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Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Protecting Life Means Protecting Death
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Hi and welcome back to Dispatch Faith. Multiple U.S. states have considered or are considering medical assistance in dying (MAiD) laws this year, while a yearslong debate over physician-assisted suicide is playing out in the United Kingdom too. For today's newsletter, Dispatch Contributing Writer Karen Swallow Prior focuses on one group's criticism of the UK MAiD proposal—that of advocates for women who have been victims of domestic abuse and violence. That group's particular vulnerabilities can serve as a 'magnifying glass' for what makes everyone who faces end-of-life decisions particularly vulnerable and what the death with dignity movement misses, Prior argues. The dying are uniquely vulnerable. This is true even in the best of circumstances. Last year when my mother was dying—we didn't know she was dying, but we knew something was terribly wrong—there was a moment one afternoon when she lay atop her bed at home, too weak to get up. I came into the room and sat down at her side. 'I don't want to live like this,' she said, looking up at me. Her eyes were full of fear, her voice full of quiet anger. 'I know, Mom,' I said. Then, after a sliver of a second and with as much lightness as I could muster in the heaviness of the moment, I added, 'But I'm not going to put a pillow over your face, you know!' That made my mother almost-laugh, and we smiled at one another. 'I know,' she replied. I knew that wasn't what she was asking of me. At least, I was pretty sure. My family didn't know what lay ahead for her or for us. But this was settled: Whatever was ahead, we were committed—by our Christian beliefs and our belief in one another—to facing it together. Not all who to whom death is drawing near have such a strong system of support. And for those in circumstances lacking such safety nets, laws allowing medical assistance in dying or euthanasia add layer upon layer of vulnerability. This is why proposed legislation in the United Kingdom that would give the terminally ill the right to choose to end their own life is receiving quite a bit of pushback on multiple fronts. Some disability rights advocates argue that assisted dying devalues the lives of the disabled, perpetuates systemic inequalities, and relies on all-too-fallible medical predictions and decisions. Others think more resources and attention should be given to palliative care. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speaking against the legislation last year, drew from his own experience with the death of his infant daughter in voicing his opposition. 'The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care,' he wrote. One particular group, advocates for victims of domestic violence and abuse, have also voiced unique criticisms. An open letter released in April by the British think tank Theos in response to the Terminally Ill Adults Bill warns that the proposed law lacks safeguards necessary to protect those at risk of being coerced into ending their lives, particularly the poor and the disabled. Those at higher risk of being pressured into suicide also include women who are members of highly controlling religious communities who are susceptible to having their religious beliefs weaponized against them so abusively that death seems like the best way out. Representing women from a range of faith traditions and backgrounds, the letter's signatories hold varying views on medical assistance in dying but share a common commitment to protecting women and girls from domestic violence and abuse. Citing statistics around suicide, domestic violence, and spiritual abuse, the letter cautions that abuse victims are at greater risk of being pressured into assisted death. The group also cites an alarming new report showing an increased rate of suicide by victims of domestic abuse. And because poverty and other inequalities increase the risk of violence being committed against women and girls, they write, these populations are more at risk for receiving lower-quality health care in the first place, then being coerced into opting for aid in dying when faced with terminal illness. 'If assisted dying is seen as a response to alleviate suffering, without addressing the underlying structural issues that make life difficult and safeguard against harm,' the group argues, 'it could put undue pressure on vulnerable women to choose death over inadequate care.' Moreover, the letter points out that it is those with the most power who tend to make these decisions for those with less power: Much of the debate inside and outside parliament has been conducted by those empowered to speak of the importance of personal choice, without consideration of those who struggle to be heard in the public square. It is the voices of the unheard, ignored, and marginalised that we are compelled by our faith traditions and scriptures to listen and draw attention to, in the pursuit of good law–making for the common good – legislation that considers and protects the most vulnerable, not just those who speak loudest. To protect the lives of the most marginalized and powerless, the law must protect their deaths, too. Abuse victims who are terminally ill or disabled must be protected from any pressures by their partners to choose a hastened death rather than continued care. Those who are poor or otherwise marginalized need more support to receive medical care that could improve their quality of lives rather than the efficiency offered by self-imposed death. In thinking through these arguments on behalf of the most vulnerable among us and considering their further implications, there is something to consider for all of us who are facing end-of-life decisions for ourselves or our loved ones. Indeed, the acuteness of the situation for victims of abuse who are choosing whether to live or die offers a magnifying glass for all of us who will someday face difficult end-of-life decisions. The end of life makes us all vulnerable: the powerful as well as the powerless, the majority as well as the minority, the centered and voiced as well as the marginalized and silenced. Laws that legalize euthanasia—no matter how merciful they purport to be—simply fail inherently to protect human life at one of its most vulnerable stages. They harm—lethally and irreversibly—rather than help. They eliminate the sufferer, not the suffering. Painted in the most idealized strokes, medical aid in dying (which is becoming legal in more and more countries across the globe and is currently under consideration in New York) allows a terminally ill person to choose the time and manner of death—supposedly—freely, without pain, and without external pressures. Such an ideal does not really exist, however. To be dying is to be constrained. It is to experience pain, and in so doing even cause others pain. Even seemingly self-imposed pressures are contingent upon one's relationships with others and circumstances in the world and therefore come, at least in part, from outside ourselves. No man (or woman) is an island, as John Donne reminds us. By expanding safety nets, options for palliative care, and support for carers, we can greatly expand the opportunities for the dying to exert agency and make choices freely that stop short of the intentional taking of life. It is human to fear and to seek to avoid death. It is human to fear and to seek to avoid suffering and pain. It is human to fear and to seek to avoid causing those we love to suffer. And yet, it is the essence of our shared humanity to bear these burdens with one another. Not one of us bid ourselves to come into the world. Not one of us needs to or ought to bid ourselves or another out of it. It is easier to end a life than it is to care for a life nearing the end. 'The compassion of the wicked is cruel,' as Proverbs 12:10 (CEB) says. This is why great care must be taken, not only for the more obviously vulnerable, but for all of us who will someday approach the end of life. To care for the dying undeniably requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice, unfathomable heartache, and more. To offer these gifts to those who suffer is a basic tenet of the Christian faith, one woven throughout scripture, church practice, and the testimony of history. Some of the earliest hospitals were established by the early church, a legacy that has continued into modern times with the rise of the nursing profession, the modern hospice movement, and the ongoing leadership of Christian medical facilities today. We are to care for the vulnerable, which includes the aliens in the land, the widows, the orphans, the unborn, the prisoners, the sick, and the dying. And perhaps there is no one more vulnerable than the dying. What lies ahead for the dying—as well as the living—is certain pain and suffering, helplessness and dependency, fear and uncertainty. It is not possible to live without suffering. But thanks to palliative and hospice care, choosing death isn't the only means of ending the pain of living. In a world of limited time and resources, all the energies that go into legalizing medical aid in dying are ultimately diverting resources that could improve and expand end-of-life care. Those last weeks, days, and hours of my mother's life (and her dying) were ones nothing had prepared us for. But the human body and modern medicine are miraculous things. The body knows what to do to ease the pain. We learned what to do, too, because of the trained professionals who supported and helped us. Love, too, is miraculous. The more my mother's body shut down and the pain medication gave her relief, the more the suffering was ours. We gladly bore it for this woman we loved and who loved us. The law, of course, cannot force us to love. But it can help us to live free from harm at human hands. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, a case that will decide whether a virtual Catholic school in Oklahoma can become the country's first religious charter school. For our website, Contributing Writer Andy Smarick broke down how oral arguments went. State charter school laws have been around for more than 30 years. They enable nonprofits to operate public schools free of many rules that apply to the traditional government-run public schools. That list can include policies related to calendars and schedules, teacher pay and certification, curriculum, teaching methods, and more. From the very beginning, all charters have been secular. That's been required by state laws. But a Catholic-affiliated applicant in Oklahoma put those provisions to the test, essentially arguing that it is anti-religious discrimination for a state government to allow any nonprofit other than faith-based groups to operate a charter consistent with its beliefs. The likeliest battle line, I thought, would be whether charters are 'state actors' (quasi-governmental entities). If so, they must be secular. But if they're private nonprofits partnering with the government, they might be allowed to be faith-based. But if the five more conservative justices (Justice Barrett is not participating in this case) quickly revealed that they believe charters are not state actors, I suspected the battle line would shift to possibly reviving some kind of 'status-use' distinction. Oklahoma and the progressive justices would, I thought, tacitly concede that faith-based groups can operate charters while arguing that states had a right—to keep church and government separate—to prohibit those charters from using state money to do a variety of religious things. The third possibility would come about, I thought, if the conservative justices made clear that religious groups must be allowed to run charters consistent with their faiths' teachings. In this case, Oklahoma and the progressive justices would retreat for a final standoff, trying to preserve some ability of states to limit the scope of faith-based chartering. This might include narrowing the ministerial exception (the legal doctrine protecting religious entities' key staffing decisions from government interference), ensuring state nondiscrimination statutes apply to religious charters, and/or preventing a maximalist view on faith-based groups' participation in government programs. Read the whole thing. Nearly a century ago, famed preacher Aime Semple McPherson walked out of a hotel room barefoot and disappeared. Five weeks later, she returned with a story that became as controversial as it was fantastical. For The New Yorker, Casey Cep recounts this story and McPherson's legacy as she reviews a new biography of McPherson written by Claire Hoffman. 'It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike as 'God's Best Publicity Agent.' McPherson rose to prominence during the golden age of P.R., when Ivy Lee was talking up the Rockefellers and the Democratic Party and Edward Bernays was selling everything from Dixie cups to the First World War. In keeping with the times, McPherson used mass media to make herself into a master of soul craft and self-promotion, laying hands on thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically seven days a week to thousands more until her death, in 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry, including boxing rings in which she knocked out the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled across a stage with sirens wailing while calling herself one of the Lord's patrolmen. 'Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal,' Charlie Chaplin once told her, 'half due to the props and lights.' More recognizable than the Pope, McPherson was often besieged by followers, but the ocean offered an escape from their attention, and she liked going to the beach to read Scripture and to write, and then to take a break from both to swim. That May afternoon, she chose a title for her sermon, 'Light & Darkness,' and wrote for almost an hour before wading into the water. Jonah was swallowed by a whale on his way to Tarshish, and St. Paul was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta, but no one knows what happened to McPherson after she wrote the following in her notebook: 'It had been that way since the beginning. The glint of the sun, gleaming light, on the tops, and shadow, darkness in the troughs. Ah, light and darkness all over the earth, everywhere.' More than a month later, and two days after her own memorial service, the lady preacher reappeared, still barefoot but now wandering around a Mexican desert, hundreds of miles away.' On Friday, President Donald Trump announced he would seek to end Harvard University's tax-exempt status because of what he sees as the institution's antisemitism, which is sure to trigger a legal battle. Last month for Religion News Service, as talk of such a move heated up, Jack Jenkins and Bob Smietana reported on the federal government revoking the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University in the 1970s over the evangelical school's prohibition of interracial marriage among students. Such a move against Harvard may be inherently political, but it and the wider legal debate are also shot through with religion. 'Some evangelical Christians worry Trump's attempt to revoke Harvard's tax exemption could backfire. Conservatives have long voiced concerns that Christian groups that oppose marriage for same-sex couples and LGBTQ+ rights on religious grounds might find their tax exemptions at risk. That worry was prompted by the 2015 Obergefell decision, in which the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. During oral arguments for that case, then-U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said faith groups who opposed could find their tax exemptions at risk if it were legalized. Chief Justice John Roberts cited those remarks in his dissent. 'Unfortunately,' he wrote, 'people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.' Those concerns led Christian groups such as Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Family Association to oppose the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act, a federal law that recognized same-sex marriages. When that law was signed by President Joe Biden, Alliance Defending Freedom said it 'intentionally threatened free speech and religious liberty.' [David] French said the IRS' Bob Jones ruling to punish nonprofits over LGBTQ+ rights has long been the Christian right's 'nightmare scenario.' He warned that if Harvard loses its tax exemption, that could open the door for the Christian right's nightmare to become reality.'
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
After Francis, What Now for the Catholic Church?
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Hi and happy Sunday. Often, the main elements of this 'news'letter (to borrow one of Jonah Goldberg's phrases) are off the news, meaning we're publishing items that aren't necessarily driven by what's going on in a given week. This edition is different. The death of Pope Francis, about whom there is no shortage of opinions, is not just a seminal moment for the world's 1.4 billion Catholics. The end of a papal era has vast implications for other nations and other religions alike (and of course throughout the entirety of Christendom). Thus, all of today's Dispatch Faith focuses on Francis' legacy, what may come next for the Catholic Church, or both. One housekeeping note: In this edition, I'm including a short Q&A with Catholic scholar George Weigel. If you'd like to see more items like this in Dispatch Faith (in addition to the customary longform pieces), drop me a line via email, or if you're a member, leave a comment on our site. First up, though, is a helpful essay on where the Catholic Church goes from here, by Clemente Lisi, the editor of Religion Unplugged, a good publication whose work I've plugged in the newsletter before. With Pope Francis' funeral in the rearview mirror, the focus at the Vatican shifts to the forthcoming papal conclave and the process of electing the next pontiff. The Catholic Church is bigger than one single pope, but talk of Francis' legacy lingers as the church finds itself at a crossroads. It is also something the next pope will have to contend with. The Francis papacy was marked by a greater focus on politically progressive issues —migrants, climate change, and LGBTQ rights—that fueled much doctrinal confusion in the process. At the same time, Francis upheld traditional beliefs and was in lockstep with his predecessors Saint Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, holding a firm line when it came to issues such as abortion, the need for evangelization, and helping the poor. From the start, the Holy Father made a strong impression by living simply, electing to reside, for example, in a guesthouse instead of the Apostolic Palace most popes choose. He emphasized his focus on the poor and charitable works, while championing more participation on the part of laypeople. These were all good things for a church seeking to find its place in the 21st century. Nonetheless, I agree with a recent opinion by Philadelphia's Archbishop Emeritus Charles Chaput (who should have been made a cardinal by Francis) that 'an interregnum between papacies is a time for candor.' That candor includes highlighting what Francis did badly and what the next pope can do to make the church a much stronger force for good around the world, while also maintaining its centuries-old traditions and values. Pope Francis was wrongly painted a communist by many on the political right in the United States and his native Argentina, but that doesn't mean his often autocratic style didn't alienate conservative Catholics. Yes, Francis was a pope of firsts—the first from Latin America, the first Jesuit, and the first to take the name Francis—but his disruptive style had its limitations. Francis' era was one marked by too many news alerts proclaiming that some church teaching had been changed, only to discover very little had. It resulted in glowing mainstream press coverage and frustration for so many of us. An example of this occurred in December 2023 when the pope approved allowing Catholic clergy to bless same-sex couples—issuing a document detailing the change in the Vatican's policy—as long as it doesn't resemble a marriage ceremony. In the days and weeks that followed, amid much pushback, the Vatican was forced to clarify the decision. What it all means for the daily life of Catholics is less understood even all this time later. So what now for the next leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics? A lot will depend on whether the College of Cardinals elects a pope who is progressive, in the same vein as Francis, or a return to the traditional, like John Paul II and Benedict XVI. There's no way to know how this secret process will play out. Francis named 108 of the 135 cardinals who will decide the next pope—a supermajority—but whether that has any influence on the outcome remains to be seen. The Overton window, when it comes to church doctrine, may have shifted some, but that doesn't mean the next pontiff can't show that he is a leader for all Catholics. Banning things such as the Latin Mass at a time when more younger people in the West are hungry for tradition and liturgy in this ever more secular and digital world hurt Francis' overall effectiveness. It's a fine line, but the next pope can be both progressive and still hold on to tradition. One way to do so is to avoid Francis' doctrinal ambiguity (he was a Jesuit, after all) on a variety of issues that didn't serve his 12-year papacy well. Jesuits, whose religious order was founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, have developed a more liberal or progressive viewpoint on a variety of topics over the centuries. Francis came to embody this very spirit. While the pope's proclamations featured a series of well-meaning gestures (coupled with what appeared to be policies akin to a liberal Protestant church), the Catholic Church's role is primarily to ignore the headlines of today. Instead, the church needs to focus on its primary mission—promoting faith and guiding believers towards spiritual salvation. In greater depth, here are the five areas the next pope will need to focus on: As mentioned, the church has not been immune to the culture wars, experiencing deep internal divisions in an ever-polarizing world. The upcoming conclave to elect a new pope will be pivotal in determining which vision prevails, with potential candidates such as Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of the Philippines—dubbed 'the Asian Francis'—viewed as someone who could continue in a progressive direction. Francis never fully addressed some of the progressive factions—most notably in Germany over the issue of same-sex blessings—who thumbed their noses at doctrine. Even when the Vatican did address the issue in early 2023, German bishops said they would defy Rome. The issue became moot after the Vatican said such unions could be blessed, albeit with a series of caveats. At the same time, Pope Francis was not a theological giant. It was tough to be in the shadows of such notables as John Paul II and Benedict. But he could have surrounded himself with someone with doctrinal heft. Instead, he named Victor Manuel Fernández to head the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The cardinal fueled ambiguity with the announcement that priests could bless same-sex unions, something that included a carveout after it was poorly received by African bishops. The next pope should replace Fernández with someone like Benedict. Long a plague on the church, this needs to be addressed by the new pope from the start. Critics have argued that Francis' response to the crisis was insufficient, particularly in holding bishops accountable and ensuring greater transparency. Survivor groups have called for more action and systemic change to protect vulnerable children, seminarians, and nuns—who all have been the target of abusive clergymen—in order to restore greater trust in the church. Oddly, Francis was a defender of Marko Rupnik, a Jesuit priest from Slovenia. The Jesuits expelled Rupnik from their order in 2023 after more than two dozen women came forward to say he had sexually and psychologically abused them. Nonetheless, Rupnik, also an artist whose mosaics decorate many churches around the world, remains a priest after the order was overruled by the Vatican as it sought its own probe. The next pope needs to make it a point to move quickly and make a decision regarding Rupnik's future. While Christianity is declining in the West (despite some recent data revealing a growing interest by men and Generation Z), it is rapidly growing across the global South, particularly in Africa and parts of Asia. This rapid growth has occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, which today is home to about 171 million Catholics—up from an estimated 1 million in 1910, according to Pew Research Center. This demographic shift presents challenges for the church's governance, as the Vatican's leadership remains predominantly European. Francis was Argentine (the son of Italian immigrants to the South American nation), but he essentially functioned as a European despite his outreach to the peripheries. He was in agreement with many European bishops who also favored a progressive stance. He made it a point to elevate such bishops to cardinals, while ignoring men like Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, a conservative who sparred with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A new pope from the global South could alter the church's dynamics. Wherever the pope hails from, a new global strategy will be needed beyond the usual papal trips. It's easy to forget that the pope is also the head of a small state. As leader of the Holy See, the next pope will face the financial pressures that come with running the Roman curia, the Vatican's governing body, and a worldwide church. A decline in donations and rising costs in recent years haven't helped. The Vatican's financial situation has been in peril for some time. In 2023, the Holy See's annual operating deficit reportedly grew to more than $90 million. The Vatican doesn't provide figures regarding its finances to the public. The Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook estimated, for example, that its revenues and expenditures in 2013 had reached $315 million and $348 million, respectively. The Francis era included several high-profile financial scandals. A new pontiff will need to explore new ways to raise money, while making sure the bloated Vatican bureaucracy and corruption can be tamed. Francis had taken steps in interfaith dialogue, and the next pope will need to do the same without watering down doctrine. It won't be an easy task, but a necessary one. So many Christians around the world are being persecuted as minorities. The pope will need to be an advocate for them, while helping to bridge divisions with other faiths. Part of this interfaith dialogue involves the pope's role as diplomat. It seemed as if the church's role in international relations had somewhat weakened in recent years. Although the pope is considered a man of great influence, Francis' papacy has also coincided with the rise of both secularism and populism. That placed the Vatican in unfamiliar positions on some issues, like finding itself aligned with left-wing parties in Italy. There are plenty of conflicts around the world for the next pontiff to get involved in. The ongoing wars between Russia and Ukraine and Israel and the terrorist group Hamas are just two major ones that warrant attention. Being pope is both complex and demanding. The next man to lead the Catholic Church will need to find the right balance between the spiritual, diplomatic, and administrative. It's now up to the College of Cardinals to elect a new pope. It's a decision guided by the Holy Spirit, not simply ambition or politics. It's also a decision that will determine the future direction of the church and global Christianity. The time seems ripe to embark on a new era. Pope Francis' legacy likely will not be an easy one to sum up succinctly, and only with time (and perspective) will it fully take shape. Patrick Gilger—a Catholic priest, professor, and, like Francis, a Jesuit—writes for our website today that how Catholics approach the act of remembering Francis will matter. To grasp the papacy of Pope Francis we need not just an analytic but a discerning attention. Put differently: I am distrustful of answers that step outside of time, that step away from the site of illumination. Instead I want a discerning answer because, like memory, it is old. Or, more accurately, it is traditional. It remains part of a conversation that is still going on, an argument that is happening now. This kind of answer is hard to come by because, as 19th century theologian St. John Henry Newman wrote in An Essay On Development Of Christian Doctrine, it takes time for a 'real idea' to reveal itself as itself in history. Contrary to our expectations, Newman argued that a great idea is not 'clearest near the spring [but] purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full.' Like rocks in a tumbler, the most real of our ideas are only burnished by the sacred weapon of time. We human beings tumble our greatest ideas about inside of traditions. As Alasdair MacIntyre has taught us in After Virtue, what we call a tradition is an 'historically extended, socially embodied argument about the goods which constitute that tradition.' Living traditions, then, are ongoing conversations that take place over a long time. So what about the memories of Pope Francis? Gilger continues: The contribution that the papacy of Francis has made to these questions—the questions that for centuries have dominated the conversation that is the Catholic tradition—has been less an attempt to resolve them than to embody a practical hope: that the entire church might become a subject capable of being guided by the Holy Spirit. That it might become more and more fully the body of Christ that it already is. I admit that there are many times when I am myself less hopeful than Francis was. I remember not only when I have been sensitive to the word God is speaking through the life of another, but also the other times when I have been insensate and self-centered. I remember how much it costs to be a good priest. Just as it costs much to be a good father, a good wife, a good friend. What I will remember most about the papacy of Francis is how often he himself remembered not how hard such sensitivity can be, but how good it is. That is why, I think, he was less afraid than I often am. Pope Francis believed in time—which, as he often and cryptically said, is 'greater than space.' He believed in taking time to listen and to remember. This would allow us to 'work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results,' to 'endure difficult and adverse situations,' and 'accept the tension between fullness and limitation.' Read the whole thing. Earlier this week at First Things, Catholic studies scholar with the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Pope John Paul II biographer George Weigel published a retrospective on Pope Francis' legacy. I reached out to Weigel, who had several private audiences with Francis over the years, about his thoughts on where the Catholic Church goes from here. Our exchange is below, with my questions in bold. Years from now, what do you think Francis' best contribution to the Catholic Church will have been? That's not an easy question to answer, as it often takes decades, even centuries, for the Church to 'digest' a pontificate and assess its impact. To take one example: the full impact of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), who in many ways created the modern papacy, is still being debated. One thing that can be said for sure of Francis is that the election of a Latin American and a Jesuit further broadened future fields of papal candidates, as had the elections of a Pole (John Paul II) and a Bavarian (Benedict XVI). Francis will also be remembered for his evident concern for the poor and the marginalized. What is less certain is whether he understood why the poor are poor, and what might be done about that. Likewise, what will have been the biggest weakness? Francis was deeply influenced by his Jesuit experience, in which the superior is a virtual autocrat. So the Francis papacy was the most autocratic in centuries. Yet despite that tendency to autocracy, Francis didn't really fix the Vatican's financial problems, which are severe, and he didn't deal vigorously with several grave sexual abuse cases. His fondness for interviews turned the pope into a kind of oracle, which actually diminishes the moral authority of the papacy: No pope has any special insight into issues like climate change or the resettlement of migrants. In fact, one veteran and very Catholic European diplomat told me in 2017 that the pope's absolutism on the problem of migrants—which amounted to a call for open borders—was shrinking the space in which a reasonable political solution to the undoubted problem of mass migration could be found. What do you see as the most important or perhaps most immediate issue for the next pope to address and why? The immediate evangelical need is for the next pope to radiate a sense of Christian confidence and joy. The immediate theological need is for the next pope to explain to the Church and the world that moral truth and mercy are not in conflict, despite the misimpressions sometimes created by the pontificate that has now ended. The immediate institutional need is for the next pope to restore an orderly pattern of governance, including serious financial reform, after 12 years of autocracy and dithering about Vatican finances. Earlier this week, you wrote, 'Christian communities whose self-identity becomes incoherent, whose boundaries become porous, and who mirror the culture rather than trying to convert it, wither and die.' Is this how you'd describe the Catholic Church presently? And what was Pope Francis' effect on such a dynamic? Francis didn't create that problem, but he didn't grasp it (at least in my experience of conversation with him), and therefore he didn't address it vigorously enough. And this was a real problem, because that doctrinal and moral ambiguity and incoherence are destroying Catholicism in Germany, Belgium, and elsewhere in Western Europe. Why is that happening in these historic centers of Catholic faith? Because no one is interested in the 'Church of Maybe.' The living, vibrant, attractive parts of the Catholic Church throughout the world—in the U.S., for example, but above all in sub-Saharan Africa, which is Catholicism's growth center right now—have embraced Catholicism-in-full as an alternative to the nihilism and moral confusions of so much of contemporary Western culture. It's impossible to predict the vote of the College of Cardinals during the upcoming papal conclave. But in broad terms, do you anticipate cardinals moving in a direction more in line with their vote to elect Francis in 2013, or perhaps more in line with the vote to elect Benedict XVI in 2005? This is the most diverse electorate in papal history. The cardinals really don't know one another, so it is very hard indeed to predict how the cardinal-electors will decide on the next pope. Before the conclave of 2013, Cardinal Bergoglio of Argentina, who became Pope Francis, was promoted as a tough-minded reformer who would straighten out the Vatican bureaucratic and financial mess while continuing the dynamic orthodoxy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Neither of those expectations were met. That will be one factor in shaping the conclave's decision. Another will be, as I indicated above, a desire to return to a more stable pattern of Church governance. Would you consider the election of another pope from outside Europe to be a good thing? I don't think nationality counts for very much anymore in papal elections, with the possible exception of the difficulty that some Europeans and Latin Americans might have in imagining a black African pope. What counts—or should count—is the vibrancy of a man's faith and his capacity to govern. And you can find that in many, many parts of the world church. In case you missed it, on our site earlier this week, longtime Vatican correspondent Francis Rocca penned our initial obituary of Pope Francis. 'While the late pope was an electrifying leader, he was also a polarizing one and left his church more divided than he found it—both ideologically and geographically. In his efforts to forge a more welcoming church, he stirred up controversies that pitted African conservatives against Western liberals, laypeople against the hierarchy, and Catholics who emphasize doctrine on personal morality against those who prioritize social justice. His overtures to Beijing and Moscow alienated members of his own flock in China and Eastern Europe, respectively. To be sure, a worldwide organization with more than 1.4 billion members spanning vastly different cultures and traditions will inevitably harbor tensions, especially in an era of rapid global change. The late pope inherited divisions between conservatives and progressives that had been deepening since the 1960s, when the reforms following the Second Vatican Council and the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which forbade contraception, sparked enduring conflicts over authority, morality, and church governance.' And Dispatch contributor Scott Salvato wrote an explainer on the College of Cardinals, the group of men (135 are eligible to vote) who will now select the next pope. 'The College of Cardinals traces its origins to the early centuries of the Catholic Church in Rome, evolving into its current form under Pope Nicholas II in 1059. Initially serving as key advisers to the pope, the cardinals' role expanded significantly as the papacy sought to consolidate its authority and regulate administration of the Catholic Church. Cardinals became the primary electors of the pope, ensuring continuity and ecclesiastical autonomy from secular rulers who often sought to influence and control the great authority of the church for their own ends. The red color of cardinals' vestments symbolizes their willingness to defend the faith even to the point of shedding their blood as martyrs. The collective influence of the cardinals shapes Catholic doctrine, global church policy, and diplomacy—which often positions them as intermediaries between the Vatican, national governments, and other large national and international institutions. In modern times, popes have sought to internationalize the College of Cardinals, appointing more cardinals from regions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. There are currently 17 cardinals from the United States. While their spiritual authority is considerable, their authority and influence within the church fluctuates depending on the reigning pontiff and the particular responsibilities of each cardinal. Ultimately, the role of a cardinal embodies both the sacred and administrative dimensions of church governance. The role reflects a delicate balance between faith, tradition, contemporary issues, politics, finance, and the practical issues of administering a global church of 1.4 billion Catholics.'
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Water From Stone
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Happy Sunday, and, for fellow Christians, happy Easter! (He is risen!) It's sometimes so hard to communicate something fresh about a holiday, event, or idea that we routinely interact with. But in contemplating what millions of Christians around the world are celebrating today—Jesus Christ's resurrection—Contributing Writer Jake Meador focuses on key imagery taken from the Old Testament that Christians may see anew on Easter. There's an odd story tucked away in the Hebrew Bible about the Israelites and their wilderness wanderings after their escape from Egypt. It being the desert and there being quite a lot of Israelites, food and water were constant worries for the people, for reasons one can understand. But God persistently supplies Israel with the food and water that it needs even as the people continue to worry and complain. In the story I am thinking of, he does it in a particularly surprising way: God instructs Moses, the leader of the Israelites, to take his walking stick and strike a large rock in the sight of the Israelites. Then, God promised, he would cause water to come from the rock, so Moses does that and the Israelites receive water. The image of water flowing from a rock is an image of Easter—Jesus Christ's resurrection— surprising as that might seem. To understand why, consider a marvelous poem by the Catholic poet and memoirist Mary Karr. It is part of a broader series of poems she has written, all with the title 'Descending Theology.' In her poem on the resurrection (which you can read in full here) the arresting revelation comes in the final couplet, which in the sonnet form she is using is often where the 'problem' of the first three quatrains is resolved. Thus the poem that begins by considering Jesus' death—and he really was dead—and how 'In the corpse's core, the stone fist / of his heart began to bang,' resolves with this: it's your limbs he comes to fill, as warm water shatters at birth, rivering every way. I'm not sure you'll find a more distilled, condensed account of the Christian understanding of the resurrection than those two lines. And note the final image: birthing waters, rivering out from a stone tomb and filling the world. The Christian claim, as Karr puts it so beautifully, is that a man who was dead (and who was also God) came back to life. And now he seeks to fill you with the same resurrected life that he took up on Easter Sunday, if you would respond to his call and follow him into life, light, and love. Those who thirst can find water here—a stone tomb that is now empty. Today Christians are celebrating because we believe this claim, made unanimously by the church down through the ages, is true: Early on a Sunday morning after Passover sometime around 30 AD near Jerusalem, a recently executed man condemned as a criminal by the Roman civil authorities and accused of blasphemy by the Jewish religious authorities came back to life. And we believe something further, and perhaps, if possible, even stranger: that that same man who was murdered and returned to life was actually a union of God and man, that he was, himself, God, come down to earth as a man, like an author writing himself into the story he was writing. This means that the Christian claims here are both universalizing and radical in what they mean about the basic nature of reality, and of life and death. Saying all of this in our current context is both necessary and, I suspect, somewhat fraught. The place of religion in America's public life, particularly Christianity as it is America's most practiced religion, is a deeply contested and complicated issue today. On the one hand, there are those who, in a metaphor used by J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter, want 'religion' to basically be a kind of supplement to help some human machines run moderately better. But it isn't strictly needed. Viewed this way, religious practice is a tool some of us use to help us deal with life, perhaps to help us find community or connect with family or even some deeper part of ourselves. When viewed this way, many think religion is perfectly fine. The trouble begins, they say, when people (mostly Christians in the American context) start acting as if their religion is universally true, as if everyone has to reckon with it in some sense, as if it