This Last American Summer

For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark -- Matthew 24:38

I was at a wedding this weekend a couple of hundred miles to my north. Let not the epigraph say anything about the couple I saw married. They are two nice and intelligent people with solid values and good humor. Their wedding was a fairly modest mostly family affair, so much so that there were only three eligible women of suitable age there.

But I unfortunately spent much of the festivities trying not to think, "This all soon will pass away." Since I may wax apocalyptic for the rest of this piece, let me just say that Revelation is a rather flexible work. It presents a world in which divine agency is responsible for a breakdown in basic economic systems, the dominance of great empires, and ecological ruin. I, for one, do not take John of Patmos literally or generally for much of the book. God, as author of nature, need not punish the human race directly for our contempt for the world He has made. Nature does a very good job of punishing us anyway. Instead, God's direct agency in the world lies in arrest of judgment and clemency for us with regard to the forces of nature, the last enemy to be destroyed that will be death. But until the just reign on earth and the entire created order is overturned, the seven seals are sometimes broken and the Four Horsemen roam the earth.

I traveled north and south by train: a surprisingly popular operation in this part of the world. There are signs that it always has been this way, that new ridership due to high gas prices has encouraged slight improvements in efficiency and introduced considerable strain in the system. My train rides (and bus rides) gave me time to contemplate James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency and this Sunday's New York Times , even as many of the conversations around me concerned many of the problems being discussed by Kunstler.

My elders have been trying to tell me for some time that present patterns of human life and consumption, especially in the United States, cannot continue. Alfred Ziegler, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, is the father of modern historical geology, i.e., after the convincing demonstration of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics introduced the final pieces to the puzzle of the origins of coal, oil, and other mineral resources. By piecing together the continents as they grew and changed during the history of the Earth, Ziegler gained access to immense amounts of information about coal, oil, phosphorite, and other mineral deposits and considerable funding from companies interested in those deposits.

Like older colleagues such as M. King Hubbert, Ziegler noticed that the world was highly dependent on the products of both geographically and historically rare ecological and geological circumstances. Coal is the result of the flooding of coastal forests, like the mangrove swamps of the Carolinas and the rather careful refinement of the soggy carbon by burial at depth. It has been known since the middle of the 19th century that it does not occur any earlier than the Silurian Period of Earth's history. Later geologists realized that this was because trees originated then. Strangely enough, ephemerally flooded forests on tectonically active margins are rare indeed. Oil has an even more interesting past. It's mostly the result of algal blooms in coastal upwelling zones burying huge amounts of organic carbon on the ocean floor. Preservation of organic carbon in anoxic environments is usually favored by the same conditions under which hydrogen sulfide precipitates as off the present coast of Namibia or the Black Sea. Here, too, tectonics determines whether the carbon will become oil, natural gas, or fade away into the mantle to be exhaled as carbon dioxide from volcanoes. Let's just say that the conditions under which oil forms are fairly narrow, not unlike the conditions under which shale becomes slate that you can use as roof shingles. But since hydrogen sulfide is involved, oil contains more or less sulfur and sulfur makes it harder to refine oil into gasoline.

So Ziegler bothered to teach me these helpful facts and then gave his last lecture as a professor at the University of Chicago, a sobering lecture on what everyone seems to be talking about except the folks on television and the campaign trail, "peak oil." He reviewed most of the alternative means of getting energy and concluded that nuclear power was a fair medium term solution. He then proceeded to sell his house and purchase a water mill in West Virginia.

Other people have tried to teach me a general principle of geological resources: the least energy-intensive resources are exploited first (since they are cheapest) and so on until the amount of energy required exceeds the desire for the resource. And when your energy source is a non-renewable geological resource, life becomes very bad when the amount of energy needed to get your source of energy comes close to the recovered amount of energy.

David Archer, another of my professors, taught me one final fact of interest: the carbon we combust and emit into the atmosphere adds to the climate system roughly 100,000 times the energy we gained from its combustion through mainly absorption of infrared emission from the surface.

Last year, I wondered whether climate change would become disastrous at the same time we hit peak exploitation of resources on the Earth (primarily oil and gas). This year, I'm fairly sure that we'll see resource problems before the summer icepack at the North Pole is mostly gone. Saudi Arabia has hit its peak oil production. I wish I still had my course handout that gave a predicted date for this (based on 2002 numbers). It was either 2012 or 2020. Either estimate seems a lowball.

Responses to these terrifying results of the principles of geophysics vary. Some believe a technical solution is possible. I do, too, as a matter of fact. But I fear the implementation of such a solution is improbable. Moreover, it's going to be very difficult to replace oil as a medium for individualistic energy exploitation.

Kunstler's Long Emergency is somewhat more pessimistic. But he's more than twice my age and might regard me as a wild-eyed dreamer. Kunstler may be some sort of folk hero in coming decades. Like some of the gurus of the resource peak known in the popular media, he has an ideology. It's an interesting one and a quite ancient one in Europeanized America. In architecture, he is clearly the anti-Ayn Rand, rejecting modernist forms in architecture and urging the recovery of forms in harmony with the environment, such as those which allow efficient passive heating and cooling. In systems theory, he praises the value of inefficient systems for sustainability in everything from agriculture (polyculture) to education (highly localized and vocational). He came to this issue through his interest (and dislike, I suspect) of suburbia. And so he's rather glad that the suburbs soon will turn into a slum.

And that is always going to be major weakness of Kunstler's oeuvre or the oeuvre of peak resources folks in general, they are (myself included) generally discontents from the automobile and consumer good obsessed mainstream of American culture. They're very glad it's not long for this world. Some long happily for the extinction of the human species. Kunstler's blog, "Clusterfuck Nation" is suffused with rage. I frankly was surprised how cool The Long Emergency reads. He either has tremendous discipline in print or a good editor.

However, a good editor could not remove Kunstler's virulent hatred of Southerners. Lutherpunk, who Kunstler might regard as an unusual example of the "cracker lumpenproletariat", will boil with rage at a certain part of this book. I don't know what to say except to refer him to the body of scholarship that demonstrates the proximity of many counties in the Southern states to the state of nature in the 19th century. But the contempt and ethnic slurs he reserves for a people who actually might teach him to hunt partridge competently are despicable.

For you see, Kunstler, is a Yankee of the old school, a believer in covenantual and communal rights and responsibilities in the sense as it was understood by the Founding Fathers in the Massachusetts Bay. Paul Revere and John Adams are his ideological forefathers. While he doesn't say it openly, he must regard libertarians as the lowest and most dangerous form of life, especially in times of social crisis. And thus Kunstler longs for a society much like pre-1869 New York or New England, a little pocket of idyllic bliss somewhat isolated from the dieoff of the 5.5 billion excess humans whose deaths he assures us he does not desire. I, too, a Yankee by blood and somewhat by education am interested in such a world, too, though not the last part and also recognize my present profession is unlikely to exist in such a localized world.

Kunstler recently has published a novel about this near future world he envisions, A World Made by Hand in which the protagonist (who some think is modeled in himself) has a surprisingly active and dangerous sex life for a New Englander of the early 19th century. (Read the reviews on Amazon). Clearly, he has not grasped certain aspects of covenantual rights and responsibilities.

My basic conclusion on reading was that Kunstler may despise you and your way of life, but he is telling you much of the truth. Writing in 2003, he predicts much of the mayhem we are currently experiencing in energy and credit such as the return of stagflation. I expect this book may be an excellent guide to the next five years as well.

Reading the New York Times today, I felt like I was reading pharmaceutical advertisements for American society. The Times solicited several opinions on high gas prices. They ranged from paeans to the promise of technology and limited conservation such as Daniel Gross on a coming alternative energy investment bubble (not another freaking bubble) or a discussion of how we can improve the fuel efficiency of our cars by being more courteous drivers. There was one proposal to give us tax credits for not driving our cars. There's a few thinkers on the same lines of Kunstler (transition/suburbs to small city fed by country, the joys of a Maine island vacation) but more moderate (no people dying or breakdown of public order). Tom Friedman encourages the renovation of the Republic rather than obsessive focus on national security.

But my favorite piece for its sheer vapidity is a piece by Ben Stein in Sunday Business. An piece in Op-Ed observed that the rise in prices has disproportionately hurt the poor. Stein notes this, too, for only 2% of our national income is spent on oil and gasoline, he says. Well, he's wrong first of all. It's closer to 7%. It was 2-2.5% when oil was at $50. He's quoting the March Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, which was reporting on 2007, the year in which oil rose from $75-$150. But anyway, Stein notes the poor are hurting because real income from 1947-1973 rose 40% but only has risen a $1 on ~$670 per week since. Stein makes the sensible suggestion of paying off the national debt, which would strengthen the dollar and make prices a little easier to bear. But since Congress won't do this. He suggests that people buy smaller cars and trucks and focus on educating their children to become doctors, dentists, and lawyers, who magically have the money to spend on fuel. Because really this proposal so beneath his intelligence as to appear almost sarcastic is the only way Stein can excuse the negligence of him and his ilk in allowing his Grand Old Party to be sold to the corporatists, the neoconservatives, and the Religious Right wholesale since the late 1970s. But then again, I think he sold out to them eventually, too.

Our final sign from the Times is that a noticeable decline in adolescent automobile cruising has been observed. Cruising is a phenomenon that only has existed since World War I. The mixture of adolescents with automobiles forever changed the structure of our mores and our national life. Moreover, Kunstler observes our tendency to infantilize adolescents and allow them incredible amounts of leisure time dedicated to consumption as a relief for the mechanized form of education to which we subject them. But apparently the waste of fuel is no longer tolerable.

You see, my friends, we live now during the last American summer, the last summer in which the imagined invincibility of the cultural and economic life of the American people against the constraints of nature and geopolitics will remain unscathed. This is the last summer in which our transportation networks are likely to work as they have since 1980, in which a combination of cheap air travel and automobile travel allows us mobility and flexibility of diet hitherto unknown in the history of the world. The big box store and the commercial airplane are dead, though to borrow from Nietzsche, "but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which their shadow will be shown." Well, if not ages, at least years. The automobile someday will follow. The chemical fertilizer, strong national governments, large-scale armaments, sic transit, sic transit .

I guess I don't know what to do. In the kind of post-oil future the sensible people envision, I do have certain uses. I can decipher tremendous amounts of information about land and its resources, test your soil, suggest where to build mills, and teach many subjects in both the sciences and humanities. I even can build fences, weed gardens, and do some crude carpentry and masonry. I'll likely need to improve some of these skills. But I do like what I do for a living now, despite its dependence on oil and a strong national government. And I do need to finish my thesis research. And I do wonder if I could put together a crash program to make this transition a bit easier and ensure that the world at least was electrified. And perhaps we'll just live with smaller amounts of oil made by cockroaches eating weeds (as bls pointed out to us) and gradually learn to maintain the carrying capacity of the Earth to a few billions to which the world's population hopefully will shrink less violently than many fear.

But in this last American summer, there's one development that won't be worth a sprig of wheat (old Roman expression) in time to come. And it's this business of global Anglican realignment consummated in the final declaration of GAFCON. I'll give the Lambeth Conference a couple of more meetings after this one and any competing organization the same lifetime. Evangelical Anglicans in this country will blend rather quickly with those with whom they have aligned themselves in this country, q.v. Rick Warren. Those in Sydney and Abuja soon will be occupied solely with the problems of Sydney and Abuja. The Anglo-Catholics will swim the Tiber in a world where the Roman Pontiff will seem very far away. And the Episcopal Church will return to its early 19th century institutional structure with bishops involved in day to day clergy training. Seminaries, too, may pass away. But I do warn that a society in crisis often looks for scapegoats and agricultural societies have a particular attitude toward the possible sources of crop failure. My hope is that these years of unpleasantness may make some corner of the world safe for an orthodox gospel in which all people may live lives of moderation and virtue in the Body, where gay and straight are one in Jesus Christ.

Life Imitating Art

Yet though some banks were full, too many were now closed in a city
Effete and wrecked, worn out by the uncertainty of world wars.
Dear Columbia so long had been a hot, high-rolling gambler.
There were jealous protesters on the streets and fingering of knives
Always, but there is so much bomb-throwing and unpleasantness ‘fore
One’s backers become nervous and the gruff warblers at the table
Look for arms and their advantage, so though she was victorious.
The diplomats dick’ring peace at Turin to one thesis agreed:
This lady, e’er torn between professor and queen, would live within
Her means. Accounting for some variance in the balance of trade
Wrote reddening balance sheets on Houstonian eyes and drove mouths
To strange oscillations: Vitus’s Dance (?), non-verbal stutt’ring.
Around this time, I suspect you and yours slipped out in confusion
Of budgets and values and what the taxpayers could take these days."

Written c. 2003

Messy Blessing

One fine day at the end of May, a Rev. Mr. Cowell and a Rev. Mr. Lord registered a civil partnership in England. They then went to St. Bartholemew's in London and entered into something approximating fratrimony before friends and relatives (a good sampling of the liberal clerical establishment of the Church of England) with a Rev. Mr. Dudley as officiant. I say something approximating fratrimony, because the service was a cut and paste of the kind all too common in ILEOS, except you have to give someone credit for cutting and pasting the 1662 Marriage Service. Only this kind of high-handedness could make the first commenter on the liturgy at Peter Ould's site accuse them not just of deconstructing marriage but salvation. Yes, you read that right. This debate is not just about sex now, it's about God and the Church.

There's a lot to say about this. For instance, this isn't likely the first of these to take place. And there's endless speculation to be had about whether the celebrants intended the publicity just before GAFCON in a Lambeth summer. But I've decided to focus on the possible Chiquita aspect of the Holy Spirit of this. This theology states that the Holy Spirit occasionally likes to do things that are just plain silly in order to convince us of the foolishness of our ways. It's an idea at least as old as Erasmus and maybe as old as St. Paul. But the name derives from Chiquita banana for reasons I really can't explain.

For you see, I think the Rev. Mr. Dudley may have committed a liturgical and doctrinal abuse of such serious gravity that he probably could be prosecuted in the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved. The bishops on this high tribunal are so comically condign as to see the hand of God in their selection for such a case. We have Bishop Wright of Durham, Lord Harries of Pentegrath (who as Bishop of Oxford tried to appoint Jeffrey Johns as his suffragan), and Lord Hope of Thornes (former Archbishop of Canterbury and a lifelong celibate who has described his sexual orientation as a "grey area.") Their senior jurist colleagues would be a member of one of England's most prominent legal families (the Haverses), Elizabeth, Lady Butler-Sloss, and Lord Justice Mummery (Sir John Mummery). The presence of the latter on the panel mainly describes the kind of circus such a trial would be. Veni Creator Spiritus.

