to admit)! What about human freedom? Does this mean that Catholics believe in some form of predestination? I thought that was only for Calvinists. I picked up Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Predestination which aided me in contemplating these questions. I ended up writing a research thesis on the topic under Fr. Thomas Weinandy, OFM while at CUA. That helped me work through some questions, but I still had others. When I arrived at the doctoral program at Ave, I assumed that I would leave this topic behind and pick something else upon which to write my dissertation. But it kept tugging at me, and after continued conversations on the topic in seminars led by Professor Steve Long, I knew that I had to write on this. The book is the fruit of that study.

Who is the main audience for this book?

I think that this book will be of interest to anyone who has already thought and perhaps read a little bit about the questions surrounding providence, grace, human freedom, and predestination. It seems to me that there has been something of a resurgence of interest in this topic, and my hope is that this book can join a wider conversation. The book will appeal to Catholics and Thomists, of course, but I also think that it will be of interest to Orthodox and Protestant Christians as well, since the topics discussed are among those most pertinent to the areas of on-going conversation between us (grace, justification, human works, etc.)

Did you find it challenging to complete the book while teaching at Mount Mercy University?

Somewhat, yes. One simply has to carve out time to work and write, which isn’t always easy. I found that devoting myself to working over the summer was particularly helpful. And, thankfully, my wife has been amazingly helpful in aiding and supporting me in the time needed. In many ways, this book was a joint project, if you will, because getting it done required work from both of us.

How do you balance time researching, writing, and teaching?

In my experience, it is really just a matter of time management. One has to select times in one’s schedule that are set aside for particular kinds of work such as meeting with students, writing, etc. As I mentioned before, working during the summer is also very helpful. But, while I need to set aside blocks of time for certain kinds of work, I find that writing and teaching tend to be mutually beneficial to each other. Writing helps to keep me fresh in the classroom while researching for class and engaging with students helps me to further consider ideas that help shape what I am writing.

Are there any other writing projects you are working on?

I am working on a new book which will be, in some ways, a follow up to this one. The recent release of David Bentley Hart’s book That All Shall Be Saved has a lot of theologians thinking about universalism. As a corollary, if universalism is not true, we’re left with this really big question as to why God might permit evil and even hell. At the end of Grace, Predestination, and the Permission of Sin, I begin to give a response to that question. But I am hoping to engage it more fully in this second book, especially according to the mutually enriching insights of St. Thomas Aquinas and Julian of Norwich. And this opens up onto other questions such as whether this is the best of all possible worlds. And I think that, upon final analysis, St. Thomas gives a pretty surprising response to that question!

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poetspade45-blog · 6 years ago

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Letter to the Editor: Matthew Clemente’s Response to Kevin Hart’s “A Return to God After God”

JANUARY 13, 2019

Matthew Clemente’s Response to Kevin Hart’s “A Return to God After God” (November 25, 2018)

IT IS UNCOUTH to respond to a review of one’s work — this can be admitted from the start. Doubly so when one holds one’s reviewer in high regard, as I earnestly do. I have an enormous respect for Kevin Hart, who is not only a careful scholar but also a genuine artist, someone who brings together theology, philosophy, poetry, and the artistry of living in the manner called for by The Art of Anatheism. What is more, I was honored and humbled by Dr. Hart’s interest in the two works I co-edited. His review was thorough and thoughtful, engaging not only the volumes themselves but the philosophical currents that inspired them. Nevertheless, after reading the review I could not help but to feel that — out of fairness to our contributors who put so much time, care, and effort into their chapters — a couple of his claims necessitated responses.

First, Hart makes the assertion that “not many of the contributors have a rich knowledge of theology […] Many in the collections seem to be theological liberals, but theirs is not the theological liberalism of Ritschl or Tillich; it is a liberalism home grown in the thin soil of cultural studies.” Admittedly, I myself have not undergone the type of rigorous theological training needed to plumb the depths of my own Roman Catholic tradition. But I don’t believe the same could be said of, say, Emmanuel Falque, who has written extensively on the Church Fathers — in particular, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine — as well as medieval theologians such as Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Bonaventure, and Erigena. John Panteleimon Manoussakis’s most recent book, The Ethics of Time (2017), proposes one of the more original, yet orthodox readings of Augustine’s Confessions in recent memory. It does so, in part, by developing key concepts such as the problem of movement (kinesis) in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, and the understanding of the diastemic nature of fallen creation in the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, then relating them to contemporary thinkers, including theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar and John Zizioulas. Another contributor, Marianne Moyaert, has spent her career developing the notion of “Comparative Theology,” which attempts to “help theologians to further develop their doctrinal traditions” by encouraging them to engage rigorously with the sacred texts of other faiths. And, as Hart rightly notes, Christina Gschwandtner has written clear and careful treatments of many theologians and philosophers of religion, including a remarkably thorough consideration of the works of Ephrem the Syrian, in one of the volumes under review. All these scholars possess a rich understanding of Christian theology. None of them, as far as I am aware, considers himself or herself to be a theological liberal. Nor, I think, would most impartial observers question the depth of theological understanding of some of the more renowned contributors to the volumes such as Julia Kristeva, Thomas Altizer, John Caputo, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Second, Hart writes, “I found myself asking why almost all the contributors seem so uninterested in putting pressure on Kearney’s ideas. It is strange […] upon completing these two volumes one would put them down with a sense that anatheism is the very last word in the philosophy of religion, with little to be said by way of correction.” This assertion struck me as odd for two reasons. First, because The Art of Anatheism — which I co-edited with Kearney — makes plain that its purpose is to “further develop the anatheist proposal.” That is, to explore how “anatheism — the return to God after the death of God — opens naturally to a philosophy of theopoetics.” The import of Kearney’s thesis is, as expressly stated, to be assumed. Second, and more to the point, it is patently untrue that neither volume includes criticism of Kearney’s work. Indeed, the very critiques that Hart raises in his review are addressed at length. “One target of Kearney’s criticism,” he writes, “endorsed by several of his admirers, is Christian dogma […] before agreeing to dissolve or at least minimize reliance on doctrine, one might want to be given good reasons why one should do so.” A fair point — one which Marianne Moyaert explicitly makes in her essay “Anatheism and Inter-Religious Hospitality.” Distancing herself from Kearney, she writes:

I share with Kearney the firm conviction that a spirit of interreligious hospitality has the potential to break through the spiral of tribal tendencies, but I do not share his negative stance on dogmatic traditions. I do not think dogmatic theism necessarily excludes welcoming strange gods; matters are more nuanced.