can't simply be relegated to a negotiable and privatized domain of life kept safely away from questions of common life. When politicians speak not of 'freedom of religion' but 'freedom of worship' they are working with this sort of constrained understanding of religion and public life. The trouble is that the basic nature of the Christian claims don't really allow for such constraints. Christians don't believe that Jesus had some good ideas about life that can be found just as easily elsewhere. Christians believe that Jesus was God, that he was dead because a bunch of powerful people murdered him, and then … he wasn't dead. Not only that, but by reversing death, as Jesus does, he does that not only for himself but for all who are subject to death. St. Paul says that Jesus is 'the firstfruits' of the dead. This is an agrarian term, referring to the first produce in a crop. The first fruits are a sign that more fruit is coming, like them. So Jesus' resurrection is a sign that death itself is defeated and more resurrection is on the way—including your own, one day. Is this good news or bad? Imagine a person propelled through life by selfishness or greed or anger or some other vice, something actively harming them and hindering their relationships with others. Now imagine that person having an eternity to sink deeper into those evils. To exist forever as a person like that sounds horrid. But, Christians, believe, resurrection is coming, like it or not. So those who would have resurrection be a cause for joy and not for grief, have only one thing to do, as St. Paul exhorted his readers: Repent, follow Jesus, be baptized. These claims that the church makes are not claims about how some people can make their lives better. These are claims about the basic nature of reality. So you can't really reduce them to a form of privatized therapy. Resurrection is coming. It can be good news for you or it can be bad. What it can't be is a matter of indifference. On the other hand, some Christians take the radical and universalizing nature of Christian claims, vindicated on Easter Sunday, to mean that Christians have a unique calling to dominate the world because Christians have unique knowledge of what is true about the world. But to read Easter in this way also badly misses the point, as the simple facts of Easter weekend make plain. Jesus himself rejected the possibility of domination during his life on earth. Early in St. Matthew's Gospel he is tempted with an offer of global domination by Satan and rejects it. Later, as he is dying on the cross, some in the crowd taunt him and say that if he is really God then he should come off the cross and destroy his enemies. But Jesus does not. Instead he allows himself to be mocked, ridiculed, beaten, spit upon. In Karr's words, he consents 'to have oafs stretch you out / on a crossbar as if for flight, then thick spikes / fix you into place.' The events of Easter are a vindication of Christian claims about life and death. But a vindication of dominance politics, acquisitiveness, greed, and the destruction of enemies they very much are not, for such things are foreign to the moral wisdom of the faith laid out in the scriptures. We might put the matter this way: Ours is a moment when many are fearful of their perceived enemies. We then allow this fear to drive us to behave monstrously in search of their destruction and our imagined safety. This is the story playing out now in our politics and with the support, to our shame, of many Christians. The events of Holy Week suggest a better path: On the cross, Jesus shows his enemies mercy. He might have struck out at them. But he didn't. And in return for his mercy he received death and violence. Is that not what we fear? Is that not why we fail in mercy? We fear what we will lose if our mercy is met with violence in return. In his resurrection, the mercy of Jesus is vindicated, not because his human enemies are destroyed, driven before him in fear and despair. The mercy of Jesus is vindicated, rather, because the resurrection shows us that the worst thing an enemy can do to us when we show mercy is not so ultimate or final as we fear. Mercy is vindicated because death is defeated. Mercy is vindicated because the resurrection has come and more resurrections are on their way, as new life rivers outward from the stone. The question Christianity poses: Will you allow your own limbs to be filled with it? Earlier this week, my colleague John McCormack reported a puzzling, infuriating story for our site: Afghan Christians who sought (and were granted) legal protection in the U.S. recently received a notice from the Department of Homeland Security telling them to get out—by Good Friday. Ahmad has no plans of self-deporting to face the Taliban and still hopes his asylum claim will be granted. 'I cannot think of going back to Afghanistan,' he told The Dispatch. 'The Taliban soldiers, the leaders, they somehow think they are serving God … if they can kill Americans, if they can kill Christians. … I will not survive.' Hayes Thielman, a pastor at Apostles Church, told The Dispatch that the congregation, which is predominantly white and leans politically conservative, is rallying behind the Afghan members of the congregation now living in fear of being deported to a country where they would be persecuted or killed. 'We're raising money to get immigration lawyers,' said Thielman. He noted the bitter 'irony that on the day Jesus was crucified, Christians who were fleeing persecution are being sent out of our country.' People like Andre Mann helped get Ahmad and others out of Afghanistan. Earlier this Holy Week, they were pondering what to do in light of the orders for them to go back. Mann believes, based on his personal interactions, that there are many Christians who are among the Afghans being told to leave the country. 'Their lives were in danger. They were getting hunted. They didn't want to leave Afghanistan, but they had to flee,' Mann told The Dispatch. 'It's unknown what's actually going to happen, whether this letter is just kind of to scare them and see if they'll leave' or 'whether, come Friday, someone's going to show up at their doorstep because [federal agents] have their addresses because they've legally been here.' Mann said he hoped the Trump administration would reverse course after realizing just how vulnerable of a population Afghan asylum seekers are: 'As an American, I would hope that the U.S. would be the last place that someone who's fled religious persecution is afraid for their life.' Read the whole thing. I've discussed televangelist-turned-presidential-adviser Paula White before, along with the history of the White House Faith Office. For the Wall Street Journal, Aaron Zitner profiled White and included looks at her history with President Donald Trump and the degree to which she uses her connections with him in her questionable (and, in my view, theologically dubious) ministry. 'She has built a national profile preaching a strain of Christianity that holds that God can offer the faithful good health and prosperity. Some critics label such teaching the 'prosperity gospel' for tying divine gifts to financial contributions—a label White and others reject. She counts musician Kid Rock and model Tyra Banks as friends. In her autobiography, she said she had ministered to members of the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and was called to Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch when the late pop star was facing criminal charges. When White got married for the third time, to Jonathan Cain, keyboard player for the rock band Journey, she began using the surname White-Cain. Her husband often appears in her video sermons from behind a piano. White said critics have been unfairly dismissive in describing her ministry. ''Prosperity gospel' is a pejorative,' White said,' Zitner writes. 'Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has criticized the fundraising messages White delivers in appeals like the Passover-Easter sermon, calling her 'a theological nutcase' who is 'selling the promises of God in the guise of fundraising for a ministry.' Speaking recently on his podcast, Mohler, who supported Trump last year, said White's strain of teaching 'turns into a very manipulative theological system,' and that he was concerned about the number of Trump supporters who subscribe to it.' How much do you know about Quakers—also known as the members of the Religious Society of Friends? They are perhaps most well known for 'unprogrammed worship.' But did you know most of the world's Quakers live in Africa? Calvin Manika explains for Religion Unplugged: 'Quakerism — also known as the Religious Society of Friends — is a Christian movement emphasizing direct experience of God, the equality of all people and a life of simplicity and peace, with a history rooted in 17th-century England. Africa is home to the largest Christian population in the world. Constance Maina, a Kenyan Quaker, said she believes, as do many 'friends' in Africa, that the Bible is central to her faith and identity as a Quaker. 'My faith is hinged to Quakerism because it is the way I can help encourage my community and people to read the Bible,' Maina said. Quakerism in Africa aligns more closely with evangelical Protestant traditions, incorporating hymns, Bible readings, and prayers. The exception is in South Africa, where unprogrammed, silent meetings in the British tradition are the norm.' As we noted in a past edition of Dispatch Faith, this year the Western celebration of Easter and the Eastern celebration of Pascha occur on the same date. Which leads to stories like this one, reported by Jim Graves of the National Catholic Register: 'Father Richard Sofatzis, a Catholic priest in the Archdiocese of Sydney, has a very personal perspective on the issue. He grew up in a mixed Catholic and Orthodox environment, since his father is Greek Orthodox and his mother, who died in 2017, was Catholic. The priest's Catholic mother, who was born in England, and his Greek Orthodox father, who was born on the Greek island of Lemnos, agreed before their marriage to baptize and raise their children in the Catholic faith, but to send them to a Greek Orthodox primary and secondary school. At Easter, Father Sofatzis' family would have 'double traditions and double celebrations,' he said, noting that, as children, he and his siblings 'always enjoyed celebrating Easter twice' — doing all the usual things, like chocolate eggs, for Catholic Easter and, a few weeks later, the Greek traditions for Greek Easter. 'The fact that Easter is the same this year is, I think, really important,' Father Sofatzis said. 'I'm really hoping more than anything else, even if [Catholics and Orthodox] can't achieve full unity, we could work towards that common date for Easter — something I've been looking forward to for many years.'' To end the newsletter this week, an image from one of the Holy Week celebrations. Happy Easter.