Would An Act of Parliament Be Required to Make Appointment of the ABC a more Communionwide Process

Kevin Montgomery asks this question in Comments to the Episcopal Cafe Lead this morning.

The answer is not necessarily so. At present, the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed by the Crown upon recommendation of a commission drawn from appropriate members of the Church of England, a procedure completely within the bounds of the Act of Restraint of Annates (1534) and the legislation it replaced such as King John's, "That Elections in the Whole of England Be Free." As long as none of the members are not in Communion with Rome, I know of no statute that would forbid foreigners from sitting on such a commission. To ensure this procedure had legal force (that a certain number of foreigners of a certain type had to be appointed), I believe a Measure of Synod would be required, which through joint resolution of Parliament confirming the same has equivalent force to an Act. As far as I can tell, removing the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Crown to another organ also could be enacted by Measure.

Books

From the Postulant/Candidate/Diaconabilis/Whatever

From various sources:

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (school)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (for school, funny story there)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (might have been for school)
The Fountainhead (Yes, I've read Ayn Rand, mainly while laughing.)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch I'm 35% or so through at the moment.
Frankenstein (school)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (Partially for school.)
The Satanic Verses (I can't remember if I finished it. I thought it was pretty poor.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (school)
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince (school)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (school)
The Scarlet Letter (school)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (school)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (I don't think I finished this one, could be wrong.)
The Aeneid (school in Latin and also in English)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Yes, I'm Alive

But rather busy and wondering why a good non-linear curve fitting scheme is so troublesome to implement.

I'm reading John Crowley's, Aegypt at the moment, one of the sleeper classics of our era. Every once in a while, some curmudgeonly cultural conservative will ask whether anything will be remembered of the art and literature of our iconoclastic era. I think this particular book will remain. Harold Bloom agrees with me. It's one of the few works of recent provenance that he suggests should be included in the Western Canon.

Why is it so important? Because after all, it's not particularly grand in scope. Most of it is set in New York City and somewhere in northern New Jersey or southern New York. The characters don't do much but think and write and raise sheep and generally ignore the grand problems of our era: the inequities of our globalized human society and the coincident environmental degradation. Frankly, it's a book with a lot of Boomers being obsessed by pseudoscience and living their lives poorly.

But despite the vapidity of its setting, indeed because of it, Aegypt already is looking to be a powerful novel of ideas: an exposition of modern critical realism and the failure of the Enlightenment Project in a surprisingly readable though fairly secular package.

Huh? Failure of the Enlightenment Project? What? Critical realism? Well, they didn't teach me this kind of stuff in school, I'll tell you. Well, they dropped hints every once in a while. And Crowley is absolutely wonderful in connecting a few ideas I saw in McGrath's epitome, the Science of God . He is wonderful, because he goes back to the era where the western intellectual world went marvelously off track, 1600 or so.

In that era, there were two kinds of new men: the scientific magicians and the early scientists. And the funny thing is that they weren't two different groups. For instance, I read an article in the Australian yesterday about a woman in Mercersburg, PA, who shares a surprisingly common belief that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. We laugh at this today. But Isaac Newton would consider this idea worthy of as serious inquiry as gravity. And in fact, the idea of gravity began as an alchemical idea. Scientists today try to disprove that crystals heal or that power lines cause cancer, but they only are disproving ideas that would seem far closer to axiomatic among the progenitors of the modern natural sciences.

Where this all went wrong is the rebirth of skepticism. Eventually, some came to believe first that the scientific method has no axiomatic basis, that it is completely founded on unaided human reason, and second that it was universally applicable, thereby creating standards for art, literature, and mores that might be completely divorced from the irrational beliefs of our forebears. Many scientists will tell you that the first idea is ridiculous, usually citing the so-called central dogma of physics, "The laws of nature are the same everywhere." Gravity works the same on Earth as it does in the Jovian system and so forth. And indeed each branch of science has its symbola no less influential than the Creeds for Christians. There is doctrinal evolution, though. Geologists used to consider it dogmatic that the continents didn't move (even on very long timescales). However, that doctrine violated more fundamental doctrines such as: that the Earth does not have multiple dipole magnetic fields at any one time. As I'm sure McGrath would agree, there's a lesson in such stories.

As for the second point, a few young scientists are enamored of Aristotle's argument in the Poetics that language may be mathematically tuned to beauty and effect on the listener and there is an entire field of computational linguistics. But attempts to create perfect music on mathematical principles only work when something different is added to the equation. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is a good example.

Well, the end result of these two bad ideas, Europeans generally came up with universal standards for things that really reflected majoritarian views or elitist prejudices. And so since at least the time of Einstein and Barthes, the Enlightenment is slowly being destroyed. Just as physics or mathematics has no authoritative reference frame might go the argument, so there are no authoritative reference frames in art, literature, or mores. Hence, relativism. And because the skeptics really vexed the religious, some asserted that the universal standard was their particular interpretation of pre-Enlightenment sacred literature, hence fundamentalism, which some think is a pretty good response to relativism, too. There's a guy named Chris Hedges, who has written a book claiming the New Atheists are really fundamentalists. I think it's a fair argument. If you can turn Genesis into a science textbook, there are ways of turning one's interpretation of the scientific literature into a religion of some sort.

A philosophical school called critical realism is trying to come up with an alternative solution to this potential "St. Jean Vianney of the western mind." Crowley, I think is borrowing from this school, to create a sort of somewhat overlapping magisteria (as opposed to Gould's non-overlapping magisteria) in which we admit that the natural sciences are an excellent form of inquiry into particular aspects of the world, particularly those connected to our senses directly or indirectly through experimentation and quantitative analogy. An example might be the kinetic theory of gases, in which the sensation of heat is understood as a set of very small balls bouncing together vigorously. But we also can admit there's a part of the world that cannot be understood by these methods: the very kinds of things that Socrates used to ask people about in the Athenian Agora: truth, beauty, justice, and virtue. Crowley's contribution is to have his protagonist posit that there is "more than one history of the world." One of my college professors studied late antiquity and used to say that he read a lot of accounts of monks having visions during disasters, but he grew to think that while there is a way of seeing history in which monks hallucinate during earthquakes and floods, there's also a way in which the monks actually are seeing something going on not directly accessible to the senses.

Well, it's a good book (and there are apparently three more). So if I finish them and like them, I'll update you.

Whoever Isn't Against You is For You

Just a quick note. I just endured a three hour meeting and spent another hour and a half finishing up a difficult statistical issue in paper/research I'm doing at the moment. So I'm going to share some thoughts and then go home and watch some miniseries on Elizabeth I I'm supposed to get from Netflix this evening.


