Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

A polymath defends Western culture and the Judaeo-Christian tradition — Rene Girard (1923-2015

From review of Cynthia L. Haven’s Evolution of Desire: A life of Rene Girard, Catholic historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science, in Times Literary Supplement.

Scapegoating demoted.

The Evangelists asserted Jesus’s innocence and exposed the lies of his murderers. They thus unmasked the entire immemorial deception whereby scapegoating had made possible the social order. This is what Jesus meant when he said that he would utter “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35)

Even Nietzsche got it about Christianity.

Girard’s reading of the Gospels has appealed to many theologians, replacing the idea of a wrathful God who demands propitiation [with] an insistence on the absolute necessity of non-violence and forgiveness, the “imitation of Christ” as enjoined in theological tradition. Nietzsche, despite his perversity in favouring the strong at the expense of the weak, had, according to Girard, grasped the true revolution of Christianity, its sympathy with victimhood.

Girard’s friends and non-friends.

One American colleague interviewed by [the author] Haven told her that Girard “goes around baptizing everyone he likes . . . . That’s one of the reasons I love him”. [I love that too.] The Paris intellectual cafés were not so friendly, and he felt ostracized. But Haven finds that the anti-communist resistance in Eastern Europe, at a time when Christianity was under attack, were inspired by his books, which were sometimes shared in samizdat editions.

A non-friend is clearly not impressed:

As one of Girard’s sharpest critics, the historian Hayden White, observed, “the obscurity of the data is essential to its status as evidence”.

Depends on what he means by obscurity, I guess.

A key element in cafe intellectuals’ opposition, by the way, would be his celebration of Western culture.

He saw the unmasking of ethnocentrism as an essential element in the Western intellectual tradition over the past five centuries, dating back to Montaigne and to early world travellers – and this critique had no equivalent in other civilizations.

The “hive mentality.”

He came to see the non-violent message of the Gospels as threatened by Satan, by which he meant the contagion that spreads between individuals to activate a hive mentality.

N.B. Italics mine throughout.

Makes me want to know about him. Toward which goal I present:

Four of his almost 30 books:

Violence and the Sacred
1972

Deceit, Desire and the Novel
1961

Things Hidden Since the…
1978

A theater of envy
1991

How Trump Rescued Our Economy From Obama’s ‘New Normal’

Something to pass on to friends and neighbors who are not sure about this:

It’s hard to believe that just two short years ago, our economy was limping along with no sign of a massive boom around the corner.

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, the pivotal factor in the last two years has been President Donald Trump.

Consider this. From 2009 to 2014, real median income fell overall. It did jump a few times between 2012 and 2014, but the overall trend was one of malaise. The reason? President Barack Obama’s regulations and taxes sat like a wet blanket over our economy

More more more here: How Trump Rescued Our Economy From Obama’s ‘New Normal’

David Foster Wallace’s best commencement speech ever

A commencement address with opening paragraphs that would make me want to keep listening.

The opening:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

If at this moment you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude-but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete…

You too,  right? Right.

Want to see and hear at the same time? Go here.

As for the best-ever part, try this out.

Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

I hate this “ordinary time” business, but Happy 25th Week anyhow, everyone.

Doesn’t mean we can’t swing to the rhythms of the oldie that is a sample of what the world owes to Holy Scripture, from Ecclesiastes 3:

There is an appointed time for everything,
and a time for every thing under the heavens.
A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to tear down, and a time to build.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather them;
a time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to be silent, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace.
See what I mean about rhythm? Marvelous stuff.
Then the un-prosy explanation:
What advantage has the worker from his toil?
I have considered the task that God has appointed
for the sons of men to be busied about.
He has made everything appropriate to its time,
and has put the timeless into their hearts,
without man’s ever discovering,
from beginning to end, the work which God has done.

Life rarely a cabaret, but ever mysterious when you get down to it.

God has put “the timeless” into our hearts. We never do quite understand that.

via Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Does a Rainbow Flag Belong in a Catholic Church?

Rather than a flag for Courage, if there were one:

Surely by now, most everyone has heard of Courage International, a Roman Catholic Apostolate for people who experience same-sex attraction and who strive to uphold the virtue of chastity.

Surely by now, most everyone ought to know that those who have come home to the Church despite having same-sex attractions actually live the truth that the Church is not a place of hate or condemnation.

Surely by now, people have come to recognize that the Church loves all people, regardless of the journey they have taken thus far.

Not surely at all. How would most people know about this organization? Even when the late Chicago Cardinal Francis George invited or allowed Courage to meet at Mundelein seminary, except from me, there was almost no publicity about it.

It’s a touchy subject.

via Crisis Magazine

The essence of freedom: David Foster Wallace on giving a care

From Times Literary Supplement review by Rozalind Dineen:

The artist-addict bromide is not what it once was. It’s easier to imagine a successful young artist in 2018 with a publicist than a habit.

And [writer David Foster] Wallace was, perhaps, the first artist-addict about whom one could not say “but I don’t really care” while still preserving literary credentials.

Caring is an intrinsic part of Wallace’s work and the effect he wished to have: he addresses a community – no longer the loner artist behaving as though he should be maintained through his otherness.

AA was a defining narrative for Wallace as it is for [writer Leslie] Jamison. In “This is Water” he extolled its precepts without naming them:

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and care about other people, and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, everyday”.

He acknowledged that the artist is held up in a net of understanding and revealed all the lines of equivalence between the addict who produces art and the one who does not.

via Story of thirst | Review: The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison