For centuries, the Hippocratic Oath, including the admonition against abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, formed the core of Western medical ethics. While the Hippocratic ideal has been eroding for decades, the most direct challenge has emerged in the Netherlands, with the cultural and legal acceptance of the right to die. The medical community and broader citizenry have so embraced the right to choose death for oneself that the Dutch parliament is currently considering legislation that would allow assisted suicide for anyone who has reached the age of seventy and has merely grown tired of living.

In any other country, such a proposal might be considered radical and shocking. But in the Netherlands—the country that first legalized euthanasia—the change in the law will merely decriminalize a practice that has been occurring for decades. An examination of how this formerly conservative, tradition-bound culture could adopt what the modern Hippocratic Oath refers to as “therapeutic nihilism” is useful for understanding how the other nations will begin to accept euthanasia in the near future.

As occurred in many Western countries during the 1960s, the people of the Netherlands began to reject traditional authority structures in favor of increased individual freedom. While the change led most visibly to a liberalization of attitudes toward sex and drugs, it also carried over into the role of doctors and patients, particularly in the expansion of patient’s rights and patient autonomy.

In 1969 the influential physician J. H. Van den Berg published Medische macht en medische ethiek (“Medical power and medical ethics”), which argued that medical technology was making doctors more powerful. According to Van den Berg, doctors, when bound by Hippocratic ethics, are morally required to keep patients alive as long as possible (a dubious interpretation of the oath and its meaning). But in the age of advanced medical technology, he argued, the ancient creed posed new ethical problems. On the basis of this revised ethical code, Berg argued not only for voluntary euthanasia but also for the involuntary killing of individuals who suffer from reduced quality of life, such as elderly patients suffering from dementia.

After the release of Van den Berg’s book, end-of-life issues began to be included in the debates on patient’s rights. But while public sentiment was evolving rapidly—becoming much more tolerant of assisted suicide and euthanasia—the law was slower to conform. Despite legal prohibitions against euthanasia and assisted suicide, which had been part of Dutch law since the Dutch Penal Code replaced the French Code Penal in 1886, euthanasia become increasingly common.

A turning point occurred in 1973 when Dr. Geertruida Postma was convicted of killing her elderly mother, but on such grounds and with such limited punishment that the conviction had the practical effect of giving public protection to physicians engaging in certain forms of euthanasia. In this landmark case, the criminal court ruled that it was possible to administer pain-relieving drugs leading to the death of the patient provided the purpose of treatment was the relief of physical or psychological pain arising from an incurable terminal illness. Because Postma’s primary goal was to cause the death of her patient, she was found guilty and received a one week suspended sentence and one year’s probation.

The ruling marked a notable shift in the law, allowing the formulation of conditions under which life could be deliberately shortened by physicians. The light sentence also sent a clear signal that cases of euthanasia would be treated mildly by the judicial system. The result was that the publicly popular practice, while not yet decriminalized, began to be carried out more regularly and routinely, but without a studied understanding of its prevalence or the circumstances under which it was administered.

In 1990, the Dutch government set up a Commission, chaired by Attorney General Jan Remmelink, to investigate and quantify what was happening in the shadows of the law. Using the narrow definition of euthanasia as “active termination of life upon the patient’s request,” the Remmelink report concluded that 2,300 instances of euthanasia were carried out during 1990. And while the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) had established in its Guidelines for Euthanasia that terminating a life without a patient’s request is “juridically a matter of murder or killing and not of euthanasia,” the Remmelink Commission found, through interviews with randomly selected physicians and mailed questionnaires, that over 20,000 life-ending actions had been taken in 1990 without the patient’s express consent. These “matters of murder” do not include, as the report notes, the unknown numbers of disabled newborns, children with life-threatening conditions, or psychiatric patients who may have been killed involuntarily but were not included in the survey.

Rather than being disturbed by the findings, the Commission glossed over these instances of involuntary killing by claiming that “active intervention” was usually “inevitable” because of the patients’ “death agony.” In 1993, the Dutch Parliament responded not by tightening controls on doctors but by implementing the Commission’s recommendation to establish in statutory form the report physicians who practice euthanasia should file with the local medical examiner. Euthanasia shifted from being a punishable criminal offense to being a matter of bureaucratic form-filing.

According to the Dutch Ministry of Justice, of the 135,675 deaths recorded in 1995, 3,600 (2.4%) were the result of a doctor-assisted termination of life while another 238 (0.3%) were cases of assisted suicide. The most disturbing statistic, however, is that 913 (0.7%) were terminations of life without the express request of the patient. For every three lives ended at the request of the patient, one person was killed without consent. While it is assumed that these cases consisted of terminally ill patients with no chance of survival, no one in the Netherlands knows for certain. Because the numbers are based on self-reporting by physicians, no accurate data exists to determine exactly how many Dutch citizens have been killed against their will.

Another comprehensive survey by Dr. Paul J. van der Maas in 1996 showed that the situation had indeed worsened since 1990. The total number of cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide had risen by a third from 2,700 to 3,600, with an estimated 60 percent not being officially reported. The number of cases of euthanasia without request by the patient also remained high, with 900 cases being reported. Although the government passively accepted the practice, doctors were still legally susceptible to prosecution if a disgruntled family member disagreed with the killing of their relative. Legislation to decriminalize euthanasia, which had been repeatedly proposed since 1984, was finally passed on April 10, 2001. A criminal liability exclusion was added for doctors who willingly reported their actions and demonstrated that they have satisfied the criteria of “due care.”

A survey of 405 Dutch doctors published in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1999 revealed that safeguards established by the Royal Dutch Medical Association to control how and when euthanasia is performed were often ignored. Dr. Henk Jochemsen of the Lindeboom Institute for Medical Ethics and Dr. John Keown of the University of Cambridge found that almost two-thirds of cases of euthanasia and assisted suicide in 1995 were not reported. According to the findings, in 20 percent of cases the patients did not explicitly request to die and in 17 percent of cases other treatments were available. The doctors surveyed claimed that 56 percent of patients wanted to “prevent loss of dignity” while 47 percent wanted to “prevent further suffering.” “The reality is that a clear majority of cases of euthanasia, both with and without request, go unreported and unchecked,” said Drs. Jochemsen and Keown. “Dutch claims of effective regulation ring hollow.”

In 2003, the regional testing committee reported that the total number of euthanasia cases had slowly fallen from 2,123 in 2000 to 1,882 in 2002. What was not clear was whether the change was due to a reduction in euthanasia requests or because fewer doctors were reporting when they terminated a patient’s life. While only 18 percent of euthanasia cases were being reported in 1990, the decriminalization in 2001 only increased the reporting frequency to 54 percent. Since prosecutions only occur if the regional review committee is aware of the case and finds that the due care procedures were not adequately followed, doctors have little incentive to report when they assist in killing a patient. Unless the family of the deceased has an objection, the incident will never receive public scrutiny. While prosecutions may be rare, doctors are leery of taking the unnecessary risk of reporting their actions.

The Royal Dutch Medical Association has since called for increased reporting to bolster public trust in euthanasia laws. But enthusiasm for following these procedures and standards remains muted, since doctors know that no penalties will be incurred by simply ignoring the law. Prosecutions for guideline violations are exceedingly rare and no doctor has ever been imprisoned or substantially penalized for noncompliance. Even when the government is made aware of cases of non-voluntary euthanasia, no legal action is likely to be taken.

The Dutch have even expanded the scope of protected physician killing to include children. With their parent's permission, a child between the ages of 12 to 16 years old may request and receive assisted suicide. Initially, minors could obtain an assisted death even if their parents objected, but after domestic and international criticism, the law was changed to require parental consent. Currently, there is no legal provision allowing for the termination of younger children. But the fact that the law does not allow it does not stop it from occurring. Doctors in the Netherlands have taken it upon themselves to end the life of infants and others who do not have the free will to agree to end their own lives, but whose existence doctors or parents deem “unfit.”

In October 2004, the Groningen Academic Hospital officially proposed a government policy—dubbed the Groningen Protocol—which would allow doctors to legally euthanize children under the age of twelve for conditions in which suffering was “so severe that the newborn has no hope of a future.” The hospital even admitted to administering a lethal dose of sedatives to four newborns in 2003. In the previous three-year period, fourteen other cases had also been reported by various hospitals to the Justice Ministry. No legal proceedings were ever taken against either the hospitals that condoned the practice or the doctors who carried out the killings.

The lack of prosecutions is hardly surprising considering the Dutch people’s attitude toward killing those deemed unworthy of life. A survey by the NIPO Institute in 1998 found that 77 percent of the populace favored non-voluntary euthanasia while only 76 percent favored voluntary euthanasia. Although the one percent difference falls within the margin of error, it may also be attributable to the false belief that non-voluntary killing is considered only as a last resort while voluntary euthanasia can be administered for almost any reason. As reported in one Dutch documentary, a young woman in remission from anorexia was concerned that her eating disorder would return. To prevent a relapse, she asked her doctor to kill her. He willingly complied with her request.

The anorexia example is horrifying, but at least in that instance an actual physical illness was involved. As the most recent legislative proposal shows, some advocates of the practice consider the presence of a debilitating illness or physical suffering as too stringent a prerequisite for permitting euthanasia. The Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society (DVES), for example, was generally pleased with the relaxation of euthanasia laws, but it was disappointed that the law continued to forbid the killing of people who are simply tired of living. “We think that if you are old, you have no family near, and you are really suffering from life,” said DVES spokesperson Walburg de Jong, “then [euthanasia] should be possible.” Days after the change in the law, Dutch health minister Els Borst admitted in an interview that she had no problems with providing “suicide pills” for elderly citizens who were simply “bored sick” with living.

Perhaps the most significant shift in the public acceptability of voluntary euthanasia occurred in the summer of 1991, crystallizing around another important legal case. Psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot treated a woman whom he gave the fictional name of “Netty Boomsma.” The woman was suffering from grief over the loss of her youngest son to cancer at the age of twenty. Her eldest son was also dead, having killed himself two years earlier after being rejected by his girlfriend. Boomsma, who had a long history of depression, approached Chabot with the understanding that he would assist her suicide if she did not change her mind about wanting to die.

Although the crushing grief over losing a child can last for years, Chabot treated Boomsma for only two months before fulfilling his promise. Four months after the loss of her youngest son to cancer, Chabot gave Boomsma the lethal agent she needed to kill herself. While listening to the sounds of the same Bach flute sonata that had played at her son’s funeral, the grieving mother took the medication and asked the psychiatrist: “Why do young kids want suicide?” Thirty minutes later she was dead. With the aid of the psychiatrist, the mother was able to end her life and fulfill her desire to be buried between the graves of her two sons. In his defense, Chabot insisted that Boomsma was not depressed, nor even a real patient. She was, he claimed, simply a grieving woman who wanted to die. Many Dutch therapists insist that there is an obligation to assist in the suicide of a patient with suicidal ideation if treatment has not succeeded.

But Chabot provided only minimal treatment: The despairing patient became her own diagnostician, and the doctor simply acted as the deadly pharmacist. After reporting the case to the coroner, Chabot was prosecuted for violating Dutch law, but the case was appealed to the country's supreme court, which upheld the precedent set by the Leeuwarden criminal court in 1973—that pain relief that runs the risk of shortening life is acceptable when helping a patient suffering from a terminal condition. The court found that Chabot was guilty of not having provided an adequate psychiatric review of the patient’s case before assisting with the suicide. However, the court imposed no penalty on Chabot, and the legal ruling established the precedent that physical illness was not a requirement for providing “pain relief” that ends a life when the request is voluntary, well-considered, and reviewed by a second physician. Suicidal depression became a terminal disease; psychic distress became a legitimate ground for doctor-assisted death.

While the Supreme Court’s decision was hailed as a victory by euthanasia supporters, it took more than ten years before the medical community openly agreed that neither a terminal illness nor physical suffering should be necessary for ending a patient’s life. After a three-year investigation, the KNMG concluded in January 2005 that doctors should be able to kill patients who are not ill but who are judged to be “suffering through living.”

Jos Dijkhuis, the emeritus professor of clinical psychology who led the inquiry, said that it was “evident to us that Dutch doctors would not consider euthanasia from a patient who is simply ‘tired of, or through with, life.’” Instead, the committee agreed on the term “suffering through living,” because a patient may present a variety of physical and mental complaints that can lead them to conclude that life is unbearable. “In more than half of cases we considered, doctors were not confronted with a classifiable disease,” said Dijkhuis. “In practice the medical domain of doctors is far broader. . . . We believe a doctor’s task is to reduce suffering, therefore we can’t exclude these cases in advance. We must now look further to see if we can draw a line and if so where.”

Over a period of forty years, the Dutch have continued the search for where to draw the line with euthanasia, shifting from acceptance of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, to voluntary euthanasia for the chronically ill, to non-voluntary euthanasia for the sick and disabled, to euthanasia for those who are not sick at all but are merely “suffering through living.” While the initial impetus may have been spurred by a desire to give expanded rights to the person who faces extreme suffering or imminent death, the effect has been to concentrate power into the hands of state-sponsored medical professionals. And while the justification for assisted death is usually the supposed well being of the suffering patient, the Dutch have redefined natural dependency into an unacceptable or unwanted social burden.

By conflating the duty to reduce suffering with the perceived necessity to eliminate all suffering, Dutch physicians have increasingly resorted to euthanasia as a novel form of sympathectomy. A sympathectomy is a medical procedure that is sometimes required after a localized trauma or peripheral nerve injury, when a person may feel a syndrome of pain and tenderness that can only be relieved by the excision of a sympathetic nerve. In a similar manner, when faced with the many pains, heartaches, and disabilities that eventually afflict most of us in one form or another, the Dutch are resorting to the excision provided by euthanasia.

In doing so, they are severing more than the cords of life, they are cutting the sympathetic nerves that tie us to our fellow human beings. By perverting the traditional role of the physician, the Dutch are making a mockery of true human compassion, and providing a stark warning to those aging societies, like our own, which might one day be tempted to allow this sympathectomy of the soul.

Joe Carter is web editor of First Things.

Whenever we process information, interpret an experience, or organize our actions, we do so within the context of existing intellectual knowledge abstractions—schemas. Schema theory has been developed within the field of psychology in an attempt to explain how these cognitive knowledge structures are derived from personal experience and how they are organized in memory. Furthermore, schema theory has allowed us to investigate how these schemas serve as prototypes in memory and how they influence our interpretations of events.

As an example, we can briefly examine a little story discussed in the 1985-published proceedings of Nobel Conference XX, How We Know (edited by Michael Shafto): “John went to a restaurant. He ordered lobster. He left a small tip. He left.” As we consider the story, we might conclude that we actually know quite a bit about John even though explicit items of information are not mentioned in the passage. We might say that we know that John ate lobster, was served by a waitress or a waiter, and was not pleased with the service and / or the food. What this brief example suggests is that when we process information, we do so within the context of our present cognitive knowledge. Therefore, when I read a paragraph (Sunday’s gospel passage, for example), or experience an event (the sacrament of Reconciliation), or interact with others (a social in the parish hall), I process and interpret these situations within the context of what I know about the world—that is, within the context of my stored schemas.

To further clarify this important point about how we process information, let’s look at a second example. I referenced the following paragraph years ago, in my dissertation research into the effects of contextual information on the comprehension and memory of prose material:

People’s ability to comprehend and remember this passage is much greater when they are told that it is about Christopher Columbus discovering America than when they are not given any contextual hints as to its meaning. Furthermore, when readers are not given any contextual cues for the interpretation of the passage, they typically attempt to subjectively conjure up a viable context from their own idiosyncratic knowledge of the world—a context that might enable them personally to derive meaning from the passage. To the extent that they are able to develop such a context, they are able to comprehend and remember the paragraph.

These examples serve as elementary illustrations that when we process and interpret events, we do so from our perspective of the world. It is, then, through a synthesis of our cognitive knowledge of the world with present input that we derive meaning from our experiences. Furthermore, when we do not have the appropriate context for an event at our cognitive disposal, we often adopt an alternative contextual interpretation whereby meaning might be derived.

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Many years ago, cultural pundits began to intimate that Americans increasingly would find themselves living in a psychologized society. This point was stated poignantly by C.G. Ellison in an essay in Current Perspectives in the Psychology of Religion (1977): “Psychology has grown into a giant during the twentieth century. No other age has witnessed such intense concentration upon the nature and functioning of ‘homo sapiens.’ Psychological terminology has become an integral part of the common vernacular and psychological concepts strongly influence contemporary thought.”

In the midst of this “psychologization” of Western language and thought, we have more and more come to view the vicissitudes of life in terms of psychological categories. Or, as argued by the authors of the unlikely best seller Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), it is the therapist (along with the manager) who largely defines what constitutes effective living in American culture. The authors of this book offered the following statement as a succinct summary of this therapeutic mind-set: “Like the manager, the therapist is a specialist in mobilizing resources for effective action, only here the resources are largely internal to the individual and the measure of effectiveness is the elusive criterion of personal satisfaction. . . . Indeed, the very term therapeutic suggests a life focused on the need for a cure. But a cure of what?” (italics mine).

We find within this definition the following components of the therapeutic mind-set. First, as it attempts to provide a viable framework for the interpretation of reality, this set of cognitive knowledge structures concentrates on the internal psychological and emotional workings of the individual. Second, this mind-set emphasizes the need for men and women to be cured / healed. Third, the therapeutic schemas suggest to the twenty-first century interpreters of events (that is, to us) that the end result of this healing process should be fewer blocks to personal growth, greater personal satisfaction, less personal suffering, and a greater sense of personal well-being. Fourth, this therapeutic way of perceiving reality emphasizes a utilitarian view of life, a view in which virtually all human endeavors (from reading Scripture, to worship, to personal relationships) are evaluated based on criteria of psychological effectiveness.

As we move forward in the twenty-first century, there is little to suggest that this psychologization of Western thought and language has abated. In Modernizing the Mind: Psychological Knowledge and the Remaking of Society (2002), author Steven C. Ward put it this way: “Throughout this book I have tried to illustrate how over the course of the last century psychological categories and practices became ‘naturalized.’ As this happened, psychology, like other naturalized ideas and categories, ‘disappeared into infrastructure, into habit, into the taken for granted.’ Psychology’s presence in schools, workplaces, and homes is now an ordinary and seemingly indispensable feature of the cultural landscape. . . . Today, psychological knowledge and categories seem ‘intuitively right and reasonable because they are rooted in everyday life.’”