Relying on documents such as Dei verbum (the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation) and the writings of thinkers like John Henry Newman, Moyaert argues that her “particular dogmatic tradition contains theological resources for dialogue even though it also claims that in Christ, God’s revelation reaches its climax.” Agreeing with Hart’s assertion that “some dogmas, if not all of them, attempt to indicate mysteries,” she concludes that “Catholic theology also acknowledges that Deus semper maior est. Not only do we not grasp the fullness of his revelation; his gracious self-communication extends beyond the boundaries of our own Christian tradition.”

Hart writes: “It is odd that, over the course of two quite thick volumes, there is no concern registered about what one might retrieve of the sacred in the brave new world that Kearney sketches […] not all the sacred is benign. Some of it is quite malign.” This critique finds echoes in both books under review. Manoussakis dedicates a sizable portion of his essay to “Destructive Poetics, Painful Pleasure, and the Erotics of Thanatos.” Freud, Nietzsche, Lacan, Sartre, and Deleuze factor heavily in this anatheistic reading of the death drive and its relation to the divine. Jacob Rogozinski, in “The Twofold Face of God,” examines the horrible ambiguity of the divine in the story of Abraham — the God who demands the sacrifice of Isaac. Jean-Luc Nancy and James Wood each provide critical challenges to anatheism from atheistic perspectives. (Nancy even counters Kearney’s interpretation of da Messina’s Annunciata, offering a reading of his own. Where Kearney reads the painting as the secular made sacred, Nancy reads it as the sacred made profane.) And L. Callid Keefe-Perry, in “The Wager That Wasn’t,” questions whether Kearney sets up an authentic wager at all — whether the risk of choosing a “malign” deity is even possible for the anatheist proposal. “Kearney wants anatheism to persist in a moment of true tension […] And yet, I cannot help but to wonder if, in fact, the philosopher doth protest too much.”

It is neither my job nor my intention to review the reviewer or even his review. I hesitated before writing this response. As I said above, I have nothing but respect for Kevin Hart, and I would not have written this had I not felt that I owed it to the exceptional scholars who contributed to the two volumes; I felt obligated to highlight the rigor and clarity of their work. It is my hope that this congenial reply fosters more dialogue around what I consider to be a vital topic, and that it emphasizes not only the exactness we demand of our scholars, but also the hospitality, generosity, and goodwill characteristic of all those engaged in a genuine pursuit of wisdom.

Kevin Hart’s Response to Matthew Clemente

Matthew Clemente thinks I have been a little rough with regard to the two collections of essays on Richard Kearney with which he has been involved. The review struck me as benign, all the more so because I put Kearney front and center in the review; he is not only a friend but also a philosopher whose itinerary is close to my own in some respects. In more than one way, Kearney and I belong to the same family, and I would like to see him treated well. That Clemente also wishes to treat him well is evident; and at heart we disagree more about the importance of historical knowledge and the proper treatment of intellectual positions than the rightness of the path Kearney has taken.

Doubtless that knowledge and treatment would have been more expressly articulated had I composed a long and careful essay on anatheism and its supporters. However, a review is a short piece, written partly to indicate to potential buyers if a given book is something they should own, and partly to maintain as high a standard of intellectual debate as is possible in the media. To be sure, I regret that so much discussion of religion these days is conducted without due knowledge of theology and the history of theology; it means that our intellectual engagements with religion, which are so important, are conducted with reference mainly to the living present, and often in ignorance of important distinctions, concepts, arguments, and practices. Clemente begins by conceding his own lack of “rigorous theological training,” which does not put him in a particularly good place from which to speak about my criticisms. He then identifies four contributors who, he thinks, are theologically well educated, one of whom I mention in the review for the depth of her knowledge of a writer in the early Church. Three contributors are defended, then, out of 35, which I take to be consistent with my judgment that “not many of the contributors have a rich knowledge of theology” [my emphasis].

Clemente also objects to my caveat that there is little offered by way of criticism of Kearney’s project. Any interesting idea benefits by having smart and well-educated people put pressure on it, and this can be done in all sorts of ways. One can examine examples that Kearney gives, ponder different ways of drawing distinctions than the ones he proposes, and explore counter-examples to his case. These things, along with several others, help the community to assess the value and strength of a position. What’s more, they help the author to sharpen his or her ideas and so produce the best work possible.

It’s true: I did not find enough of this critical practice in the two volumes under review. According to Clemente, my discontent was because I did not notice that the contributors sought to “further develop” Kearney’s ideas. On the contrary, I did; but I thought that the bulk of the two volumes simply didn’t engage those ideas at a level that would make anyone wish to take them up in preference to others that are also put before us in conferences, seminars, libraries, bookshops, journals, and the media. No doubt I could have applauded two friends, Emmanuel Falque and John Manoussakis, among others, for the depth of their philosophical and theological knowledge; and no doubt I could have thrown up my hands, for the umpteenth time, when reading Jean-Luc Nancy, who plays a very loose game with monotheism, and whose prose strikes me as rough and ready at best. But a review is a review, not an essay and not an exercise in grading term papers; and a review of two edited collections, with a total of 35 different contributions, must look a little more often to the mile than to the inch.

Matthew Clemente is a teaching fellow at Boston College specializing in philosophy of religion and contemporary continental thought. He is author of Out of the Storm: A Novella and is editor (with Richard Kearney) of The Art of Anatheism.

Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. His most recent books are Barefoot (Notre Dame University Press, 2018) and Poetry and Revelation (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is currently preparing a set of Gifford Lectures to deliver at the University of Glasgow.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/letter-to-the-editor-matthew-clementes-response-to-kevin-harts-a-return-to-god-after-god/

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jeroldlockettus · 6 years ago

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There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285 Rebroadcast)

(Photo Credit: MattyFlicks / flickr)

Some people argue that sugar should be regulated, like alcohol and tobacco, on the grounds that it’s addictive and toxic. How much sense does that make? We hear from a regulatory advocate, an evidence-based skeptic, a former F.D.A. commissioner — and the organizers of Milktoberfest.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

This week we’re bringing you one of our most popular episodes from the archive. Because we’re traveling. Our American listeners know why. To the rest of you: this is the week we all drive hundreds of miles to eat turkey — which isn’t that great, honestly — and pie, which is great. So we thought it’d be a good time to re-release this episode, called “There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified?”

[MUSIC: Jonathan Still, “Lederhosen”]

Surely you’re familiar with the beloved autumn festival that revolves around folk dancing and lots and lots of drinking …

LAYTON: Milktoberfest! The holiday for drinking milk and doing homework.

Okay, not what you were expecting. Bavaria has Oktoberfest; Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, has Milktoberfest — Brigham Young being a Mormon university, and therefore prohibiting the consumption of, among other substances, alcohol.

LAYTON: People don’t drink, but we still like to have a lot of fun.