This morning, I was friended on Facebook by a stranger. This happens every once in a while. Lately, the friend requests have been getting so strange as to be spammy. So I've generally been rejecting them. This request was from what I might describe as a High Church Pentecostal with Anglican leanings. Clergy-in-training, interested in liturgy, studying for a Ph.D. In other words, the exact kind of person I usually socialize with by Internet ;)

And this man was the kind of person not easily classified in the liberal theological kind of box I worship in on Sundays, where traditional Christianity is the tool of the capitalist, imperalist oppressor. The kind of person interested in loose denominational structures and fighting racism and economic disenfranchisement in the inner city, but clearly has connections among those bogeymen denounced at the pulpit most Sundays including folks at conservative Episcopal seminaries from familiar countries with familiar surnames.

Well, I sent him a message asking him if I actually knew him. He replied that he didn't, but he saw that we had lived in some common places, had some common interests, and (since I was an Episcopalian), he just wanted to connect with fellow Anglicans. I friended him immediately. Maybe, I'll run into him in real life soon. I hope so.

It's a common story in Laodicea. To go from liberal to conservative Anglicanism here (and not just wishy-washy varieties either, but true centers of thought and action), you need only to cross the street. It's called Las Robles, and I know people who do so and have done so.

Laodicea is in this way amazing, and I'm fairly sure God brought me here for two reasons: (1) to provide Martian weather services and (2) to see the split in Anglicanism across a gulf of 200 m. I'm also suspecting there's a third reason that may combine the two somehow, but the Lord remains vague on the issue.

I tell this story as an introduction to my feelings about what went on in San Joaquin last weekend, which are mixed to say the least. What can you say about a Diocese in which the Bishop subverted the letter and the spirit of the discipline of this Church unto perpetual scandal and a Presiding Bishop who pretty much did likewise to relieve the uncertainty and fear of those bereaved and scandalized? Say what you may about Fr. Martins of Carioca Confessions, but he's right that the Presiding Bishop can't call Special Conventions by fiat and dismiss a Standing Committee by edict. The Presiding Bishop and her Chancellor seem to be operating on that great elastic principle of American constitutional law: that the Constitution of the General Convention is not a suicide pact. I don't know if the Presiding Bishop has a coat of arms, but I'd put as her motto now, et ultra viros et ultra vires .

But I wasn't unmoved by the reports at Fr. Jake's place. People asking basic questions about Integrity. I think I've known about Integrity since I was knee high. People out under the shadow of a bullying hierarch longing for new life. It's a Diocese whose renaissance I pray for several times a week. I can't be unsympathetic.

But I also can't be unsympathetic to a Standing Committee illegally ejected, despite their standing on a tacet, nolit consentire. In a church where we sometimes show surprising mercy to those guilty of crime and immorality, we seem to have little care for those caught in an echo chamber, in a grex clericorum of enablers, who allow a few legal machinations to pass by them. And when they see the horror and ridiculousness of what they've allowed, they indicate their willingness to proceed by canonical process, only to see canonical process thrown out of the window by the +Squid and the Ale.

I think this travesty will pass over, no matter what. But to people my age who look on these events in later years, I can tell you that it will be hard to pass beyond the power games on one side of the Anglican wars when the power games on the other side are this striking.

Just Stopping By

Affairs of business have taken me from the Monastery during Lent. I've seen one paper finally in print and another rejected. And again I find myself with far more projects than I can focus on at one time. Oh well. Tomorrow...

But for now, I'll share with you a Holy Saturday meditation of a sort. No, I didn't preach it. I was officiating at Morning Prayer at church, but I had no desire to bore anyone with thoughts hastily scribbled in the wee hours of the morning. And the Gospel, as noted, isn't the one prescribed.

Holy Saturday
Ps. 130
Job 14:1-14
1 Pet. 4:1-8
Mark 7:31-37

In Bede's Homilies on the Gospels , the Gospel appointed for Holy Saturday is Bede's era and circumstance is the healing of the deaf-mute in the Decapolis in Mark 7. Look if you will in the lectionaries of the Book of Common Prayer and you will see discontinuity in the traditions of the Ecclesia Anglicana . The lection on which Bede preaches is nowhere appointed.

I will return to Mark 7 in a moment, but I think the choice of lections is exemplary of the day. The Roman Catholic theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar, complains, "And yet Holy Saturday stands as the mysterious middle between cross and Resurrection, and consequently properly in the center of all revelation and theology. And here in the center like an unexplored, inexplicable blank spot on the map!"

The core of the Christian message lies in the bridge between the death on Friday and the resurrection in the wee hours of the first day of the week. But Saturday, the day of the bridge, is very much a mystery, poorly theologized and thus poorly understood. And as this day confounds our intellect, so it confuses our hearts.

Should we look forward to Easter and victory? Should we look backward to Good Friday and catastrophe? On Saturday, we do not know whether to mourn or rejoice. For the moment, I would suggest as person on staff at my church put it in the Tenebrae meditation that our attitude to Holy Saturday must begin upon waking with the realization that our friend who was executed yesterday is still very much dead with the rising of the Sun. Time's arrow runs ever forward. The dead yesterday are the dead today. Evil provides this permanence to human affairs. We can take as our examples our siblings in the Greek churches, who are distributed laurels at the close of the Holy Saturday liturgy as a sign of coming victory. They do not receive them at the beginning.

Fortified with the awful and life-annihilating sensation that Jesus is really dead, we now face the texts of the day. And heavy they are. We begin with Psalm 130 whose plaintiveness is nearly unforgettable, "Out of the depths, I have cried to thee..." The depths, like Saturday, are a middle place. They suggest the sea, a place filled in the literature of Israel with alternately the promises of death and fruitfulness. The deep is that primal void in which God slays the Leviathan and renders light from nothing. The deep also is the place of Sheol, the abode of death, the place of alienation from God. And analogous to this cosmic deep is the simple marine deep, filled with hazards, happily bounded by divine law, where sailors throw you overboard to be eaten by whales. But where those who go down to the sea in ships may have great delight in the works of the Lord and face that Leviathan down. Perhaps, the Israelites, akin to yet separate from their more seagoing Phoenician neighbors felt deeply conflicted by the sea. Yet ultimately they resolved their concerns by acknowledging God's hand in the contradiction of the waters. That God could bring a new ethic for humanity out of the drowning of most of it in Noah's flood. That God could complete the circumcision of Israel from Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea, by which the Israelites passed over to dry land but in which were the Egyptians were drowned.

And thus inveigled in the treacheries of the sea of life, the Psalmist begs the Lord to keep the sea as a means of fruitfulness and liberation, not on account of the Psalmist's deserving for, "If you, Lord, were to note what is done amiss, O Lord, who could stand?," but merely on account of patience for relationship, in the faith of forgiveness. In faith that the hand of God will turn the deep to the Psalmist's favor once again.

In the reading from Job, I think the Psalmist's plight becomes universal. Aren't we all in the same sea? Each of us has a brief life, a mixture of frailties. Don't mind the author's slightly inept analogy to the trees, reproduction is no means for us to maintain our individual identity for eternity. Not even the more direct copying available in cloning will preserve us. The stimuli we receive in the womb and in our early years (and indeed throughout our life) individuates us beyond our genes, making us a product of our experiences. And even if we could make a perfect copy of ourselves, we have little guarantee that another one of me is the same as me. No matter the plasticity of our mortal nature, I suspect some part of us always will be separated from the world by death. Whether cut down in youth or age, there is something in us that will never be roused from sleep.