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The encroachment of a psychological mind-set into the day-to-day workings of Western culture is obvious. It can be argued, in fact, that therapeutic schemas have grown to such a stature of prevalence, consequence, and acceptability within the culture that they dwarf all other views of reality. As a result, it should not be at all surprising to find a growing presence of therapeutic schemas within the Christian churches. The authors of a 2005 book titled Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers have suggested that this may be the case much more than had previously been suspected.

Soul Searching is based on in-depth interviews with more than 265 teens from various faith traditions. The authors of the book begin by offering some encouraging findings about young people and their faith. As these teens responded to specific questions in the interview sessions, for example, the vast majority identified themselves as Christian. Furthermore, many of the teens reported being involved in such religious activities as regular church services, youth retreats, youth rallies, and service projects; they saw participation in an organized faith community as an important way to have ongoing contact with influential adults; and most of them responded with positive attitudes toward their religion and their parish or congregation.

In an effort to further gauge the religious lives of these young people, the authors proceeded not only to record the teens’ overt responses to the specific interview questions, but also to take note of the words, terms, and phrases that most often emerged in the transcripts of the interview sessions. These analyses begin to reveal quite a different picture of the spiritual lives of young people in the United States.

For the most part, the language of the young people did not reveal a faith that revolved around traditionally relevant Christian themes. The teens’ expressed belief systems did not center on being faithful to God, or repenting for sin, or building character through steadfastness. Instead, for most of them, what was essential to their faith was “feeling good, happy, secure, at peace”—what the authors term the “therapeutic benefits” of religious involvement.

More specifically, the authors report that the phrase “the grace of God” was mentioned by these 265 teens a scant three times. The same was true for “honoring God with your life” and “the importance of loving your neighbor.” Similarly, “the justice of God” was mentioned only twice, and several historically significant Christian themes—self-discipline, sanctification, social justice—were not mentioned at all. In contrast, 112 teens mentioned personally feeling happy or being made happy through faith, and 99 different teens discussed feeling good about one’s life. In fact, the specific phrase “feel happy” was used more than 2,000 times during the interviews.

In a particularly pithy summary of these interviews, the authors offer the following: “When teenagers talked in their interviews about grace, they were usually talking about the television show Will and Grace, not about God’s grace. When teenagers discussed honor, they were almost always talking about taking honors courses or making the honor role at school, very rarely about honoring God with their lives. When teens mentioned being justified, they almost always meant having a reason for doing something behaviorally questionable, not having their relationship with God made right.”

One might be tempted to speculate that although such religious trends may typify the spiritual lives of many (if not most) young people, they certainly are not an accurate reflection of the more seasoned faith of adult believers in the United States. The authors of Soul Searching beg to differ, however. They are quick to assert that the type of belief system encountered among the teens who were interviewed is not restricted to the young; rather, it “is also a widespread, popular faith among very many U.S. adults. Our religiously conventional adolescents seem to be merely absorbing and reflecting religiously what the adult world is routinely modeling for and inculcating in its youth.”

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One need not be a seer to perceive the infiltration of this therapeutic mentality into sectors of the twenty-first century Church. One need only be cognizant, first, of the growing number of committed Christian men and women for whom the virtues of courage, fortitude, compassion, and charity have become blurred in the midst of their psychological and emotional misgivings; second, of the number for whom the pursuit of goodness, truth, beauty, and moral character has been supplanted by a search for personal satisfaction; third, of those for whom thoughts of loyalty, duty, and commitment have been recast in terms of personal growth and well-being; and, fourth, of those for whom suffering has become merely an indication that something is personally not right and needs to be cured or fixed. One need only listen to some of the messages emanating from the pulpits in today’s churches—messages in which personal hurts may be portrayed as greater pitfalls to the Christian walk than personal sins; where psychological wholeness is emphasized more than sanctity; where the presence of authority may be viewed as spiritually more destructive than the presence of Satan; and where believers may be encouraged to find themselves more than they are encouraged to find God.

These comments are not meant to suggest that the gospel is opposed to personal well-being and the diminution of suffering, only that such therapeutic categories may not provide legitimate criteria for evaluating the efficacy of one’s decisions, behaviors, and relationships. Nor are these comments meant to suggest that solid psychological intervention may not be a vital part of the spiritual growth process for some Christian men and women, only that the standards against which the success of such interventions are evaluated may not be therapeutic ones. In other words, the gospel has never claimed, in our classical, Judeo-Christian tradition, to provide another path to “the therapeutic good life.” Christianity has not claimed uniqueness for its therapeutic benefits.

* * *

Years ago, when I was a graduate student in Chicago, there was an article in one of the local papers about a wealthy woman who had instructed her chauffeur to drive her to a new McDonald’s that had opened in a downtown shopping mall. On entering the restaurant, the woman took a seat at an open table and waited. No one came. The longer she waited, the more upset she became. Finally, she asked to see the manager to complain about the poor service. As this woman attempted to understand her experience at McDonald’s, she cognitively accessed her understanding of how restaurants work. Because the restaurant schema she had developed over the years was incorrect for a visit to McDonald’s, however, she misinterpreted the situation and, accordingly, organized her actions mistakenly.

There are many men and women in the Church today who, like the woman at McDonald’s, cognitively access their available schemas in an attempt to make sense of their life circumstances but come up short because the therapeutic schemas with which they have been equipped fail to adequately represent the reality of our human condition. One should not be surprised to find that when this happens, traditional Christian ideals such as selflessness and self-denial, duty and fortitude, repentance and reconciliation, and sacrifice and sanctification are scarce commodities, even among some of the most committed of Christian men and women.

At present we face a challenge of great importance. We face it in our parishes and congregations, in the everyday lives of our fellow Christians, and, as a consequence, in our society. Increasingly, the ideological and cultural character of churches today is being formed by a worldview that espouses not virtue, but psychological satisfaction and well-being. It is a worldview in which the moral excellence that can be found in suffering often is negated in the hurried search for relief; it is also a worldview in which the greatness of character that derives from habitually meeting all of one’s duties with excellence is challenged by the voice of therapeutic reason: “This is hard. Besides, what am I going to get out of it?” Is it any wonder that people decide to shift their church affiliation based on such criteria as enjoyable music, lively homilies, or a satisfying Sunday-morning coffee-and-donut experience? Or that people who find themselves in personally unfulfilling marriages conclude that God could not possibly be in such a marriage?