Roger Layton, communications manager at the B.Y.U. library, helps produce Milktoberfest.

LAYTON: And so we thought, “Let’s just embrace that. Let’s just enjoy it.” We had a very energetic group of German folk dancers come in and perform, and we brought in cases and cases of chocolate milk. As soon as the milk was there and we said, “Go!” — it basically became a free-for-all.

OLDROYD: People love it because Milktoberfest was almost B.Y.U. lite or something like that.

That’s Brenna Oldroyd, a B.Y.U. student who helped put together Milktoberfest.

OLDROYD: Like, “Hey, this is what we love to drink all the time!”

The chocolate milk they’re drinking isn’t just any chocolate milk. It’s some pretty legendary chocolate milk, made in B.Y.U.’s own creamery.

LAYTON: If you show up at a party with chocolate milk, no one’s going to complain. It may seem a little childish, but people will drink it. It’s friendly, it’s safe, and it’s happy.

OLDROYD: And one of the great things about partying with chocolate milk is if you’re smart, you’re not going to throw up later. That’s a plus.

This all sounds pretty awesome, right? And wholesome, too — swapping out beer for chocolate milk. But is chocolate milk really as wholesome as it seems? Do you know how much sugar there is in one cup of chocolate milk? The answer is 24 grams — a bit more than you’d find in a standard serving of soda. And there are those who argue that the detriments of sugar — well, they’d argue that, from a metabolic standpoint at least, Milktoberfest isn’t much better than Oktoberfest.

Robert LUSTIG: We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing.

If you’ve been following health news in the last decade, you’ve likely noticed that there’s a war on sugar.

Belva DAVIS in a clip from KQED’s This Week in Northern California: An alarming rise in the rate of obesity and related health problems has prompted a nationwide movement to ban or restrict sugary drinks …

How justified is that war? Today’s episode was inspired by a question we received …

Saul ARNOW: Dear Freakonomics, My name is Saul Arnow, and I’m an 11-year-old listener from Chicago. I was wondering why sugar isn’t considered a drug even though it is addictive and stimulates the brain. Sincerely, Saul.

Okay, Saul — we’ll do our best to answer your question. Along the way, we’ll learn some sugar history:

Elizabeth ABBOTT: St. Thomas Aquinas, way back in the 13th century, pronounced sugar a medicine.

We’ll hear from some people who fully agree with you:

Robert LUSTIG: Now alcohol, tobacco, morphine and heroin clearly meet these four criteria.

Some people who don’t agree with you:

Richard KAHN: We have no clue, no real good evidence that it’s going to do any good whatsoever.

And we’ll hear about your sugar habits.

BOY: I tried to give it up once, but it didn’t work out at all because I’m addicted to sugar. I can’t help it.

* * *

[MUSIC: Paul Freitas, “Sugar Daddy” (from Salon de Cabaret)]

Before we get into the nitty-gritty on sugar, let me offer a sort of caveat.

KAHN: In general, nutrition studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in biological science.

That’s Richard Kahn.

KAHN: I’m the former chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

So what’s the problem with nutrition studies?

KAHN: There are often no controls, no randomization, small number of subjects — it’s very difficult to conduct very robust, long-term studies on nutrition.

Okay, this is a really important point. It’s the kind of thing we talk about all the time on this program — the legitimacy of data, yada yada. But with nutrition, there are a few things going on that make it particularly tough. No. 1: this is about something that we all put in our mouth every day. Which means we all think of ourselves as experts. Unlike particle physics or financial engineering, this is something we all do all the time, so of course we know what we’re talking about. No. 2: most nutrition science is built on survey data — that is, asking people about what they’ve eaten, or asking them to keep food diaries, things like that. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to Freakonomics Radio over the years, you know this is a surefire way to gather some not-so-realistic, or at least not-so-robust data. And so, as Richard Kahn said, it can be a real challenge to run a really convincing nutrition study.

KAHN: Because people do not want to participate. They don’t want to alter their diet patterns for a long time and they don’t comply with the regimen of the instructions in the randomized trial.

Now, if we could take a few thousand people, and randomize them, and then control every single thing they ate and drank for a few years — well, that that’d be great. But, absent that, we do our best. We look for data. We ask questions. Starting here:

Stephen J. DUBNER: As a public health official in New York and at the national level, you’ve tried to stem AIDS and T.B. and pandemic flu. You’ve tried to prepare the public for a potential bioterror attacks. How, in light of those dangers, would you rank the consumption of sugar?

HAMBURG: Well, they’re very different threats. But we have to recognize that — while acute public health crises really demand all of our attention and get a lot of response — that how we live, what we eat, if we exercise, many aspects of our daily lives have the greatest impact on health and disease.

That’s Margaret Hamburg.

HAMBURG: I am a medical doctor and a public health professional who has served in government at many levels over many years now including most recently as the U.S. F.D.A. commissioner.

DUBNER: I wanted to ask you briefly about some F.D.A. definitions. When I read them I have to say they are somewhere between comical and incomprehensible. When the F.D.A. defines food, food additives, drugs and, then “substances generally regarded as safe.” So those are the categories. Which of these definitions apply to sugar?

HAMBURG: You know, I have to agree with you that many of the definitions are hard to penetrate.

DUBNER: I didn’t mean to slam you. I assumed you didn’t write them and that there were 40 lawyers between whoever wrote them and—

HAMBURG: No, no! Congress is responsible for some of it, and the F.D.A. lawyers for some of it. And, of course, many of these laws and regulations and guidances and definitions have evolved over many, many years. But it is complicated and confusing and it’s why there are almost as many lawyers as scientists at the F.D.A.

DUBNER: For instance, the very first thing: “food.” No. 1, “articles used for food or drink for man or other animals.” I can imagine that could easily fit within F.D.A. guidelines then, if it were used for food. Yep?

HAMBURG: It’s really hard to answer a question like the one you just posed to me. Sugar is intrinsic to many food products. It’s not going to be regulated in the same way that a completely exogenous additive to a food product can be regulated.

DUBNER: But technically, the categories under which sugar falls, however, are “food additive” and G.R.A.S., “generally regarded as safe,” and not food itself. Correct?

HAMBURG: This is my point. I’m not going to answer your question because I don’t have my lawyers here.

DUBNER: I see.

HAMBURG: But there are sugars in fruits and vegetables, there are sugars in dairy products, there’re sugars in various grasses that people consume. It’s intrinsic to the food product itself.

[MUSIC: Paul Freitas, “A Little Crazy” (from Again Spring)]

For instance, let’s get back to chocolate milk for a minute. As we said, it’s got 24 grams of sugar per one-cup serving, more than some soda. But regular old milk, without the chocolate, has about 12 grams of sugar — it’s naturally sweet from the lactose. And then there’s the sugar that’s added to many foods.