Yahoo
06-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Loving Your Neighbor's Job
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Hi and happy Sunday. Increasing efficiency in the federal government—the stated goal of Elon Musk's new agency within the Trump administration—is a laudable goal in the abstract, and federal bureaucracies are certainly ripe for reform. Few Americans are likely to argue that point. But what happens when the impulse to slash runs amok, divorced from any notion of the value of work and how work itself—vocation—is baked into us as humans? Contributing Writer Hannah Anderson wrestles with those questions in this week's Dispatch Faith, examining the ways in which DOGE has fallen short and how Musk's impulse to do away with human work perverts elemental truths. For the last two months, the Trump administration has made it a priority to reshape the federal workforce through budget cuts, grant cancellations, and civil service layoffs, ostensibly in an effort to reduce waste and improve government efficiency. The cuts have led to record-breaking job losses across both public and private sectors and left federal agencies and individual workers reeling as they try to figure out how to move forward. And while none of us is guaranteed employment, the language of 'efficiency' and 'budget cuts' belies a deeper misunderstanding of work that in many ways, runs afoul of a Christian vision of human vocation. We often associate 'vocation' with a particular kind of skilled training, especially in the trades. But historically, the word has a much more expansive meaning. It comes from the Latin root voc or 'to call,' which frames one's work as a reply to the call of one outside oneself. In the Christian tradition, one's vocation is deeply tied to one's very existence, flowing from the same source as our lives and falling under those things (to use the language of the Declaration of Independence) 'endowed by [our] Creator.' One's vocation should be mutually rewarding, serving both the world and flowing from this deeper sense of divine purpose and dignity. In this way, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is not a call to mere consumption. It is the freedom to respond to God's calling on your life, whatever it may be. The Founders understood this—however imperfectly—and saw vocational determination as part of the promise of independence. In a 1780 letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams wrote: I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain. It would take us generations to extend this right to all those made in God's image, with chattel slavery being the most egregious example of our blindness (willful or otherwise) to vocation as part of God-given personhood. Slavery is immoral precisely because it supplants God's authority in a person's life with the false authority of someone else. The voice that one is forced to respond to is not the quiet, loving voice of a creator who gave us our gifts to serve the world, but that of an authoritarian ruling class who co-opt other people's work for their own benefit. In this way, chattel slavery forecloses the very idea of vocation by impeding an individual's ability to respond to God's call to perform a particular work in the world. Protestant Reformer Martin Luther even went so far as to frame our callings as the means by which God himself works in the world: What is our work in field and garden, in town and house, in battling and in ruling, to God, but the work of children, through which He bestows His gifts on the land, in the house, and everywhere? Our works are God's masks, behind which He remains hidden, although He does all things. One of the tragedies of this moment is the degree to which federal job cuts are leveraging people's vocations as a way to enact the will of a select powerful few, bypassing the representative process almost entirely. That this work is being done through executive order and outside explicit congressional oversight means that the Trump administration is using executive powers not to enact the will of the people as expressed through the congressional delegation sent to Washington, but to reshape the federal government on its own terms. Trump is daring the other branches of government to try to stop him and threatening them when they do. Whether it is the promise to primary Republicans who oppose Trump's agenda, naming judges 'dangerous' when they order fired workers to be reinstated, or strong-arming independent government agencies with police presence, the administration is using workers' lives and well-being as political pawns. Not only does this partisan vision harm individual workers, it harms us as a nation insofar as civil service jobs are among the few in our society that are explicitly designated to serve the common good—especially in areas that don't produce capital or that the market doesn't necessarily value. While one might immediately think of jobs in the arts or scientific research that do not have immediate application, workers in food health and safety as well as caregiving are also at risk. I saw just a small example of this recently when my local Veterans Administration hospital, already understaffed, lost 20 positions due to Trump administration policies. While there are clinics scattered around our region, it is the only VA medical center in a 200-mile radius serving the rural population in southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia. Workers who were acting as 'God's masks,' to use Luther's term, for an underserved population have been unceremoniously stripped of their ability to do so. According to regional news station WSET13, fired workers grieve not simply a position or even income, but the loss of meaningful work: 'Every day I woke up just happy to go to work, excited to work with these guys, excited to help them,' said one former employee. 'Knowing that what we did made a difference in their lives because they told us that.' The loss of their work may mean lower quality of care for veterans, who have explicitly served the common good through their military vocations. Even more perversely, some of the workers laid off were veterans themselves. Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia's 9th Congressional District, a House Freedom Caucus member and die-hard Trump supporter, appeared to distance himself from the cuts, noting that they came through executive action and not congressional budget cuts. The irony is that Trump rode vocational concerns to re-election, especially among the rural working class. That this same administration shows so little regard for people's work once elected—and has made it a priority to aggressively and carelessly cut jobs—is revealing. Ostensibly, the cuts are about reducing government inefficiency and waste (yet to be seen). But the claim is especially hard to accept coming from the man behind these cuts, Elon Musk, who also believes that human workers are replaceable with AI. Musk envisions a future where 'probably none of us will have a job' due to technological advances and those who do work would simply do it 'kinda like a hobby.' Besides being incredibly patronizing to millions of Americans who engage in routine but rewarding work, Musk misunderstands the essential link between our humanity and the work we do. AI technologies may support human efforts, augmenting and bettering our ability to fulfill our vocations–even freeing us to more intentionally pursue callings that do not have a price tag attached. But they cannot fully replace humans because working to serve others is part of what makes us human. Again, this is the man Trump has deputized as a 'special government employee' to make cuts to the federal workforce without congressional authorization. This is not to argue that the federal government doesn't need reform or that technology cannot serve and support human vocation. Insofar as state bureaucracy limits our ability to serve others through our unique callings, it needs to be shaped toward freedom and the benefit of all. What we have seen recently, however, is not that. Instead the administration bears the marks of a ruling class playing with people's vocations as a means to promote partisan agendas and settle personal grievances. If Musk and company eventually achieve their vision of replacing human workers with robots, it will be because they're already treating people as tools and means to an end. Whatever hope I have beyond the chaos of the present moment is this: Reality cannot sustain what is fundamentally at odds with itself. If it is true that human vocation is tied to human existence, identity, and purpose, and if the ability to serve others with our unique gifts has been woven into the fabric of reality, it is only a matter of time before movements that abuse human work collapse in on themselves. Writing in the midst of World War II, English essayist and social critic Dorothy Sayers noted how the frugality of the war effort forced correction in a previously consumptive society whose vision of work had been 'based on Envy and Avarice.' People who would not revise their ideas voluntarily find themselves compelled to do so by the sheer pressure of the events which these very ideas have served to bring about … This attitude we are now being obliged to alter, under the compulsion of war – and a very strange and painful process it is in some ways. It is always strange and painful to have to change a habit of mind; though, when we have made the effort, we may find a great relief, even a sense of adventure and delight, in getting rid of the false and returning to the true. As my children prepare for their own vocations, I wonder what world they will inherit. My daughter is studying that notoriously inefficient field of art history while my son is navigating the final stages of a college search to enter the field of theoretical physics. My children's chosen vocations are uncertain right now as canceled funding for the arts and scientific research ripples across these fields. Even still, I continue to encourage them in their pursuits because I know that living fully into who they have been made to be depends, in large part, on contributing to the world through their unique gifts, interests, and abilities. And if they can find a way to do this, they will fulfill John Adams' vision for a free society: one where our sons and daughters can serve the world however God calls them. For our website site today, Michael Wear reviews Heaven Help Us, the new book by former presidential candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. The book, Wear writes, is not the typical faith-and-politics arguments readers may be used to. Remarkably, I could not find one instance of Kasich referencing the politics of those he highlights. Kasich does not seem to be seeking to advance religious contributions for the sake of a partisan end, or even to show his magnanimity as a politician. Indeed, the diversity of stories he tells reflects, I think, a desperation for religious people themselves to stop allowing politics and its logic to prevent and distract them from taking action themselves to address the problems we face as a society. There are things you can contribute that are more powerful and meaningful in our civic life than your vote. Kasich shows a disregard in this book for partisan ends, but aims to inspire people to do good, regardless of their political disposition. That does not mean politics is absent from this book. The second thing readers will notice is how the narratives often weave together individual initiative, the power of community, and the capacity of philanthropy and government to partner with, clear pathways for, and scale these projects and initiatives for the common good. Instead of viewing the charitable initiatives of individuals and communities as at odds with the government, Kasich promotes a vision of mutuality. In this way, politics is indeed present—but it's politics as service, as one way communities solve problems together. Read the whole thing. Political scientist and statistician Ryan Burge broke down a 2022 survey on local church congregations in the U.S. and politics for his Substack this week. He parses lots of questions and data from the survey, but offers insightful analysis about the perhaps surprising responses to the survey prompt I wish my church talked more about political division in the country (emphasis his): 'Doing a lot of public facing work on religion has taught me that a significant number of people who aren't religious or don't attend church on a regular basis have a misperception about what happens on a Sunday morning. The vast majority of pastors aren't talking about politics on a regular basis and when they touch on anything that may be in the political realm it's about topics like racism and income inequality. Both can be discussed in fairly apolitical ways. The other side of this is that huge majorities of congregations just want to avoid politics entirely from the pulpit. They don't want their pastor or priest to try and discuss the political divides that we are facing. Being around church people my entire life, that's the clear impression I've always gotten. They see Sunday worship as a respite from all the Culture Wars and the talking heads and the political battles that seem to consume our every waking moment. In March 2023, 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who identified as a lesbian and sometimes used masculine pronouns, walked into a private Christian school in Nashville—which the shooter attended as a child—and murdered three 9-year-old students and three adults who worked there. Almost immediately, media personalities and cultural commentators claimed the shooter's motivations were anti-Christian or the result of transgenderism. For Christianity Today, Daniel Silliman writes on a newly released report from investigators that dispels those claims. 'Hale did not target the Christian school because it was Christian or fantasize about attacking conservative Christians specifically. Hale attended The Covenant School, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, from kindergarten through fourth grade and always recalled the experience with fondness. Hale's journals and 'rage storms' do not contain any allegations of emotional or physical abuse at the private school, and investigators found no evidence of disciplinary problems or even serious conflict with the staff and administration. According to police, 'Hale considered these years the happiest of her childhood.' … 'Hale often remarked her time at The Covenant was the happiest she was during her childhood education,' police said. 'Hale felt The Covenant was the perfect place to commit an attack, as it was the perfect setting for her death.'' For Arc magazine, Daniel Smokler chronicles the centuries-long history of hevrot: small, Jewish volunteer groups 'who join together to do good work or promote piety' that largely have fallen by the wayside in modern life. Smokler ends his piece with practical suggestions for reviving them—and the good they could do at a time when such groups are largely know we Dispatchers are suckers for a good story about mediating institutions, and I was encouraged by the history of hevrot. 'By the time of the Jews' expulsion from Spain in 1492, hevrot were a subculture unto themselves, separate and apart from the formal Jewish communal government and distinct from the yeshivot, or rabbinic academies. They were a way of upholding traditional good works but also an experimental space, innovating new devotional practices … By the early modern period, we have evidence of women's hevrot in central Europe working to bury the dead, care for the sick, and make clothes for the needy. These 'sacred sororities,' as Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan describe them, wrote their own bylaws and kept their own financial records. Like those of Spain, these groups at once performed acts of traditional piety while cultivating new roles for women as executives and treasurers, roles not available to them in normal communal life … Jews brought hevrot with them during their mass migration to the United States. Burial societies, study groups, and charitable circles blossomed in every major city where Jews settled. A new formulation of the hevra, the landsmanshaft, emerged to help emigrants from specific villages settle in the new country. These societies procured cemetery spaces for their members, in keeping with the ancient tradition of securing a dignified burial. But they also taught classes, loaned money, and provided social services. Thousands of landsmanshaftn flourished across the United States, becoming the dominant form of social organization among Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth century.'