And so Job seeks a solution from God to his conundrum, confident in the hand of God strong and willing to save. And let me tell you, Job's proposed solutions for his problems often are our most universal promises of Christ. In the case of the Hebrew prophets, you can fudge a rather particular Messiah as a political liberator of the Jewish people. The Christ that Job yearns for in his proposed solution will revolutionize our very existence. Job asks, "If only you would conceal me in Sheol, conceal me until your anger is past, and only then fix a time to recall me to mind. I would not lose hope, however long my service, waiting for my relief to come." In the literal sense, Job is requesting that he be placed in Sheol, the abode of the dead, the uncreate deep, in which God is thought absent, so that God's anger may cool toward him. However, Job's longing for this solution also must be read in the context of requests by Job to have an advocate whenever he faces God to account for what he imagines are his grievous sins. In one sense, Job seeks both the order of things before Christ and after Christ, which the final two readings clarify.

Every event of importance in the acts of God toward humankind in the Incarnation must have some literal antecedent in Scripture, because it's quite difficult to see how Jesus' life could be documented otherwise. Imagine if the Gospels never mentioned the Crucifixion. Now I can quote several mystical proclamations of the fact and manner of Jesus' death in the Law and the Prophets, but I don't think you or I would put any stock in that knowledge without a more direct witness from the Evangelists that he died on a cross. In that sense, there is only one part of the reading from 1 Peter that should be of note in that it asserts the gospel was preached even to the dead.

It's not much to go on, especially for an article of the Apostle's Creed. In the Gospels, Saturday is the day of the missing Christ. More glaring in the wake of near-death experiences attested by ancient and modern witnesses. Medicine has a variety of weaker and stronger definitions of death, but Christian doctrine presumes the strongest for Christ. But still we wonder if there is part of us that endures beyond the body's death. And so buoyed by the physicality of the Resurrection and by the continuity of relationships maintained by Christ with the apostles between death and life, in particular the issue of Peter's denials, something of the Christ on the Cross on Friday remained in the risen one confused for the gardener on Sunday. Only in 1 Peter do we have a direct clue of Christ's whereabouts on Saturday beyond Christ's comment to the penitent thief on Friday.

I will not harp on this too much, but it has been a general belief in the church catholic that Jesus in solidarity with us, his friends and family as human beings and images of the divine majesty, descended into the place thought abandoned and untouchable by God (note the Psalmist disputes this in 138). And while there, he taught the dead the Gospel and some or all came with Him to the Father as the Psalmist says, "with captives in his train."

Well, I admit this particular summary of the Christus Victor model of human salvation is deficient in one respect. It suffers from dependence on a dualism between soul and body, in which the soul can be independent and active apart from the body and find the body's concerns irrelevant. This position on the soul should not just be critiqued from the standpoint of ethics (as it usually is) but also from the Scriptural description of human creation in which the soul is simply God's breath in us, no longer part of God but a new thing that when joined to the body is a "living soul." Breath is ephemeral, without constitution, and easily mixed into the atmosphere when released from its container. Not that there is still something peculiar about whatever is permanent about our individuality, but that it is not easily active, coherent, sustained without the body to contain it.

And so we turn to Mark 7. Jesus has entered a boundary place on the Sea of Galilee between mainline Judaea and the pagan cities of the Decapolis. This location brings Jesus into a universal context amidst both Jews and Gentiles and likely among those of one group who would prefer to be part of the other. Jesus is presented to a man both deaf and mute. Both avenues of communication do not exist for this man. He may not be entirely mute, just unable to make himself clear enough to be understood. Jesus puts his fingers into the man's ears, touches his tongue with spittle, looks up to heaven, sighs, and cries, "Be opened." The entire economy of salvation is recited here in a nutshell. What? Really ? Where?


The deaf-mute is us. Living, we feel alienated from God by our sins and so we have trouble speaking to Him and hearing Him. Dead, we are disembodied in the deep, unable to exert the creative power upon it that would bring fruitfulness and material creation, that would restore our bodies to us by our own wills. We are as Aristotle really describes the shades of the dead: mere potential. To the living and the dead, Christ presents himself in the flesh, literally incarnating Himself to the deaf-mute with finger in ear and spittle in mouth. Incarnate to us now in the elements of the Eucharist, the living waters of Baptism, and the Spirit's gifts working in the world in us. Incarnate to the dead in Sheol as one dead like them, touching them by sharing in their being. And like on the cross, the means of the incarnation to the dead, Jesus sighs or groans and inclines Himself to the Father in offering, bringing us assurance of the mercy and power of God in the midst of the depths. John Polkinghorne speaks of salvation and Christian hope in terms of computing, saying that our software will be downloaded into God's hardware until our own hardware is restored at the general resurrection of the dead, the final submission of the ambiguous deep to the hand of God, the last gasp of the muddleness of this Saturday. Paul says likewise of our sympathetic burial with Christ in a life baptized that ours are lives hidden with Christ in God as opposed to being without God in Sheol as Job desired. For from a God who has died like us, there is no alienation final and total between Him and us and thus unto the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be all praise and glory unto ages of ages. Amen.

Another Song Parody: Those Were the Days

With apologies to Charles Stouse and Lee Adams

Boy, the way Augustine prayed
Songs to which we still parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.

And you know who you were then.
Men liked girls and girls liked men.
Milords we could use a man
Like Candidian again.

Didn't need (a) new attitude
Caesar gave no latitude
Gee our old councils ran great.
Those were the days.

This song is meant to be just as ironic as the original

Class Meme

From Lutherpunk and Anastasia:

Bold all statements that are true.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college

Sidebar--My mother would answer these questions like I would. My father wouldn't bold any of them.


5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed
Close enough.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school Oh yeah. Run by Quakers. So it was a religious school with a completely different dynamic from Lutherpunk's high school.
17. Went to summer camp

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels. (And camping, bed and breakfasts, and cottages. And extremely dirty motels in South Carolina.)

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child Provided that originals of editorial cartoons and my uncle's artistic photography count.
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home. My father is one of the most enthusiastic homeowners on the planet.
25. You had your own room as a child
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course. Mainly for ethical reasons.
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college. Does owning stock count?
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16. I've flown on airlines that no longer exist. Like Piedmont. I had a passport as an infant.

31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. Um, no, I was quite familiar with the size of the heating oil bill. That's why those ads offering poor people in the Northeast Venezuelan heating oil burn me up. Our own government really should be doing more.

Il Papa E La Sapienza (E La Scienza)

Through a couple of episodes of the narrative, Michael Flynn has suggested in his recent novel, Eifelheim , that heresy trials are the aitia of academic peer review. In the first, a brilliant physicist is accused by the chair of her department of trying to use physics to justify young earth creationism whereas her ideas about slight variations in the speed of light and the quantization of the observed galactic red shifts stem from the desire for elegance and simplicity in an area of cosmological mathematics. But all the while she notes how much the encounter feels like a heresy trial. In the second, William of Occam indicates his disdain for Durandus of Mende and excoriates him especially for sitting on the tribunal that condemned some of his Commentary on the Sentences , to which a colleague replies, "Peer-review is the the fate of all philosophers worth reading."