HAMBURG: Products that you think are actually very healthy — yogurt — the levels of sugar are astonishingly high. Things like barbecue sauce and spaghetti sauce and soup actually have much higher levels of sugar than you would ever imagine. Not to mention the levels that are in you know pies and cakes and ice cream and things where you would expect to see sugar.

So how much sugar, overall, do we actually consume?

LUSTIG: Right now we are about 60 to 65 percent over our limit, and that’s average.

That’s Robert Lustig.

LUSTIG: I’m a professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, also a member of their Institute for Health Policy Studies. My job is to try to treat obese children and now, also, alter the global food supply.

DUBNER: Easy picking the low hanging fruit for yourself, I see.

LUSTIG: Easier said than done. In both cases.

The data vary — again, this is nutrition science we’re talking about here — but the most recent estimates show that Americans consume between 20 and 30 teaspoons of added sugar per day. That’s down a bit from our peak consumption, sometime around the early 2000’s, but Americans still consume more added sugar than anyone else. This has turned Lustig into one of the most outspoken sugar critics you will find. He came to this position over many years.

LUSTIG: I’m a pediatric endocrinologist. I take care of glandular hormonal problems in children. I was doing that pretty seamlessly for a good two-to-three decades. Then the kids started getting fat on me. The question was, “What’s going on?” We started looking at what sugar did to the body, and what we realized was it caused this thing called insulin resistance and particularly in the liver. We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing, and it makes sense that it should, because after all, where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar. We were now seeing the diseases of alcohol without the alcohol. That started my, shall we say, advocacy in this field of obesity and public health.

KAHN: If you are indeed overweight or obese, you want to lose weight, the first place to start is to reduce sugar consumption.

That, again, is Richard Kahn, formerly of the American Diabetes Association.

KAHN: The reason being that we get plenty of energy from other carbohydrates, we don’t have to rely on sugar to get our energy. And the second reason is that sugar itself does not come along with any other essential nutrients, vitamins or minerals.

So you might think that Kahn and Lustig are in precisely the same camp. But there you’d be wrong.

KAHN: There’s no question that there is a real obesity epidemic throughout the world. That, I think is very real. It’s very important. It’s very serious. It has clear adverse health consequences. In addition, that has led directly to a dramatic increase in the incidence of diabetes throughout the world. We first saw this in the United States. We’ve seen it in European countries. We’re now seeing it in Asian countries. Diabetes is clearly a serious disease. It has quite serious complications and that��s a problem. Then the question becomes, “What has caused the obesity epidemic?” And that is, to use the euphemism, the $64,000 question.

There are many potential contributors to the rise in obesity.

KAHN: There’s been some evidence that with the increased use of psychotropic drugs, anti-depressive drugs, drugs for schizophrenia and other mental disorders — those drugs tend to promote weight gain. Another possibility is that we’ve seen, clearly, smoking cessation in a large proportion of the population. And when people stop smoking, that’s usually been associated with weight gain. Psychotropic drugs, smoking cessation, potential infections have been attributed to a rise in obesity.

There’s also a lot of research arguing the rather obvious point that we consume more calories today than we used to — for a lot of reasons. The relative low cost of food; the deliciousness of food; the availability of food — especially the availability of cheap, delicious, sweet food.

KAHN: Many people do believe that sugar consumption has been the cause, is the cause, of our obesity epidemic and then, subsequently, diabetes. But I believe that the evidence for this is pretty weak.

When the City of San Francisco wanted to add warning labels to soda, Kahn submitted an expert report on behalf of, among others, the American Beverage Association. He wrote: “There is no scientific consensus that added sugar (including added sugar in beverages) plays a unique role in the development of obesity and diabetes.”

KAHN: If we look as an analogy, for example, to cigarette smoking, and try to make the link between sugar and obesity or diabetes, and cigarette smoking to cancer. What are the differences?

Okay, what are the differences?

KAHN: In the cigarette-smoking realm, the lowest smoking rate produced an enormous incidence of lung cancer. The highest rate of smoking was just simply off the charts in terms of the likelihood of developing lung cancer. Conversely, with sugar consumption, it’s less than a two-fold increase at the highest levels.

This gets into tricky territory. As Kahn says, some studies do find a two-fold increase in diabetes at the highest level of sugar consumption — but other analyses, including one by Robert Lustig, argue it’s considerably higher. That said, the relationship between sugar and obesity is nowhere near as strong as the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. According to the NIH, even “light smoking” results in a nine-fold increase.

KAHN: The next one is something called temporality. In other words, is there association in time between sugar consumption and obesity? That held pretty true from about 1985 to the year 2000. Where obesity levels went up, sugar consumption went up. But thereafter starting in the year 2000, even to today, sugar consumption has declined somewhere around 15 to 20 percent, whereas obesity rates continue to rise. We don’t see that at all with smoking, the analogous situation. Cigarette smoking rises, cancer rises. Cigarette smoking declines, cancer declines.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that sugar doesn’t contribute to obesity. Just that, again, the relationship isn’t so definitive. Kahn points to another difference between smoking and sugar.

KAHN: In cigarette smoking, we found a link between cigarette smoking and cancer in every population, every ethnicity, both genders, all kinds of tobacco use and even in bystanders. Conversely, with sugar, we don’t have that consistency whatsoever.

For instance: some studies show a strong relationship between weight gain and sugar-sweetened beverages — S.S.B.’s — but that relationship is most consistent when the S.S.B.’s are consumed in addition to a person’s regular diet. So the problem might simply be the extra calories, not the sugar per se. It could also be that people who drink a lot of sugary drinks do other things that lead to weight gain. There’s also the fact that, as Richard Kahn said earlier …

KAHN: In general, nutrition studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in biological science. In sugar consumption, most of [the studies have] either no controls, a very small number of subjects … They’ve only lasted for days or weeks at the most. The experimental studies have not been robust.

So in Kahn’s view, the science on sugar is not settled. Which means that the notion of regulating sugar is, at best, premature.

KAHN: I don’t think that there is any absolute amount of sugar that we should be under in our consumption. It all relates to eating a well-rounded diet.

To Robert Lustig, meanwhile, the time for regulation is now.

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “It’s About Time” (from It’s About Time)]

DUBNER: This episode was inspired by a listener, who wrote in to say, “If sugar is as bad for us as a lot of people are now saying it is, why isn’t it regulated the way other potentially harmful substances, like alcohol or tobacco, are regulated?” How do you answer that question?

LUSTIG: Well, the public health community has identified four separate criteria that are needed to be fulfilled before a substance can be considered for regulation. No. 1: ubiquity, that is, can’t get away from it. No. 2: toxicity, that it’s dangerous. No. 3: abused, that increased consumption is inherent in the molecule itself. Finally, No. 4 is externalities. That is, your consumption hurts me. Now alcohol, tobacco, morphine, and heroin clearly meet these four criteria. The question is, “Does sugar meet them?” And the answer is, yes, it does, absolutely.

Okay, let’s look at those four criteria for sugar. Ubiquity? That’s pretty much a no-brainer. But what about toxicity? Lustig’s hypothesis has to do with how the body handles fructose.

LUSTIG: When you consume dietary sugar, the glucose molecules can go anywhere in the body; only about 20 percent hit the liver. But the fructose molecules have to be handled in the liver, because there’s a specific transporter called the GLUT5 transporter; it is only in the liver. When you consume a soda, you are flooding your liver, and your liver can’t handle the flood. The liver has no choice but to turn that fructose into liver fat. It’s that liver fat that causes the chronic metabolic disease. We have the data that demonstrates that it’s the liver fat made from dietary sugar that is at the nidus, at the beginning of type-2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease. We’re starting to ferret out the links between dietary sugar and cancer and dementia as well.

DUBNER: But I know there’s other research that says that the toxicity argument may be overstated. That it’s not an acute toxin but a chronic one.

LUSTIG: You are absolutely right that sugar is not an acute toxin. Chronic toxins are still toxins even though they don’t make you keel over and die. Is benzene a toxin? We regulate it as such. Benzene doesn’t kill you acutely.

DUBNER: What about alcohol?

LUSTIG: Alcohol is both. It’s an acute toxin. You can die on a bender. Or it’s a chronic toxin — you can fry your liver. It’s both. The point is that the F.D.A. regulates acute toxins, because it’s in their charter, The Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. Very specifically, it does not say anything about chronic toxins. The F.D.A. does not regulate chronic toxins.

Criteria No. 3 for regulation: the potential for abuse.

LUSTIG: It turns out that there is no biochemical reaction in any vertebrate on the planet that requires dietary fructose. Now, it happens to be sweet. It happens to signal our brain reward centers that we like the stuff. We happen to crave it. We happen to really enjoy it, and a little too much. In fact, now we have data that shows that it happens to be addictive as well.

Nicole AVENA: The question about whether sugar can meet the criteria for an addiction or an abused substance is something that I’ve been studying for many years now. It’s something that I think has become of interest to a lot of people.

That’s Dr. Nicole Avena. She’s a research neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

AVENA: The way in which we’ve been studying this and the way in which others have studied this is to use these D.S.M. criteria for addiction and ask the question, “Can sugar, when it’s consumed in excess, produce some of these behavioral indications and neurochemical indications that you would typically see with a substance of abuse?”

The D.S.M. is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It defines addiction or substance abuse along four main criteria: impaired control; social impairment; risky use; and pharmacological indicators like tolerance and withdrawal.

AVENA: You certainly don’t need to meet all of them and many people who are addicts don’t meet all those criteria. But you do need to meet a certain number of them for a protracted period of time. What the research has suggested in both animal models and in clinical studies is that the criteria for addiction as we classically define it in the DSM can be met when the substance of abuse is a sugar or a palatable food, in many cases. We see evidence of bingeing, withdrawal, craving. We also see changes in the brain.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that some of the most troubling studies are animal studies, which can be problematic on two fronts. One: the lab animals aren’t people, so they process sugar differently. Two: the doses of sugar they receive in the lab are often so large as to not be comparable to what most people would consume. Moreover, sugar isn’t the only thing we consume that has “addictive” qualities: pizza and french fries are also at the top of the list. So how well does this emerging model of sugar addiction line up to the addictive criteria for the sort of drugs that we do regulate?

AVENA: It’s a difficult question, because sugar is safe when it’s used in moderation. But the problem is that most people are unaware of how much sugar they’re consuming. Also, if the data suggests that the sugar is producing addictive-like changes in the brain, then we’re talking about something very different. Because if you’re no longer be able to have full volitional control over your decision to eat or not eat the sugar, then that becomes a different type of discussion.

The fourth criteria for regulation, that Robert Lustig was telling us about: externalities.

LUSTIG: That is, your consumption hurts me.

A classic case of externalities is auto travel. Every time you drive, it costs me something whether I’m driving or not. More pollution; more congestion; more risk of accident. We share all those costs, regardless of my actions.

LUSTIG: The question is, “Does this fit for sugar? Do I have anything to say about your consumption?” And the answer is, “Yeah, you’re costing me in obesity-related health care — whether I’m obese or not — because of your obesity.” It’s economic, but it’s real. 62 percent of all the health care costs in this country are shouldered by the federal government. Damn right, we share it!

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “My Dear” (from It’s About Time)]

* * *

[MUSIC: Vic & Gab, “When You Walk In The Room” (from Love of Mine)]

It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t like sugar. And nearly just as hard to find anyone who doesn’t think they’re having too much of it …

YOUNG WOMAN: I really like sugar. I know it’s bad for you, but I like it.

SOUTHERN MAN: Right now, I am staying away from sugar, trying to eat a better, have a better diet.

MAN: I’ve tried to cut back on it, but I’ve never given it up. I think it tastes delicious in the right thing, and I think that, at this point, it’s probably an addiction that my body just needs to have. I’ve never tried to give it up, nor will I try any time soon.

GIRL: I’ve definitely eaten too much of it, because I had a sleepover at my friend’s, and for breakfast we had lollies!

It wasn’t always thus.

ABBOTT: Sugar started out as a minor commodity that was used for medicine and for spice, up into the Middle Ages.

That’s Elizabeth Abbott. She teaches history at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and is the author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History. She says the debate over what sugar is — a food, a drug, or something in between — is hardly new.

ABBOTT: St. Thomas Aquinas, way back in the 13th century, pronounced sugar a medicine. He said: “Though nutritious in themselves, sugared spices are nonetheless not eaten with the end in mind of nourishment, but rather for ease in digestion. Accordingly, they do not break the fast any more than the taking of any other medicine.”

One reason sugar was welcome in medicine was because a lot of medicine tasted terrible — a combination bitter roots, animal feces, even bits of corpse. So yeah, a spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down! Outside of medicine, however, sugar was decidedly aristocratic.

ABBOTT: For example, Persia — or Iran today — [sugar] was very popular among the elite. They are the ones that started this trend, this architecture of sugar. They would make beautiful sculptures often, for example, life-size trees.

Sugar was costly, and sugar was rare. But the sugar trade began to grow, built on the back of the slave trade.