Both Christianity and modern psychology provide ideologies for the understanding and guidance of the interior life, and many of us find ourselves in singular positions as we strive to bridge these sometimes disparate disciplines. The English geographer Sir Halford John Mackinder stated in 1887 that “Knowledge is one. Its division into subjects is a concession to human weakness.” Conceding to our human weakness, we must explore carefully the differences between these two models of care for the interior life. The problems of human existence take on a distinctively different significance when viewed through a psychological mind-set intent on the attainment of positive internal states than when viewed through the eyes of one who realizes the inherent suffering in the ongoing personal repentance, conversion, and regeneration asked of us by Christ. Conceding to our human weakness, we should be the first to pursue all that psychology has to offer in the understanding of the human condition; but, at the same time, we should be the last to blur the distinctiveness of the Christian gospel.

John Buri is a professor of psychology at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of over fifty professional articles and one book (How to Love Your Wife). He also teaches a course in the Catholic Studies Program at St. Thomas in which traditional Thomisic moral theology is compared with modern psychology.

Sociologist Christian Smith began his ambitious, multivolume effort to plumb the religious lives of Americans across the life course in his 2005 with Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. In that book—aimed at an audience that the author hoped would include general readers as well as clergy and scholars—Smith painted an incisive portrait of religion among America’s adolescents. Especially insightful was the way Smith explained why the more sectarian religious traditions in the United States, such as evangelical Protestantism and Mormonism, were achieving greater success than more churchly traditions such as mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in transmitting their faiths to the next generation. Also notable was the way Smith explained how the guiding religious ethos of American teenagers—what he aptly termed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”—seemed so suited for our culture.

Smith contended, in his 2005 book, that most religious teens in the U.S. had very little appreciation or regard for the theological and doctrinal particulars of their own religious traditions but did believe that God exists, loves them, wants them to follow the Golden Rule, and comforts them in the midst of the emotional ups and downs of adolescence. Moreover, Smith argued, most teens, including teens who were regular churchgoers, believed that all religious traditions are functionally equivalent, and that they provide spiritual succor, moral guidance, and emotional support in about equal measures. This, then, is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism; and, as Smith pointed out, it has proved enormously useful to American adolescents because it allows them to navigate the increasingly pluralistic milieu of the United States without stepping on the religious sensitivities of their peers or violating the tolerant conventions of the larger society.

In his latest book, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Smith revisits the spiritual state of his respondents as young adults aged 18 to 23, at a life stage that is now called “emerging adulthood” in the social sciences. In a sense, not much has changed among the emerging adults Smith discusses in this new book. Young adults from more sectarian religious communities still do comparatively better when it comes to outcomes such as church attendance and orthodox religious belief, and most emerging adults still seem to subscribe to a form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Smith notes, however, that emerging adults are less religious than they were as adolescents. Only 15 percent attend church on a weekly basis, and 26 percent indicate they have no religion. Part of the story here is that young adults often drift away from formal religious practice after they move out of their family homes and return to regular churchgoing only when they marry and have children. For much of recent American history, young adulthood has been the religious nadir of the life course for most Americans.

But the religious disconnect—institutional, moral, and theological— among contemporary emerging adults that Smith describes in Souls in Transition seems more profound than the typical pattern of temporary religious disengagement that has marked the lives of young adults over the last century or so. A majority of today’s emerging adults do not regularly darken the door of a church; are largely indifferent or, in some cases, hostile to religion; and are similarly indifferent or hostile to religious teachings about the good life—especially as they relate to sex, drinking, and drugs. Furthermore, a majority of the 30 percent of this cohort of emerging adults who are regular churchgoers are “selective adherents” who “believe and perform certain aspects of their religious traditions but neglect and ignore others.” By Smith’s reckoning, only 15 percent of emerging adults count as “committed traditionalists” who are committed and consistent believers. When it comes to religion, this seems to be a generation of lukewarm believers.

This should come as little surprise, however, when we step back from the religious lives of today’s emerging adults and look at the larger social milieu in which they find themselves. Their connections to education and work tend to be fragile and unstable. They live much of their lives in an isolated, electronically mediated world in which iPods, personal computers, and cell phones link them to their preferred music, movies, and friends and not much else. They are largely indifferent to the great causes of the right and the left. And, most importantly, for most of these emerging adults, marriage is not on the horizon. It is little wonder, therefore, that the members of this lukewarm generation are largely disconnected from American religion, given that they are also disconnected from stable long-term employment, civil society, and family life.

What is to be done? Smith does not provide any easy answers to this question in Souls in Transition. He does, however, offer some excellent advice to parents and religious leaders about how they can steer today’s children away from the lukewarm lives being lived by contemporary emerging adults. According to Smith’s analyses, children are more likely to end up as committed and consistent young-adult believers if their parents integrate religious faith into daily family life; if children are exposed to engaging adult believers in their churches; if they have good religious friends; if they live chaste lives; and, interestingly, if they have to suffer for their faith. Smith notes that adolescents who were “made fun of by peers for [their] religious faith” were more likely to end up as serious believers as young adults. In other words, family, friends, sex, and suffering will have a lot to do with how successful the next generation of young people will be in avoiding the lukewarm path being trod by many of today’s emerging adults.

W. Bradford Wilcox is associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands.

You will often hear Jews say, with pride, that Judaism rejects a missionary or evangelizing stance. This is true in the narrow sense that Jews do not pursue converts to Judaism, but it is deeply misleading in another. The German Orthodox rabbi, polemicist, and scriptural expositor Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), a towering figure in modern Jewish thought, taught insistently that God brought the “Abrahamitic nation” onto the stage of history for “the salvation of the world through Judaism.” As he wrote in his Torah commentary, this was to be accomplished “by example and admonition,” with the Jews as “God’s messengers on earth” (on Genesis 12:1, 11:8, 18:17–19). In Orthodox Judaism today, Hirsch remains a household name. But the most important aspect of his legacy, which deserves urgent practical consideration by the Jewish community, is insufficiently appreciated.

A range of Orthodox communities claim Hirsch’s mantle. One often hears the “Hirschean worldview” invoked. Modern Orthodox thinkers cite his philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz (“Torah with the Way of the World”) as giving a Torah imprimatur to secular education. Hirsch’s pioneering study of the roots of Hebrew words is also well regarded. But Hirsch’s thought extends far beyond his contributions as an educational theorist and etymologist. He illuminated a cultural crisis of which he saw only the beginnings. That crisis, in Hirsch’s own term, is that of the Western world “sunk in materialism” (on Exodus 6:3).

Hirsch held a variety of rabbinic posts in Germany and Austria, culminating in 1851 with his leadership of the Orthodox separatist congregation in Frankfurt am Main. He is still known for his philosophical defense against Reform Judaism and for secession (Austritt) from Reform-dominated institutions. He was a meticulous and perceptive interpreter of scriptural text. Rather than Jews’ being called on to “modernize” Judaism, he preached, they were called on to fulfill an ancient “mission” on the model of Abraham himself, who “never leaves off admonishing, teaching, warning, bettering wherever and however he can” (on Genesis 18:23–26). On the famous phrase in Exodus 19:6 (“But ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests”), Hirsch wrote that Jews “by word and example” are called to minister to the world just as the Jewish priesthood ministers to the Jews: “For that which the [Jewish] Priest is to be to the [Jewish] People, the People are to be to the rest of Mankind, the ‘leading ram’ at the head of God’s flock of human beings” (on Leviticus 16:5). The purpose? “To carry through the world [a] proclamation of deliverance ever to be found from evil and guilt, or rejuvenation to freedom and life never to be lost, is your mission” (on Genesis 1:14–19).

Hirsch’s magnum opus, the Torah commentary (1867–1878), may be one of Judaism’s least read classics. Even in a modern translation, Hirsch’s prose can be intimidating. But that does not quite explain why Hirsch’s emphasis on Israel’s mission to the world fails to resonate in contemporary Jewish consciousness. When he wrote, the idea of such a mission to a hostile Gentile culture such as Germany’s hardly seemed prudent or practical. Traditional Jews were more concerned with the threat to Judaism from heterodox movements within the Jewish community. Later, immigrant generations of Jews, struggling to make it in new lands and ambitious for themselves and their children, found in Hirsch a justification for secular education but gave scant attention to his reason for advocating engagement with secular culture.

Hirsch saw the education of mankind—that is, its return to God—as the central drama shaping human history: “This gradual winning of mankind to what is good and true was God’s purpose from the beginning” (on Genesis 2:4). In this historical struggle, God’s people encountered a foe with many faces. Hirsch spoke of the “animal wisdom” of the snake in the Garden, seducing human beings with the idea that the physical urges we feel are nothing less than the “Voice of God” (on Genesis 3:1). Sometimes, Hirsch noted, the force wears the face of Jacob’s brother Esau, carrying “the orb of empire, the scepter and the sword”—physical power—with which Jacob wrestles eternally: “it is the meaning of what the whole of world-history really is” (on Genesis 32:25). What these faces and forces have in common can be summarized, Hirsch thought, in a single word: materialism.

By materialism, he meant the conception of reality as made purely of physical stuff and physical processes—the ideological outlook that gave us modern secularism. The deterministic doctrine that people are just an aspect of nature, hairless apes or advanced fishes, saps our will to make free and good—albeit difficult—moral choices of the kind animals do not make. Hirsch taught that the key to mankind’s liberation from materialism lies in the realization that we are free: Nothing holds us back from fulfilling God’s command. Hirsch presented many of the Torah’s laws as being designed precisely to educate us in this truth. He explicated such seemingly arcane areas of Torah law as those having to do with tumah and taharah (ritual impurity and purity) as examples of the subtleties of human freedom.

Hirschean theology sees God as the ultimate model for us in this regard. Hirsch insisted again and again that God must be understood as acting with complete freedom in the world, both as it is now and as it was in the process of creation. Accordingly, Hirsch was critical of the then-new Darwinian evolutionary theory. The history of creation was one in which God’s thoughts emerged and freely influenced the shapes of nature: “They are not the result of some force working blindly, but the work of One thinking Being, creating them with intention and purpose” (on Genesis 2:1).

His case against the Darwinian materialist worldview was framed, not in scientific terms, but in moral ones; it had nothing to do with insisting on a literal reading of Scripture or modern young-earth creationism. Writing just a few years after the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Hirsch used the biblical image of the idol Baal Peor, worshipped in a grotesquely animalistic fashion, to illustrate “the kind of Darwinism that revels in the conception of man sinking to the level of beast and stripping itself of its divine nobility, learns to consider itself just a ‘higher’ class of animal” (on Numbers 25:3).

For Hirsch, the Jew’s mission to oppose materialism is conducted primarily in his role as a citizen. Especially in Horeb (1838), Hirsch’s work on the philosophy of the Torah’s commandments, his insistence on this point—the importance of patriotic devotion to one’s “Fatherland”—can be startling. Hirsch saw patriotism as nothing less than a divine commandment, “a religious duty, a duty imposed by God and no less holy than all the others,” regardless of whether a Jew’s adoptive Gentile homeland is generously disposed to him. By this he meant to call not for mindless, undiscriminating nationalism, but rather for improving and caring about the moral and religious culture of one’s home in the Diaspora as a good in itself just as one devotes oneself to Jewish welfare and flourishing.

In Orthodox circles, outreach to nonobservant Jews has come to be seen as an important communal interest, a vital good for its own sake. To embrace the Hirschean model today would require adapting that remarkably successful communicative technology, and the dynamic idealism that goes with it, to an even bigger challenge: outreach to non-Jews. Certainly, a first order of business would be to infuse the education of young people with a frankly outreach-directed Jewish mission. Jewish education would be remodeled around the goal of making a profound and Godly impact on the world. Some values that would be emphasized in a Hirschean educational system are rhetoric (writing and speaking, to persuade and affect a general audience); science (to demonstrate how God’s thoughts are made manifest in nature, so that an educated Jew should, as the Mishnah advises, “Know how to answer an apikoros,” a materialist religious skeptic); and, finally, business ethics (Hirsch was disgusted by the idea that Jews were known for being “sharp” in business).