Flynn's suggestion brings insight into Benedict XVI's disinvitation from Universita La Sapienza in Rome as mentioned in places such as Entangled States . I need to go off to work soon, but let me quickly sketch the tensions. The Pope is very much an academic, but his present office theoretically is unaccountable to earthly critique or authority and claims a potentially universal and perpetual jurisdiction over truth. Moreover, those who sought to disinvite him are clearly disturbed by his justification (through another philosopher, Paul Feyeraband) of Galileo's condemnation for heresy as supremely rational and just. Feyeraband, I should note, is chiefly known as a proponent of "scientific anarchism," in which science proceeds not by falsification or logical positivism but by ad hoc procedures that aim toward a particular consensus about the beautiful and the good (which is not necessarily beautiful or good.) Theology, I should add, might as well be a science in Feyeraband's critique. So as far as I can tell, Benedict XVI is being criticized by Italian physicists for viewing science as fallible on the same grounds on which theology might be considered fallible, yet suggests the theological community in the form of the Roman Catholic Church thus had the right in the 17th century as now to assess the fallibility of science without any consideration for the fallibility of theology and certainly without any peer review. Goose meet gander, I suppose.

Such a man must be allowed academic freedom so that his risibility may be exposed to the world entire. Shame on you, physicists of Italy.

History Meme

It seems that all memes die with me, so if you want to do this meme, count yourself as one of the seven.

I always have been interested in social history, so I've never been obsessed with one particular historical figure (such as Ben Franklin) as others I know have been. I was going to do my history meme on a geologist, but I just had a better idea.

Link to the person who tagged you. (that would be Derek of Haligweorc
List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.

The historical figure I'm going to choose is William Smith (not the geologist...common name):

1. William Smith was hired as the first provost of the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania.) His major qualifications were an essay he had written on education amd a degree from the University of Aberdeen. Only the former really mattered to Ben Franklin, who essentially hired him. But this was a good thing, because he was not a graduate of the University of Aberdeen. Talk about lying on your resume.

2. Though this theory probably appears nowhere in the historical literature, I'm fairly sure that William Smith left Aberdeen without a degree after four years, because he was an Episcopalian and was thereby disqualified from teaching school or being ordained according to the penal legislation that went into force after the '45. Oddly enough, many of his new bosses (Trustees) were Presbyterians.

3. In America, Smith did not stay out of trouble with the law and was imprisoned in 1758 for seditious libel. He lectured students from his jail cell.

4. Smith preached the inaugural sermon of St. Peter's, Third and Pine, in Philadelphia. Utterly insignificant to you, but I was baptized there.

5. Smith founded Washington College in Chestertown, MD and St. John's College, Annapolis as part of the original University of Maryland.

6. Smith was elected the first Bishop of Maryland but was not confirmed by General Convention because he was (sadly) a rather notorious alcoholic.

7. Given #1 and #2 (ironically enough), it's even more surprising that Smith received an honorary S.T.D. degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1759.

While Waiting For Evening

I currently am at my parents' house, who are sufficiently plugged in that I can do some work remotely and read blogs.

While trying to find out about the latest instance of a college student fabricating an incident in which they were violently attacked for their conservative beliefs, I shuttled over to the First Things blog, where I read this little mal mot from Thomas Sieger Derr, who apparently is professor of environmental ethics at Smith College ,

P.S. #2, on reading statistics with a viewpoint: The World Meteorological Organization reports that 2007 was one of the ten hottest years on record, most of those ten years being in the last decade. But it also seems that 2007 is on track to be the coldest year since 1998, the year of the large El Niño surge. And those who watch the sun’s behavior report a quiescent period with no sun spots, possibly presaging the return of a cooler earth – even, heaven forbid, a period like the “little ice age” of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Naturally, no mention of this happened at Bali.

Examining the relationship between the Sun and climate is a very important part of the work done by one of my research groups. And I'm one of the three people in the group who do work on the Sun and past climate. What those who watch the Sun's behavior know is that we are near the trough of the ~11 year solar cycle (the 11 year solar cycle is a name for convenience...it varies between 9 and 13 years). Looking at this handy-dandy record of the last 16 years from the Space Weather Prediction Center , we note that solar activity is about the same level as it was in the autumn of 1996, which was nearly exactly eleven years ago. What an amazing coincidence? The Little Ice Age (strictly should be called the Maunder Minimum), it's true, was a cold period with little solar activity. So little solar activity that northern European scientists were not familiar with the aurora borealis until the late 18th century. I'd wager someone has seen the aurora borealis in southern Norway recently.

Oddly enough, the next solar maximum is scheduled for 2012-2013 or so, the same year that permanent sea ice is currently forecast to vanish from the North Pole. For your further edification, some people have been trying to figure out how well the impact of the 11-year solar cycle is simulated in climate models .

Specious Ranting

I just watched Lonnie Thompson's Frontiers of Geophysics Lecture at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Fall Meeting. It was an excellent talk. Thompson is the world's leading expert on tropical glacial climate records, and his work has given him perspective on the Earth's past and a fear for Earth's future as he watches the glaciers he samples melt all around him. One of the more interesting points was that tropical glaciers currently are about as extensive as they were ~3200 BC, which depending on your exact chronology is the time of Noah and other evidence of mass disruption of the climate system. It reminded me that the Lord's promise was that He would not destroy all flesh again. Our free will now exceeds the power of the natural releases on the climate system by orders of magnitude. We may become our own destruction if we don't engage in some major metanoia . I'm glad to see that almost all Presidential candidates of both parties (John McCain was especially good) proclaim with their lips how serious an issue this is. Let us pray the seriousness of the crisis does not exceed the seriousness of our leadership in finding solutions. The Lecture has encouraged me to write the paper about low-frequency ocean variability one of my bosses wants me to write.

Some comments on bls's blog by our favorite Quebecois about the brevity of the election cycle has made me seriously think about the possibility of drastic reform in the frame of government in the United States. I would suggest we adopt a Commonwealth-style parliamentary democracy with nationally-drawn constituencies in the House of Representatives and state-based constituencies in the Senate with six or seven year bounds on the length of Congresses. Such a reform would have advantages such as a more responsive executive and a potentially longer election cycle. But the most immediate advantage would be in budgetary matters. Commonwealth constitutions either mandate in law or convention that the government must pass the budget to stay in power. Currently, the funding of many agencies (including my beloved NASA) is very much on hold due to horse trading in Congress. They call it a "continuing resolution." Of course, such a system probably would move much of the pork to the proposed budget, but it would allow more time for popular outrage to be heard and less doubt in government agencies about what projects can be funded each year. At present, one of my bosses is awaiting a decision about whether a mission he helped to propose is being funded. But NASA can't announce the decision, because the budget that funded the mission has languished for two years.

Despite my viewing of Thompson's lecture, I am not in San Francisco at AGU. One of my colleagues came into my office and asked me why I wasn't there, praising to the skies the parties, the available women, and the amazing ability of one of my other colleagues to attract non-conference attendees during conference travel. And, yes, reading the many blogs from AGU, I discovered all sorts of interesting folks with whom I could be spending time instead of sitting in my office being less productive than usual thanks to the emptiness of the building. But I can't go to every conference, and it's worth remembering that very few graduate students can go to two conferences per year with the level of effort I expend.