ABBOTT: By 1680, sugar costs only half what it had in 1630. That was thanks to slavery. By 1700, the percentage of imported foodstuffs including sugar had more than doubled and they quadrupled between 1700 and 1740. England and Wales consumed 60 times more sugar — though their populations did not quite double.

Abbott argues it was the Industrial Revolution that helped turn sugar into an everyday thing.

ABBOTT: People started going from their farms and so on into cities and into factories. They couldn’t go home for lunch because they had maybe a 15-minute break. So sugared tea and a bun — or some sort of thing like that, often with jam on it — was offered instead, and that was what popularized it. It’s said that it fueled the Industrial Revolution because sugared tea — and it would be really sugary — has calories. They’re not nutritious but they are units of energy.

The sugar boom helped create another boom that we’re still living through.

ABBOTT: They had a lobby that was extremely powerful. We could say all the big heavy industrial lobbying probably stems from the success of the sugar lobby.

That’s right: it wasn’t enough to benefit from slave labor and huge demand for their product.

ABBOTT: The sugar plantations were profitable not just because of the demand but largely because of how they were politically strong. If they had failures, if they had hurricanes, if they had bad crops — which they often did — they could keep the price. They could get Parliament to help them out with good legislation and tariffs and so on that would favor them. By the way, the sugar lobby is still a very important on. It has a lot of weight still, and it now is an alliance of cane sugar planters and beet sugar planters. They get together to lobby when and when they feel that their interests are at stake.

It was only recently uncovered that in the 1960’s, the sugar industry paid three Harvard scientists to write a review that shifted the blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. Much more recently, Coca-Cola spent millions of dollars on research arguing that the real culprit in obesity is lack of exercise, not sugary drinks. So you can’t blame people for being confused, maybe conflicted, about the degree to which sugar is a health risk. I brought this up with Robert Lustig.

DUBNER: Right now, we’re talking in the year 2017. A lot of people now are convinced that the U.S. government and many others erred terribly in declaring fat to be the cause of obesity. Many people now believe, as you argue, that sugar is a much bigger villain. How do we know you’re not the guy that’s wrong this time, that you’re not just another — perhaps well-intentioned — big-brained do-gooder who is making a massive mistake?

LUSTIG: An awfully good question. This is known as the pessimistic meta-induction theory. What it says is, “Everything we knew 10 years ago is already wrong, and everything we know today will be wrong 10 years from now. Why should we do anything differently when we know that whatever it is that we believe today will end up being wrong?” If you play that game, then you might as well never do any research, never do anything at all, and live with the current dogma.

There’s also the confounding fact, pointed out by former F.D.A. commissioner Margaret Hamburg, that a lot of time you’re eating sugar even when you don’t know you’re eating sugar.

HAMBURG: Things like barbecue sauce and spaghetti sauce and soup actually have much higher levels of sugar than you would ever imagine.

DUBNER: Talk to me for a moment about the Smart Choices program and what the F.D.A. did there.

HAMBURG: The Smart Choices program was an effort spearheaded by industry. A number of major food-producing companies came together to create a system where you would give different scores to different aspects of the nutritional value of a product. The total number would then either give you the green check, the smart choice, or not.

DUBNER: The name, I gather, was an industry name, yes?

HAMBURG: Right. Exactly. The problem with it was that you could score adequately high to get that “green smart choice check” without the food truly reflecting what any sensible nutrition expert would view as a healthy, smart choice. Some of the products that got the smart choice label were over 40 percent sugar. We joked that you could practically take sawdust and if you added enough nutrients to it and the fiber of sawdust, you could have it labeled as a healthy choice, a smart choice.

DUBNER: How long did that last?

HAMBURG: It was out there for a little while. We expressed our concerns to the group that had put this together and was implementing it. They listened and understood. They decided voluntarily to withdraw the program. There have been a number of efforts to look at other strategies for providing consumers with important information about foods. The nutrition facts label, of course, is one important aspect. The nutrition facts label that’s on most processed foods and beverages in this country was first put into place more than two decades ago. But then it was never updated. When I was commissioner, we decided it did need to be updated to reflect both deeper understandings about how people eat. Serving size for example. Also, advances in nutrition science. We embarked on a process to update it. I think the most important contribution that this updated nutrition facts label provides is in the area of added sugar.

DUBNER: As I understand it, food and beverage companies are already adjusting their products to consider the new labeling. Was that your intention?

HAMBURG: Absolutely. One of the goals of putting out that information is to encourage companies to reformulate foods towards healthier products. We’ve certainly seen that happen as we move towards this the implementation of this new nutrition facts label. Stonyfield Yogurt just recently decided to significantly reduce levels of sugar before the new facts label is actually in place. F.D.A., in some ways, has the opportunity to use both the carrot and the stick. Knowing that we could do mandatory guidelines on certain things often encouraged industry to work with us, to come to voluntary approaches. But there’s no doubt that there are tensions.

DUBNER: Robert Lustig and several others in that camp argue that sugar should be regulated substantially because it meets criteria for substances that should be controlled or regulated: unavoidability, toxicity, potential for abuse, and negative impact on society. I’m curious what your thoughts are on sugar fitting those criteria and whether you think that’s even a useful framework.

HAMBURG: We need to reduce excess sugar in our diets and in the products that we consume. Consumers need more education and information. But I’m not sure that I can really embrace the proposal to regulate sugar in that way.

DUBNER: Because it would be too overreaching? Because it would be too difficult? Why?

HAMBURG: It’s a complex area to regulate in that sugars are intrinsic components of many foods which should be part of a balanced nutritious diet. Fruits and vegetables and dairy products are good examples. I think that some of the concerns that have been raised may not be fully grounded in the best possible science.

“Not fully grounded in the best possible science.” That, you’ll recall, was Richard Kahn’s main objection to the idea of regulating sugar. But there’s another one too:

KAHN: If you reduce it or get rid of it or put policies and laws regulating it, what good is it going to do? We have no clue, no real good evidence that it’s going to do any good whatsoever. Therefore, unintended consequences become a very important factor.

Robert Lustig, meanwhile, is — as you’ve likely figured out by now — in favor of just about any kind of sugar regulation you can imagine. Taxes, for instance, and price hikes — both of which worked to reduce cigarette smoking, and are already being used on sugary drinks in a few places.

LUSTIG: The modeling studies that have been done suggests that you have to raise the price of a can of soda by about 20 percent in order to see any meaningful reduction in consumption.

Lustig’s also in favor of limiting the availability of sugar — removing vending machines from schools for instance. Also, banning TV commercials for products with added sugar. Also: getting rid of subsidies.

LUSTIG: Subsidies for food make no sense because subsidies distort the market.