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hindu Nationalism Is Not India's Version of Christian Nationalism
From the Dispatch Faith on The Dispatch Hi and happy Sunday. With India's importance in geopolitics rising—perhaps in no small part to its charismatic leader, Narendra Modi—it may be easy to assume the Hindu nationalist political project he has become the leader of is something akin to Christian nationalist movements in the U.S. That's not the case, the Hudson Institute's Bill Drexel writes in today's Dispatch Faith. While religion does indeed play an important role in the growing Hindu nationalist movement in India, that's too narrow a lens through which to view it. Understanding a society as vast and complex as India's has never been easy, but in recent years the meteoric rise of Hindu nationalism in the world's largest nation has compounded that challenge for most Americans. The gargantuan mass movement behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi has championed a vision of India that places Hindu heritage at the center of the nation's identity. With this formidable force remaking Indian society, reconstructing the country's monuments, and rebranding its civilization, it is only natural to grasp for the closest analogues that come to mind to understand these rapid transformations. The most obvious association in the American context—Christian nationalism—is a poor lens through which to view the movement behind the new India, lending itself to over spiritualizing and underestimating Hindu nationalism's mass appeal. Even if Christian nationalism—which seeks to formally establish the United States as a Christian nation with biblically grounded laws—appears ostensibly similar, applying this more familiar American template is likely to lead astray anyone who wants to understand the political culture behind an emerging global power and, very soon, the world's fourth largest economy. But as a counterpoint rather than a comparison, Christian nationalism can serve as a revealing foil—illuminating Hindu nationalists' ideas, institutions, and impacts on their own terms. To be sure, Hindu nationalism and Christian nationalism do share some meaningful parallels. Both are breeds of cultural nationalism, emphasizing shared heritage and traditions as the key determinant of national coherence. Both seek to revise the relationship between church (or temple) and state, moving beyond promoting appreciation for—or even rootedness in—'Judeo-Christian' heritage or 'Indic civilization' toward a system that explicitly privileges their nation's largest religious traditions. And at their worst, both are infamous for identitarian chauvinism and intolerance to minority groups, especially Muslims. Even if they ultimately serve as poor metaphors for one another, it is fair to say that they resemble each other more than any other major political paradigms in either country. But move beyond these external similarities toward their motivating beliefs, and major divergences start to appear—starting with each movement's ideological roots. Observers familiar with the highly defined Protestant faith commitments of Christian nationalist leaders may be surprised to discover that the father of contemporary Hindu nationalism, V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966), was an unabashed atheist who refused to allow Hindu religious rites at his wife's funeral and publicly encouraged Hindus to give up religiously motivated vegetarianism. What's more, he was critical of the very concept of 'Hinduism'—arguing that the term was akin to lumping together the conflicting beliefs of England's Jews, Jacobins, Utilitarians, and Trinitarians and calling it 'Englishism.' Savarkar's metaphor may be apt. Scholars of religion endlessly debate how to reckon with Hinduism's mind-bogglingly diverse beliefs, practices, and rituals. While Protestantism stands as perhaps the most stringently defined major religious tradition, with its emphasis on doctrinal precision and scriptural authority, Hinduism represents the opposite end of the spectrum—easily the least systematized of the world's major faiths. Regardless of where one falls in the debate about Hinduism's coherence, there is no doubt that it contains far more theological diversity than Christianity's many denominations, or Abrahamic religions as a whole. Religious Hindus often disagree, for instance, as to whether there are many gods (millions, by some estimates), one, or none—the latter even having several independent sects championing different variants of atheism. That's just one example. Hinduism writ large also contains multiple, sometimes contradictory paths to enlightenment that Hindu swamis teach—from devotion to personal deities, to philosophical contemplation, to ritual practice, to mystic yoga. Crafting social and political movements from religious traditions as different from one another as Hinduism and Christianity was bound to create coalitions that look and operate differently. Sidestepping the complexities of reconciling disparate Hindu creeds and traditions, Savarkar instead argued that Hindus are better viewed as the ethnic group that has carried forward the tangle of interrelated streams of faith and philosophy that make up Hindu civilization. The proper comparison, in Savarkar's estimation, was not so much to what we today may refer to as Christian nationalism as it was to Zionism. That vision of nationalism was connected primarily to ethnic Jews, even as they were bonded by a common faith tradition and its historical geography. In Savarkar's 1923 canonical work defining Hindu nationalism, Essentials of Hindutva, he even goes so far as to claim that the Jews may be the only other people in the world that can claim national coherence on par with the Hindus, for this reason. Still today, many Hindu nationalists have a special affinity for Zionists, whom they see as their closest ideological counterparts. Likewise, the usage of 'Hindu' in 'Hindu nationalist' may be best understood as similar to the use of 'Jew'—an identity usually employed more ethnically than religiously, though it is often both. Drawing on prior anti-colonial Hindu revivalist movements from across India, Hindu nationalism ignited in the mid-1920s, disproportionately led by Brahmin Hindus from the western region of Maharashtra. Though the Brahmin caste traditionally performs priestly duties at the top of the caste hierarchy, these early leaders of Hindu nationalism echoed the unusually political role of Brahmins in the region's Maratha Empire (1674-1818), a Hindu polity that left the area with a pronounced sense of cultural pride. Like early 20th-century Zionists and other nationalist movements of the time, the first self-described Hindu nationalists were much more modernist than mystic. Their guiding pursuit was not nirvana, but a muscular state driven by scientific rationality—so much so that they even drew some inspiration from the strident statism of fascist movements in Europe, which were emerging contemporaneously (and whose full horrors had yet to unfold). Their 'rituals' were not centered on worship, but on building an ethos of martial discipline, collective memory, and social service, with regular gatherings to exercise, sing patriotic songs, and study Hindu history—in addition to mobilizing for disaster relief and community aid. This state-building character remains deeply ingrained in the DNA of Hindu nationalism, and for many Hindu nationalists, religion is secondary or even incidental to their primary goal: strengthening Hindu society. This is not to say the first iterations of Hindu nationalism ignored spirituality. Even Savarkar defined ethnic Hindus as anyone for whom India is fatherland and holy land—regardless of specific creed or lack thereof—and elements of Hindu religion have been integral to Hindu nationalist organizations from their earliest beginnings. As the movement has evolved from its initial stages, it has also embraced a pronounced sense of religiosity. Indeed, a primary catalyst in Hindu nationalism's recent ascent was a successful campaign to construct a Hindu temple in the place of a 16th-century mosque purportedly built over the Hindu deity Ram's birthplace, opened to the public in January 2024. Devotional Hindu groups now form a central pillar of the Hindu nationalist coalition, and the religious wing of the Hindu right in India is likely to continue to play a prominent role in the broader movement for the foreseeable future. But while Christian nationalist leaders often present themselves as theological purists with unyielding fidelity to holy writ, Hindu nationalist leadership has emerged primarily from grassroots organizers—focusing on unifying and mobilizing community groups rather than parsing doctrine. Put differently, if Christian nationalism is about christianizing the nation, Hindu nationalism is more about nationalizing the Hindus. These fundamentally different approaches have produced dramatically different outcomes—and help explain Hindu nationalism's remarkable success in contemporary India. Fast-forward to the present day, and the ideological differences between Christian nationalism and Hindu nationalism have grown into striking institutional disparities. Today's Christian nationalism exists as a diffuse patchwork of leaders and institutions, spinning off from theological and institutional legacies of prior waves of Protestant political fervor: Centuries-old allegiances to Protestant Christendom, Puritanism, Manifest Destiny, and Cold War Christian anti-communism have left traces, to varying degrees, on the diffuse set of Christian nationalist thinkers and organizations that exist today. And while many American evangelicals desire a more pronounced role for their faith in public life, they have typically gravitated toward other approaches for bringing religious values into society: 'common good' public engagement, issue-based advocacy, or moral majority campaigning, to take a few examples. As such, Christian nationalism has lacked the institutional coherence needed to be a major force in American politics and was functionally relegated to being merely one among many factions of the religious right. Even if reenergized in recent years, it remains an inclination more than a