This week marks the first anniversary of my first and only visit to Fresno, the seat of the Dioceses of San Joaquin (that isn't a typo). I've gone through many waves of thought on this issue, especially reading the thoughts at Thanksgiving in All Things, Haligweorc, AKMA's Random Thoughts, Carioca Confessions, and the ENS coverage. My conclusion is that the parishes (and missions) should go where they wish, but that Bishop Schofield should be deposed and deprived of control of the temporalities by civil process. It seems harsh, I know, but I argue that the bishop should not be the only person in the Diocese with a conscience unbound by his prudence. Knowing the example of Bennison in Pennsylvania, it's fairly easy to see what mischief a bishop can do with a majority of the Diocese quite uninspired by his leadership. A bishop can intimidate vestries by restricting their choice of rector, those in the ordination process by sending them to a particular seminary, the clergy by countless other means. Liberal bishops use these means. Conservative bishops use these means. They have the most power under the canons. They deserve the greatest penalty for their violation. I'm betting I could get agreement from both Chrysostom and Winthrop on that score. As for the parishes and missions, the mission of parishes for and against the bishop likely has been hurt by this illegal fiction of secession. The gospel will be furthered by a free choice. The diocesan corporation (sans Schofield) should forgive or maintain mission debts on an equal basis no matter their affiliation. That will be justice tempered with mercy.

Notorious Sin

So *Christopher sent me an e-mail today wondering about my thoughts about the Scotist’s post on use of the disciplinary rubric in connection with the War in Iraq. I will admit initial admiration for the tinderbox quality of the question, since I know priests very strongly opposed to the war who have children that very directly participated in it. Scotist’s question stands very much at odds with the “Oppose the war! Support the troops!” ethos of many American liberals (and liberal preachers). That the question is implied by a controversial interview with the stochastically outspoken Archbishop of Canterbury gives it all the richer germanity.

Unfortunately, I was about to give a talk this afternoon and was not particularly amenable to reflection and so threw Article XXXVII across the continent and scored a glancing blow somewhere in the vicinity of Orlando, FL.

Scotist first asks if the War in Iraq is a just war. Oddly enough, I always have thought the War in Iraq is just. I initially supported it on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had fought an aggressive war in Kuwait and the survival of his regime after the Coalition forces had slaughtered his armies mercilessly (there are a few mass graves in that country that are to our nation’s credit after all) was predicated on an agreement supported by the United Nations but ultimately in the “equity jurisdiction” (as we say in the Imperium) of the United States and the United Kingdom. In retrospect, it was a poor agreement in that it allowed a manifest criminal against humanity and his own fellow citizens to enhance human misery between the Tigris and Euphrates for further years. Moreover, the lightness of its terms probably reflected old associations between Saddam Hussein and members of that Administration. I would not be surprised if a future historian showed that the ties between the United States and Osama bin Laden and between the United States and Saddam Hussein were far more significant than the ties between the two men themselves. But ultimately, the covenanters were bound before themselves and God to keep the agreement (tainted and indirectly formal as it was).

And so I believed that Saddam Hussein was making WMDs/ABCs etc. in violation of the agreement and therefore we were quite justified in removing him from power and ensuring the establishment of a popularly sovereign government. Of course, it wasn’t true. But once he was removed from power (no matter the justification), it is certainly just to ensure his government had a suitably legitimate replacement. My objection to the war lies in that the people currently in charge of its prosecution have practiced deceit on two nations and the world, providing an apparent legitimacy to the regime they removed. Give me a multinational mostly Muslim peacekeeping force (and a decent rebuilding plan, q.v., *Christopher) and I will admit the justice of continuing military action.

But as I said in comments to the Scotist, I don’t think baptized combatants in our tradition ought to be considered any more implicated in the sinfulness of the war than the rest of us, for each of us contribute to the legitimacy of the civil jurisdiction under which they fight.

But what of this issue of notorious sin? How should the disciplinary rubric be used? Our first clue comes from the older Prayer Books in the opening of the Commination:

BRETHREN, in the Primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.

This liturgy harks back to the church discipline of the Patristic era and the early canonical penitentiaries. It’s not quite clear what era exactly is meant, since degrees of excommunication varied with location and era. But it at least gives possible definitions of notorious sin: notorious breach of the moral law. I’m afraid the notoriety is important, because it recalls the teachings of the Apostle on scandal. The discipline is in part medicinal for the object of excommunication, but its greatest importance is its instructive value for the other communicants:

But if we really want to understand the disciplinary rubrics, we ought to consult the Canons of 1604 ( which are now online )

26. Notorious Offenders not to be admitted the Communion.

NO Minister shall in any wise admit to the receiving of the holy Communion, any of
his cure or flock, which be openly known to live in sin notorious, without repentance-
nor any who have maliciously and openly contend ed with their neighbours, until they shall
be reconciled; nor any Church-wardens or Side-men, who having taken their oaths to
present to their Ordinaries all such publick offences as they are particularly charged to
inquire of in their several parishes, shall (notwithstanding their said oaths, and that their
faithful discharging of them is the chief means whereby publick sins and offences may be
reformed and punished) wittingly and willingly, desperately and irreligiously, incur the
horrible crime of perjury, either in neglecting or in refusing to present such of the said
enormities and publick offences, as they know themselves to be committed in their said
parishes, or are notoriously offensive to the congregation there; although they be urged by
some of their neighbours, or by their Minister, or by their Ordinary himself, to discharge
their consciences by presenting of them, and not to incur so desperately the said horrible
sin of perjury.

27. Schismatics not to be admitted to the Communion.

NO Minister, when he celebrateth the Communion, shall wittingly administer the
same to any but to such as kneel, under pain of suspension, nor under the like pain to
any that refuse to be present at publick Prayers, according to the Orders of the Church
of England; nor to any that are common and notorious depravers of the Book of Common
Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments, and of the Orders, Rites, and Ceremonies
therein prescribed, or of any thing that is contained in any of the Articles agreed upon m
the Convocation, one thousand five hundred sixty and two, or of any thing contained in
the Book of ordering Priests and Bishops; or to any that have spoken against and
depraved his Majesty's sovereign authority in Causes Ecclesiastical; except every such
person shall first acknowledge to the Minister, before the Church-wardens, his repentance
for the same, and promise by word (if he can write) that he will do so no more; and except
(if he can write) he shall first do the same under his hand-writing, to be delivered to
the Minister, and by him sent to the Bishop of the diocese, or Ordinary of the place.
Provided, That every Minister so repelling any, (as is specified either in this or in the
next precedent Constitution,) shall, upon complaint, or being required by the Ordinary,
signify the cause thereof unto him, and therein obey his order and direction.

28. Strangers not to be admitted to the Communion.

THE Church-wardens or Quest-men, and their assistants, shall mark, as well as
the Minister, whether all and every of the Parishioners come so often every year to the
holy Communion, as the Laws and our Constitutions do require; and whether any Stran-
gers come often and commonly from other parishes to their Church; and shall shew their
Minister of them, lest perhaps they be admitted to the Lord's Table amongst others,
which they shall forbid; and remit such home to their own Parish-churches and
Ministers, there to receive the Communion with the rest of their own neighbours.

109. Notorious Crimes and Scandals to be certified into Ecclesiastical Courts by
Presentment.

IF any offend their brethren, either by adultery, whoredom, incest, or drunkenness, or
by swearing, ribaldry, usury, and any other un-cleanness, and wickedness of life, the Churchwardens, or Quest-men, and Side-men, in their next presentments to their Ordinaries, shall faithfully present all and every of the said offenders, to the intent that they, and every
of them, may be punished by the severity of the laws, according to their deserts; and such
notorious offenders shall not be admitted to the holy Communion, till they be reformed.

110. Schismatics to be presented.

IF the Church-wardens, or Quest-men, or Assistants, do or shall know any man within
their parish, or elsewhere, that is a hinderer of the Word of God to be read or sincerely
preached, or of the execution of these our Constitutions, or a fautor of any usurped or
foreign power, by the laws of this realm justly rejected and taken away, or a defender of
Popish and erroneous doctrine; they shall detect and present the same to the Bishop of the
diocese, or Ordinary of the place, to be censured and punished according to such Ecclesi-
astical Laws as are prescribed in that behalf.

In other words, in Merrie Olde Englande, the disciplinary rubrics originated as a prelude to a form of indictment or libel for presentment in the ecclesiastical court. As such notorious sins are only those that would be within the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical court. But there also seems to be concern for parish harmony in these canons, so that those barred in their own parishes wouldn’t wander to others. The other link in these offenses is that they are scandalous. They disturb the integrity of the local members of the Body of Christ. I’m afraid that in an age of moral uncertainty, they provide adequate license for double standards. What plays in San Francisco won’t play in Fresno. And while I disagree with the moral aesthetics of Fresno, I can’t say they are misinterpreting the disciplinary rubrics. They just should feel overjoyed to be welcomed in Sam Francisco, shall we say?

Which brings to bls’s latest post on another post of the Scotist. It’s a wonderful sentiment, but nothing is settled and nothing is worth ignoring until we determine how the property is to be divided. In a dense urban area like the one in which I live, the parishes fall into their little ideological niches. It’s easy for me to let a parish in La Crescenta go when I know Altadena or Pasadena or Beverly Hills are within reach. It’s harder for me to say such things in sparser areas where churches may be quite divided. How many Episcopalians already feel estranged in the rangelands west of Ft. Worth? Even in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, I know straight allies who became Lutherans because they felt unwelcome in their home parishes. Dividing the property in those cases injures both sides, no matter the division. Moreover, in this carbon-haunted world, I would like to stand up for the ideal of a parish within reasonable travel distance. I have lived my life within a half hour’s walk of an Episcopal church. I dream of jobs that will allow me close proximity to Anglo-Catholic parishes. But it’s easy for us to feel guilty about wanting the property. Isn’t it just property and assets and worldly pomp? No, it’s a part of our everyday world set apart for the public worship of God. It’s connected to a place. If you go to St. Edmund’s in Chicago, you’ll notice the affordable housing they’ve financed all around the church. The local soup kitchen for the homeless in my town started in a little house on the north end of my parish property. When we decide who gets the property, we decide how mission and place are going to be bound together. For while the disciplinary rubrics seem to belong to another age where the dirty laundry of villages like Frocester and Staleybridge and Spofford found itself aired in the parish, the modern parish still is very much in community with its surroundings. When we divide the property, we will shape little bits of America. It’s a question that shouldn’t be ignored.

Five Days Short of 25 But Pass for 20

1. Journal that accepted an article of mine (my first senior author publication) will not explain why the third of the fifteen steps remaining until publication is presently delayed. Oh, well, the article probably will not appear in print for a year anyway.

2. Graduate students of my option and year organize the seminar series for the department, which so far mainly has involved me introducing my fellow graduate students to give seminars as a sort of handshaking exercise. (We have other handshaking exercises, but this one puts the most pressure on us. I'm in the midst of preparing mine at the moment.) But recently, I invited about ten relatively local scientists to give seminars. I've received several replies, but my favorite one was the one that addressed me as "Dr. Caelius." Between the journals and seminar invitees, I now hold a Ph.D. by courtesy.

3. I went to Thanksgiving Dinner at my committee chair's home yesterday. It's the second time I've been there for Thanksgiving, and I have to say I enjoy it greatly. My committee chair has a very interesting set of family and friends: a mix of scientists, entertainment industry professionals, and tech entrepeneurs.

Pullman Loses II (q.v. Haligweorc)

From a Maundy Thursday sermon of mine:

Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury has caused some controversy by praising a dramatic adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. These books are especially notable for portraying God not as the real creator of the universe, but as a fraud and a tyrant, who consigns the souls of the dead to a “prison camp” that prevents them from being reincorporated into the world soul, and whose favorite angels conspire to use the Church as an instrument of human misery.
Pullman’s Subtle Knife, the second book of the trilogy, is especially disturbing. By the end of the book, it is clear that a conspiracy has been hatched to kill God…and for some reason, I, at least, was rooting for the assassins. So perhaps it is unsurprising that the Archbishop of Canterbury has earned such flack. He’s condoning deicide. However, Pullman’s God is not God. He is not the Creator, who yearned (as Dionysus the Areopagite puts it) to make us and all we see and don’t see. Pullman’s universe, though Christ is once or twice mentioned, is Christless. We are not so loved that God gave his only son for us. It is not Christ, but the brave young man who wields the subtle knife who enters the prison camp to set the captives free. And it is a truly a Christless universe in which deicide is so exciting and novel. In our universe, it has happened all before. Tomorrow, nineteen hundred and seventy, give or take a few years, ago and ever more, God dies.

RIP Norman Mailer

I can't say that I know Mailer's wide oeuvre well. I have read Executioner's Song which I didn't find particularly compelling. But despite its flaws, I absolutely love Mailer's account of Apollo 11, Of A Fire on the Moon , which I think is the best literary work ever written about any aspect of the American space program. Take that, Tom Wolfe.

Church Today

One of the statements below is untrue.

1. The music mostly was Durufle's Requiem.
2. The only congregational hymn was Sine Nomine.
3. The (sung) Eucharistic Prayer and much of the rest of the liturgy was slightly redacted Rite I. (We do this every year and the redaction was the least yet, though one particularly notable phrase was softened.)
4. The Gospeller was Giles Fraser, Vicar of Putney.
5. Madpriest preached.

Actually, the Rector preached a sermon that for the first ten minutes I could imagine Madpriest preaching, that is, a sermon on the communion of saints that extends sainthood omnibus fidelibus defunctorum . Then the style changed too much for it to be Madpriest. But the rest indeed happened. Giles Fraser is visiting for a couple of weeks. He's apparently preaching next week.

Seeing Into the Future

I heard today from a friend in the Diocese of Pennsylvania about the last few days. Apparently, Bishop Bennison was cracking jokes about his impending departure throughout Diocesan Convention, leaving various people in great awkwardness about what to say to him, "We're sorry that your past has come back to bite you???..." My friend thought, "We'll pray for you" is about the best that can be said. The Presiding Bishop appears to have appointed a retired bishop of Eastern Maryland as Episcopal Visitor for the time being. She also has appointed two bishops as Administrators to clean house, especially in the Diocesan finances. These appointments quite surprised me, because I was under the impression that the Standing Committee was the Ecclesiastical Authority in this type of interregnum and could act like a Council of Regents or something.

Sadly, I suspect the Presiding Bishop sees Pennsylvania as a dry run for what she may have to do in the near future for certain Dioceses of the Church that do not appreciate being named in this context. The only difference will be the removal of the Standing Committee, which is not necessary in this case.