DUBNER: One last question, perhaps ridiculous or impossible: let’s say we’re in a world where you could edit genes quite easily. It seems we’re not that far from it. Whether we’re talking about a 50-year-old person or a zygote. How would you consider editing the genes related to what seems to be a craving, perhaps even dangerous craving for sugar?

LUSTIG: That’s a really tough question. We don’t want to turn off our reward system entirely. If we do, we get into trouble. We actually did this. We did this experiment with a medicine back in the early 2000’s. That medicine was called Rimonabant. What it was was it was the anti-marijuana medicine. It blocked the endo-cannabinoid receptors in the brain, and by doing so reduced reward for alcohol and for food. In fact, people who took Rimonabant lost a fair amount of weight. It looked very promising. Until we started looking at the Phase 3 data and started realizing that a lot of these people became severely depressed, and many of them committed suicide. We didn’t realize it, until we did those Phase 3 trial. It was never approved here in the United States. Bottom line is, if you take away a reward, you take away the reason for living. Be careful about gene editing our rewards system.

Most of the regulatory measures Robert Lustig would like to see around sugar lie somewhere between unlikely and impossible, at least for now. In any case, we asked a bunch of people in Times Square what they thought of it …

YOUNG MAN: Most definitely shouldn’t ban sugar. Sugar’s one of the best things in the world. But I don’t think it should be taxed, either. I feel like it should just be accessible to everybody, because it’s a nice thing. It’s the best thing out there!

YOUNG WOMAN: Probably a tax, but not a ban. I don’t think a ban would work very well. There’s just too much sugar in the world. But maybe a tax would have people thinking more about what they’re buying a little bit more.

SOUTHERN MAN: A tax or ban on sugar? I feel that would backfire really bad. Look back at the Revolutionary War. The British put a tax on tea and people didn’t really like that too much!

SMALL GIRL: I would probably cry because I love sugar!

A love of sugar seems, from what we can tell, pretty universal. Including among the scientists and doctors we’ve been speaking with today. From Richard Kahn, formerly of the American Diabetes Association…

KAHN: One clear thing that comes to mind is just pleasure. Sugar is enjoyable to eat. It’s part of our culture, keeping our community together, our families together.

To Margaret Hamburg, former F.D.A. commissioner…

HAMBURG: I will admit to having a sweet tooth. Oatmeal cookies, I’ll tell you, are my particular vice.

To the most anti-sugar one of all, Dr. Robert Lustig:

LUSTIG: Sugar’s celebratory! Sugar’s fun! Sugar’s Apple Pie. Sugar is reward — but once a week.

[MUSIC: Stubborn Son, “Vixen” (from Birthright)]

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam with help from Eliza Lambert, Matt Fidler, and Sam Bair. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins and Zack Lapinski. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Saul Arnow, the 11-year-old Freakonomics Radio listener who inspired this episode!

Elizabeth Abbott, senior research associate in the arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Dr. Nicole Avena, research neuroscientist at at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Margaret Hamburg, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Roger Layton, communications and public relations manager at Brigham Young University Library.

Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics and member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at The University of California, San Francisco; president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

Richard Kahn, former chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

Brenna Oldroyd, student at Brigham Young University.

RESOURCES

“A Big Tobacco Moment for the Sugar Industry,” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, (September 15, 2016).

“ Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?: Health Be Damned! Pour on the Sugar,” George A. Bray and Barry M. Popkin. (April 2014).

“Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?: We Have, but the Pox on Sugar Is Overwrought and Overworked,” Richard Kahn and John L. Sievenpiper. (April 2014).

“Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake,” Nicole M. Avena, Pedro Rada, and Bartley G. Hoebel (2008).

“How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat,” Anahad O’Connor, The New York Times (September 12, 2016).

“Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review,” Jonathan D. Schoenfeld and John P.A. Ioannidis (January 1, 2013).

“Isocaloric Fructose Restriction and Metabolic Improvement in Children with Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome,” Robert Lustig, Kathleen Mulligan, Susan M. Noworolski, Viva W. Tai, Michael J. Wen, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Alejandro Gugliucci, and Jean-Marc Schwarz (February 2016).

“The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages,” Kelly D. Brownell, Thomas Farley, Walter C. Willett, Barry M. Popkin, Frank J. Chaloupka, Joseph W. Thompson, and David S. Ludwig (October 15, 2009).

“Public Health: The Toxic Truth about Sugar,” Robert Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt, and Claire D. Brindis (February 2, 2012).

“The Relationship of Sugar to Population-Level Diabetes Prevalence: An Econometric Analysis of Repeated Cross-Sectional Data,” Sanjay Basu, Paula Yoffe, Nancy Hills, and Robert H. Lustig (February 27, 2013).

“Resolved: There Is Sufficient Scientific Evidence That Decreasing Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption Will Reduce the Prevalence of Obesity and Obesity-Related Diseases,” Frank Hu (August 2013).

“Sickeningly Sweet: Does Sugar Cause Chronic Disease? No,” John Sievenpiper (August 1, 2016).

“Sickeningly Sweet: Does Sugar Cause Type 2 Diabetes? Yes,” Robert Lustig (August 1, 2016).

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Abbott, Elizabeth (The Overlook Press, 2011).

Sugar: The Bitter Truth by University of California Television (UCTV) (March 7, 2017).

“The Sugar Wars,” Daniel Engber, The Atlantic , (January/February 2017).

“Which Foods May Be Addictive? The Roles of Processing, Fat Content, and Glycemic Load,” Erica M. Schulte, Nicole M. Avena, and Ashley N. Gearhardt (February 18, 2015).

“You’re About to Find Out How Much Sugar Is Added to Your Food,” Deena Shankar Bloomberg.com , (August 9, 2016).

EXTRA

Fed Up, (Atlas Films, 2014).

“Healthy Diet,” World Health Organization.

Milktoberfest.

“Understanding and Addressing Food Addiction: A Science-Based Approach to Policy, Practice and Research” The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

The post There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/sugar-rebroadcast/

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how2to18 · 7 years ago

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I WAS IN the airport bookstore in Tallinn, Estonia, when I noticed a translation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty. This was 2015. It had taken a while for him to reach the Baltics — 24 years, to be exact. That’s a long time compared to other American writers like Paul Auster and Charles Bukowski. Is there something about Elmore Leonard’s work that resists translation?

After reading Charles Rzepka’s Being Cool in paperback reissue (hardback 2013), I venture that there is. In this detailed and deep investigation of Leonard’s sangfroid, Rzepka lays out a number of factors that contribute to a more hermetic American-ness, one that just doesn’t offer foreign translators, publishers, or readers an easy grip on the author’s native charms. And it might matter that most of my translator friends in Estonia are women: I’ll get to that later.