Perhaps above all, rabbis in training would need to be imprinted with the full scope and grandeur of the Jewish mission, so that they could not only convey it to their congregants but also become frontline spokesmen for Judaism’s thought system in the world. Every Jew has a priestly calling, but none more so than a person whose job, as a rabbi, is precisely that of a teacher. Institutions such as Yeshiva University that prepare rabbis as well as other professionals must think far more in terms of the rabbi as public figure—a writer and speaker not only to Jewish audiences, but also to general ones, on the model of Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. This is not a matter of academic panels “dialoguing,” but, rather, a matter of seeking out opportunities to speak and write about God and man in Jewish terms that can be understood by all levels of Gentile laymen. A flagship Jewish educational institution such as Yeshiva should be at the front line of this effort, as well as at the front in formulating Jewish teachings—on God, family, personal morality, and, yes, politics—for a non-Jewish audience. A full-fledged program of study devoted to Jews’ mission to non-Jews, organized by a new department at Yeshiva designed to stand alongside Accounting, Real Estate, International Business, and Speech Pathology/Audiology, would not seem to be too much to ask.

Undeniably, the authentic Hirschean worldview poses a challenge to the traditional Jewish community, whose members today, like Jonah in the Bible, are reluctant prophets. The Jews are truly Jonah’s children. Yet, at a time when Americans and others around the globe are beset by anxieties about crumbling personal and business ethics—with moral values increasingly ungrounded by permanent structures of belief, with a world economy in distress thanks precisely to factors such as these, with life’s very meaning in doubt for many, and with non-Jews more open to Jewish influence than ever before—surely the time is at hand for Jews to seize their unique moral and spiritual mission.

David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. He is the author of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus and other books and writes the Kingdom of Priests blog on Beliefnet.

In a scene in the Oscar-nominated film An Education, an older British man with designs on a precocious teenage girl concocts a story for her parents about how he is taking her to visit his old professor, C.S. Lewis. Although Lewis does not figure further in the film, this is a pivotal moment. The thrilled parents grant their permission, and their starry-eyed daughter, who dreams of attending Oxford and experiencing a life of fashionable high culture, becomes further enmeshed in the deceptive world of her superficially cultured suitor. The film does a decent, if predictable, job of showing the way bright, eager young souls can confuse sham culture with real education. The film has absolutely nothing to say, however, about what might constitute a true education.

The passing allusion to Lewis and his popularity—even celebrity—among middle-class Brits underscores something that is increasingly rare in our popular culture: art that occupies a middle and mediating ground between high and low culture and that mixes entertainment with an instructive reflection on the big questions. Nowhere is this lack more evident than in the standard type of film that is nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Picture: a film that very few Americans have seen and that represents not so much high culture versus low as a parochial world of antipopular culture.

Perhaps in the hope of expanding interest in its fatuous and self-indulgent awards ceremony, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has expanded its list of nominees for Best Picture from five to ten. This year’s list includes three films that rank in the box-office top ten for the year 2009: Up, The Blind Side, and the record-pummeling Avatar, about which I have already opined. Of the three, each of which has received some recognition in other year-end award ceremonies, Pixar’s Up is the most finely crafted story—a tale about loving fidelity, grief, old age, renewal, and growing up. It is one of the most compelling films ever made about friendship between young and old.

The inclusion of these three films does not mean, however, that the Academy has gone populist. Not only An Education, but also Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man investigate the themes of false dreams, detached lives, and empty quests that often attract those who cast the votes for Best Picture. Of the three, Up in the Air is the most enticing story, although it seems in the end to have been produced largely as Oscar bait. (The Best Picture nominee Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, a bleaker, female version of the also-nominated The Blind Side’s tale of a rise from the projects, is perhaps the hardest of this year’s films to categorize, except that it comes awfully close to wallowing in the sort of human degradation that appeals to the Academy.)

Among the nominees there is also an interesting group of what might loosely be called war films: The Hurt Locker, District 9, and Inglourious Basterds. The real revelation here is QuentinTarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a film that may serve to resurrect a filmmaking career that seemed in irreversible decline. The film stars Brad Pitt as the head of a World War Two Jewish-American commando unit sent to Europe with the purpose of “killing Nazis.” The unit does more than that; it inspires fear in its inhuman enemies. The action is fast-paced and the dialogue, witty. Tarantino’s humor works here in large part because Inglourious Basterds gleefully embraces the clear sense of good and evil that is the presupposition of the plot.

An odd pairing, I know, but Up and Inglourious Basterds seem to me to be the two most noteworthy of the nominated films. What about other, nonnominated films? Not worthy of nomination but worth mentioning are Ponyo, another delightful animated fantasy from Hayao Miyazaki, and Paranormal Activity, a low-budget horror film that uses subtle techniques of suspense to make a chilling case for demonic presence.

There is, for me, one glaring omission on the Best Picture list: Crazy Heart. It features Jeff Bridges as a heavy-drinking, once-famous country-music star whose life is barely held together by his commitment to playing the next gig. Then it is held together by his love for a sometime reporter and single mom played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. What could have been a predictable plot manages to surprise in a number of ways. A downward spiral seems to mark the end of the line for Bridges’ character. But it doesn’t. The possibility of recovery and redemption seems to signal a tidy happy ending. But it doesn’t. Redemption here does not mean recovery of all that is lost; in this case, it involves a distinction between what one wants and what one needs. Crazy Heart is a memorable and richly human film, the best of the year.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

A couple of years ago, I received a phone call from a theologian named Chris Baglow, whom I didn’t know. He told me that he had just completed the first draft of a textbook on science and religion for use in Catholic schools and colleges and wanted to know if I’d be interested in taking a look at it. A textbook on science and religion? What a great idea, I thought, and yet how obvious! Why had no one thought of writing such a textbook before? (Or maybe they had, and I hadn’t heard of it.) How badly needed such a book is right now. The world is now awash in propaganda for scientific atheism, and yet virtually nothing is being done to prepare our youth to meet this challenge.

The next thought that occurred to me was that such a book could be worse than useless—could even be a disaster—if not done well. As I talked with Baglow, however, my fears on that score evaporated and my enthusiasm grew. I discussed many issues with him, scientific, theological, and philosophical, and (from my point of view) he was hitting all the nails squarely on the head.

Chris Baglow’s book, the title of which is Faith, Science, and Reason, has come out at last, and I urge anyone who is interested in Catholic education to buy and read it. Baglow’s book would be an excellent textbook for high school or college courses, for homeschoolers, for adult education classes, or for that matter anyone interested in the subject. Though a Catholic text (carrying an imprimatur), non-Catholic Christians and Jews would doubtless find much of interest in it, many valuable insights, and perhaps even inspiration in developing similar materials for use in their own institutions of learning.