movement. Hindu nationalism, by contrast, has exploded in popularity over the last century from a small, politically irrelevant clique to a massive nationwide ecosystem of powerful, coordinated organizations touching nearly every aspect of Indian society. At its core is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or 'National Volunteer Organization,' a cadre-based body founded in 1925 whose thousands of volunteers conduct daily shakhas (gatherings) focused on physical training, nationalistic education, and community service projects among its millions of members. The RSS spawned the BJP, now the world's largest political party with 110 million members, and has produced its most successful politicians, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has won more democratic votes than any other politician in history. It has also established influential offshoots like the Vishva Hindu Parishad (literally, the 'World Hindu Council'); the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, one of the world's largest labor unions; and dozens of other affiliated organizations spanning education, health care, rural development, and media. Collectively these are known as the Sangh Parivar, or 'Family of Organizations.' Bonded by common roots and continued cross-pollination with personnel cultivated through the RSS, the Sangh Parivar has been successful in adapting Hindu nationalist ideas and narratives to a wide range of audiences across Indian society, mostly through grassroots efforts. That, together with the electoral success of the BJP, has made Hindu nationalism a diverse and composite mass movement, dwarfing the size and influence of Christian nationalism, and absorbing varied groups and perspectives that—like Hinduism more broadly—do not always strive for strict coherence. It has also blurred the lines between who and what is Hindu nationalist, exhibiting a full spectrum of associations including everything from radicals, to hardliners, to moderates. The movement's influence has grown so pervasive that even their political opponents tried adopting more outwardly Hindu symbols and religious displays in their campaigning—a resounding testament to the breadth of social transformation that the Hindu nationalists have achieved. The difference between the impacts of Hindu nationalism and Christian nationalism thus brings us full circle: Christian nationalism's leaders have tended to be poor institution-builders—preferring doctrinal purity over the many compromises needed to build and maintain broad-appeal movements. Hindu nationalists, by contrast, have made community organizing their movement's centerpiece, assimilating and carving out space for more religiously oriented elements, but treating its project as primarily an exercise in unifying a Hindu society. To Christian ears, it may sound ironic that Protestant Christianity's tendency toward sophisticated theological coherence has inadvertently resulted in a more incoherent brand of cultural nationalism. But Protestantism's ever-increasing number of denominations tells a similar story of theological focus and institutional balkanization—a model that may work for producing well-informed disciples, but not so much for broad political appeal. Meanwhile, Hindu nationalism's flexibility and adaptability in absorbing sometimes inconsistent groups and ideas into its fold—even if often under the auspices of social organizing rather than religious adherence—bears an unmistakable resonance with Hindu spirituality. In that sense, for all their considerable differences in how they view religious belief, the way each operates in practice bears the unmistakable stamp of its religious roots—just not in the way most observers would expect. In case you missed it, for our Monday Essay feature this past week, Tal Fortgang ponders the prospect of Orthodox Jews vacating elite colleges and universities in light of campus turmoil in the last 18 months. He looks at this not just through the lens of what opportunities Jewish students might lose, but what non-Jewish students (and their institutions more broadly) will lose too: 'one of the last remaining bridges between the religious and secular worlds.' Modern Orthodox Jews are told before going off to college to be a kiddush HaShem, or 'sanctification of God's name.' While they do not proselytize, they do not isolate themselves either. They invite their friends to attend Shabbat dinners at campus Hillel and Chabad houses. On some campuses, menorah lightings draw large crowds every Hanukkah. Perhaps most crucially, non-Jewish and non-observant Jews inevitably notice when their Orthodox peers abstain, unthinkably, from what are thought to be key components of campus life. They notice when their friends aren't at parties on Friday night, shut off their phones and laptops for 25 hours each weekend, and can't eat the late-night pizza provided by the debate club. They see their kippah-clad peers uncomfortably approach professors the first day of each semester to inform them that they will have to miss classes for holidays. Yes, even the esoteric ones. No, I can't show up to class and just listen that morning; I need to be in synagogue, praying. Those demonstrations of forbearance are especially important. By example, they drive home the possibility that a life well-lived can be governed by restraint and obligation rather than choice alone. Fortgang concludes the essay by drawing on his own experience as a Jewish student at Princeton University. We believed, rather, in the power of a covenantal community. We are obligated to do certain things, and if you want to be a full member of our community, you fulfill your obligations. Not out of fear of punishment, but out of conviction that it is the right thing to do—even if it is difficult to explain without reference to ancient rabbinic teachings, or hard to balance with coursework and extracurriculars. That is what binds Jews as a people, we believe. And that is more important to living a meaningful, fulfilling life than all the choices—all the bacon, all the sex, all the freedom—in the world. Read the whole thing on our website. The streaming show The Chosen, which depicts the life of Jesus Christ, has become a runaway hit with Christian viewers since its debut in 2017. For Christianity Today, Christopher Kuo reports on its popularity among non-Christians too (or at least those who used to be non-Christians). 'Sabi Ali, a 26-year-old office administrator in London, grew up Muslim and would often debate with her Christian cousins about faith. Last year, her cousins convinced her to start watching The Chosen. After the first episode, Ali was skeptical. But by the end of the second, she was in tears, and she ended up binge-watching the show in a week and a half. One scene in particular resonated deeply with her. 'It was when Jesus came to the boats with Simon Peter and Andrew and none of them were getting any fish,' Ali said. 'Jesus said, Throw the net again. I had goose bumps all over my body, and I didn't know why but I felt so emotional.' Ali began to doubt the teachings of Islam and the Quran, which says that Jesus was a miraculous prophet but not the incarnate Son of God. … She began going to church regularly and now identifies as a Christian.' With so much of the political world's attention on the use of senior Trump administration officials' use of the Signal messaging app, our friends at The Pillar published an explainer on how the Holy See handles so-called 'pontifical secrets.' As one commenter on the piece remarked, it's the kind of explainer you didn't even know you wanted until you can't stop reading. 'Depending on the department, cracks about phone taps and electronic sweeps may be more or less jokes — though in some offices, like the Secretariat of State, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, or even the Dicastery for Bishops, few are laughing about it. You only have to look back through the last few years of Vatican City scandals and trials to see that wire tapping is, if not 'normal' in the curia, certainly not unheard of. Cardinals have recorded private calls with the pope, auditors have claimed their offices were bugged, and senior officials have gone on record, admitting to using 'electronic surveillance' experts to look into their rivals … Indeed, when Vatican prosecutors come knocking to serve a warrant, they tend to check a suspect's phone quickly, to get a look at back-and-forth messaging. WhatsApp exchanges featured prominently in the recent London financial scandal trial, and before that they provided some of the most eye-catching evidence in the so-called Vatileaks trials.' This April 20 will mark one of the few times that both eastern (Orthodox) and western (Catholic and Protestant) Christians will celebrate Easter on the same day. For Religion Unplugged, Clemente Lisi writes about a movement to encourage the world's Christians to unify on the day they celebrate Chris's resurrection. 'The World Council of Churches, a global Christian organization founded in 1948 to work for the cause of ecumenism, has urged churches to find a common date for Easter. 'Eastern and Western churches have used different calendars to calculate the date of Easter since the 16th century, and only rarely do they coincide,' said the Rev. Martin Illert, WCC's program executive for faith and order. … 'The Julian calendar was used in the West until 1582, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted. The Julian calendar's method of calculating Easter was standardized in the year 325 at the First Council of Nicaea. We hope that the anniversary of Nicaea will help create a momentum so that in the future, all Christians can celebrate Easter together,'Illert said. The Vatican has also called for Christians to unite on a common date. Last year, Pope Francis encouraged the work of the Pasqua Together group — an ecumenical initiative that encourages Christians of various denominations to celebrate Easter together — and invited them not to let this unique opportunity 'pass by in vain. I encourage those who are committed to this journey to persevere,' he said, 'and to make every effort in the search for a shared agreement, avoiding anything that may instead lead to further divisions among our brothers and sisters.''