Among the selling points of this study are useful snippets of Leonard’s biography, which Rzepka slips into his readings very dexterously. We learn that Leonard was the good Catholic schoolboy, the son of a General Motors executive, a skilled sand-lot baseball player, and a Seabee during World War II. He trained up as a writer at the Ewald-Campbell Advertising Agency in Detroit and after publishing a number of Western stories (relying on Arizona Highways magazine as his landscape guide), used its severance package to launch his full-time writing career. Although other writers have come up similarly (think of Kurt Vonnegut at GE, or Allen Ginsberg’s gig as a market researcher), Leonard was always very serious about his corporate work. In his fiction, Rzepka notes, “scenes of apprenticeship, mentoring, and testing” are “early versions of ‘being cool’ as a way of defending against self-dispossession by anger or panic.”

Rzepka dovetails this background of the “organization man” with Leonard’s self-schooling in the mechanics of the Western, showing the disciplined bones beneath early classics such as “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953). There is great finesse here, not just the tricky plot reversals that strike us on first reading or viewing. By the time we reach an account of Leonard’s The Big Bounce (1969), his first crime novel, Rzepka has imparted a very modern sense of what the genre writer is. Like Cormac McCarthy, Leonard is above all a writer who does research, who knows that art is work and who works at it every day, who polishes his dialogue until not a word “sounds like writing” and strives to eliminate the “sharp elbows” in his plotting that might cause a reader to pause.

I myself came to Leonard with City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit (1980). I had just signed to write a book on Dashiell Hammett, so I was reading the two authors in tandem, and I found that Leonard had none of Hammett’s pop and repartee. But I could see that these were well-managed narratives, so I continued with Glitz (1985) and Freaky Deaky (1988). Then Carl Hiassen came into view and usurped this particular channel in my interests. And that’s another clue, I think, in explaining why Elmore Leonard has not traveled as well as Bukowski or Auster or Hiassen. His cool is hermetic.

Leonard doesn’t offer foreign readers what my academic colleagues would call affordances, a feature of visual design that tells you a doorknob is for turning or a ball is for throwing. If you are the translator of Raymond Chandler, you wait for his elaborate metaphors with relish; they are a challenge and a chance to have fun. Hemingway, meanwhile, is a par course and García Márquez a master class in syntax, while Bukowski sends you deep into the resources of your native slang. Leonard, by contrast, worked to make his presence invisible, to eliminate all the literary speech, to remove all the plot elbows. Translating him might be like recreating Amish chairs.

How Leonard achieved such seeming simplicity is what Rzepka calls his techne, Aristotle’s (and Thomas Aquinas’s) term for “skill.” The skills here are all in the service of “flow,” a being-in-the-moment sense that athletes know well: it is not timelessness, but such a high degree of practice that what comes next has been anticipated, has been set up so that there is no visible transition. According to Rzepka, this is what all of Leonard’s protagonists strive for too, but it took about a decade for the author and his heroes to meld style with character. The obstacle was that the style needed a certain amount of “flow” in order to avoid appearing wooden. The flow seems to readers to be improvisation, but actually it consists of subtle parallels, repetitions, and omissions: think of Joe Morello’s drum solo in “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. In this scene from Mr. Majestyk (1974), for instance, the protagonist almost sets his nephew straight about a certain woman:

“Listen,” Mr. Majestyk said then. “That broad on the phone —” “Yeah?” Mr. Majestyk smiled, self-conscious, showing his white perfect teeth. He shrugged then. “Why should I say anything — right? You’re old enough.” “I was about to mention it,” Ryan said.

Then there is Nancy, in the same novel, characterized — via free indirect discourse, says Rzepka — by her internal repetitions:

She sat quietly while Ray and his group whipped off to Chicago to attend the dumb meeting or look at the dumb plant and make big important decisions about their dumb business. Wow. And she sat here waiting for him.

Considering “cool,” of course, always leads back to Hemingway, for whom courage was “grace under pressure.” In his short story “Soldiers’ Home,” the character Krebs thinks about the lies he has been telling since returning from World War I. He has lost

all of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

That clearly includes killing people.

This is very close to what “cool” means to Leonard too, but Rzepka insists that his characters always feel at home in their skins, that these are not the intermittent “times” of Hemingway but a continuous flow, “never forgetting who you really were.” No Krebs’s moments of lying. This inspires the cool ones to “always dress well,” to “always be polite on the job,” and to “never say more than is necessary.” That some of these internal character rules are among Leonard’s rules for writing, leading to a synthesis of style and character, may be among the problems confronting translation.

While the reader of this book may flash back to Hemingway, it is impossible to read about Leonard’s dialogue without flashing forward to Richard Price. This is not a topic that Rzepka takes up, but the relation became explicit in a 2015 Washington Post interview with Price: “He admire[s] the great Elmore Leonard, perhaps the only writer in America that one could say surpassed him in street dialogue.” But Price does precious little research and admits to “making it up.” “I’m a good mimic,” he says.

Once you get the patter of how someone talks, you can replicate it. It’s not verbatim … It’s like after George Bush was president for eight years, if you told everybody in America to do Bush reading Shakespeare, everybody could do it. Maybe you’d [screw] up the Shakespeare, but you’d get the idea of how it would sound.

So perhaps it all does come down to craft: as the author of Clockers says elsewhere, “Realistic dialogue is interminable and goes nowhere. Good dialogue is about heightened reality, nudging it into a form that doesn’t really exist in the way people talk.” And the way people talk is gendered. If you are a translator, that’s another of your affordances, so that if you are a woman translating Hammett or Paul Auster, you can invoke and understand the gender gradations or oppositions that inform their worlds. Christine Le Bœuf once translated “The coot was stuck on her” in Auster’s The Book of Illusions as “Le vieux avait le béguin pour elle.” That’s gender genius because, while the contemporary meaning of “béguin” is “crush,” it was originally a hood worn in convents. The coot doesn’t get the girl in this novel, but the historic resonance of the word choice makes the French reader brake and shift gears. Le Bœuf told me that she worked on and worried about that word for several days.

But if “cool” has now become friction-free, then it’s more difficult to suggest the frisson behind the speech of Mr. Majestyk. Perhaps the foreign reader needs to know the films made from Leonard’s novels? But that’s not necessary with Richard Price, whose French translations read like sips of Grand Marnier. In Leonard’s A Coyote’s in the House (2004), the titular quadruped looks down on Hollywood and thinks, “It was their turf.” We understand the “cool” of that in American English, but there’s not much for a translator to work with. It becomes “C’était leur territoire” in French. And that’s not cool at all.

William Marling, Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of several books on the detective novel and, most recently, of Gatekeepers: The Emergence of World Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016).

The post In the Flow: On Charles J. Rzepka’s “Being Cool: The Work of Elmore Leonard” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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