Here is the Foreword I wrote for the book:

The most important goal of education is to give a student a framework for understanding reality. For a Catholic, of course, the overarching framework is the Catholic faith and the revealed truths that it teaches about God, man, and the world. There is another order of truths, however, that we know, not by divine revelation, but by reason and experience. Of this kind are the truths discovered by science. How do these fit into the framework? A truly educated Catholic is one who is able to integrate the different kinds of knowledge he or she has, and keep them in proper balance and perspective. In other words, he or she is a person who does not compartmentalize life but has a coherent view of it. This is the primary reason for a textbook such as this. But there is another reason, which makes this textbook by Dr. Baglow of especially urgent importance.

A Catholic student going out into the world will face challenges to his or her faith. Some of these will be in the form of sharp questions about Christian beliefs. These questions may come from those who wish to mock or from those who sincerely wish to learn. In either case, the questions will not always be easy to answer for someone who has not thought much about them before. Or maybe the Catholic student has thought about them before, but lacking guidance has been left in a state of confusion. For example, he or she may be asked, How does the biblical account of creation relate to the Big Bang theory? How do Adam and Eve relate to what we have learned about the evolution of modern humans from Australopithecus afarensis and Homo habilis? How do spiritual realities, such as the soul, fit into the world of matter described by physics, chemistry, and biology? Is it possible to believe in miracles and also the laws of nature? Is scientific reason compatible with religious faith? What about life in other parts of the universe? Do the discoveries of modern science really imply that we are just material beings without free will, as some scientists have claimed? Does the case of Galileo show that the Catholic Church been hostile to science?

Some people, perhaps, avoid these questions because they are afraid that the answers may be unsettling. But avoidance only means that students will grow up nursing secret doubts and fears and be easy prey for the first “scientific” atheist they meet in college or later life. Nor is avoiding questions compatible with our nature as rational beings made in the image of God. We are seekers after truth. That indeed is what leads us to God, who is Truth itself. What we have to fear is not truth, but rather half-truths and untruths. And, sadly, when it comes to the relation between science and religion, what many people are told consists largely of half-truths and untruths. That is why this book by Dr. Baglow is so urgently needed.

There is hardly any subject about which there is more widespread ignorance and misinformation than the relationship between the Catholic faith and science. This ignorance extends to all sectors of society, from the “man on the street” to the professor at the elite university; and it has taken a terrible toll. Gross misconceptions about the Church’s teachings and about her historical record with regard to science have undermined the faith of many believers and have created suspicion towards religion in many nonbelievers.

It would be easy to blame this state of affairs entirely on the hostility of militantly atheist or anti-Catholic people. And indeed, for well over two centuries there has been relentless propaganda about the supposed warfare between religion and science. However, it is also the case that Catholics have not been vigorous enough in confronting these issues and telling our side of the story.

Talk to any audience of Catholics, whether adults or high-school students, and ask them what name comes to mind when they think of the relation of the Catholic Church to science and the result is always the same: “Galileo!” they shout out. That is almost all they have been taught on the subject. Have they heard of Niels Stensen? Francesco Grimaldi? Georges Lemaître? Every educated Catholic should—and yet almost none have. (No, I won’t tell you who they are. You will have to read Dr. Baglow’s wonderful book to find out!) Looking over my oldest daughter’s shoulder one day, I saw that there was a paragraph in her high-school biology textbook about the experiments of Lazzaro Spallanzani, one of the greatest biologists of the eighteenth century. I asked her, “Did you know that he was a Catholic priest?” She didn’t. How could she? The textbook didn’t mention it, and her teacher had never heard it either.

And it is not just on questions of history that Catholics have not been given an accurate or full story. Too often, what they know about scientific discoveries is filtered through the interpretations of scholars or journalists who are at best indifferent to religion and sometimes deeply hostile. Fortunately, in recent years many scientists who are Christian believers have undertaken to write about science from a theologically informed perspective. This includes Catholics, such as Fr. Micha Heller, a scientist at the Vatican Observatory who does research in quantum gravity; Peter E. Hodgson, a professor of nuclear physics at Oxford University; Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University. It includes non-Catholic Christians as well, such as Dr. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project; Prof. Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and the Rev. John Polkinghorne, formerly a professor of particle physics at Cambridge University, and now an Anglican theologian. Dr. Baglow has drawn upon the insights of these and other scientists to produce a textbook that is impressively sophisticated in its treatment of science while remaining highly accessible to students.

But it is not only the relevant history and science that have often been neglected in the education of our students. Much of the rich tradition of Catholic theology and philosophy has been neglected as well. What does the Church mean by “Creation”? What has she historically taught about evolution and human origins? What is meant by saying we have “spiritual souls”? How does God govern the universe, and what is meant by divine Providence? In what sense is God the “First Cause,” and what is meant by “secondary causes”? What is faith, and what is its relation to reason in general and scientific inquiry in particular? One cannot begin to discuss science and its discoveries from a Catholic perspective without the theological tools. Here again, Dr. Baglow has done a masterful job of presenting the crucial doctrines and the theological and philosophical insights of Catholic tradition in an engaging and illuminating way.

There are so many ways that a book on science and religion can go wrong. Some authors think it is necessary to jettison or radically revise doctrines of the faith to be consistent with what science says. Others think it is necessary to dismiss well-established truths of science to be faithful to Scripture. Some put science and Catholic theology into a blender and end up with a pseudo-mystical mush that is neither genuinely Catholic nor genuinely scientific. Some retreat into what amounts to nature worship.

Not this book! Dr. Baglow takes authentic and unadulterated Catholic teaching and authentic and unadulterated science and shows them to be in wonderful harmony. He makes his own the words of a great scientist, whom he quotes:

Dr. Baglow’s careful analysis and lucid exposition make one apparent difficulty after another melt away. He shows that the record of the Church in relation to science is one to be proud of, and indeed quite glorious. The student will come away with a deeper understanding of the Catholic faith, of science, and of their coherence with one another.

We are all deeply in Dr. Baglow’s debt. There has been a terrible drought of classroom instruction in this area. This book is not just a few drops of water on the parched earth—which itself would have been welcome—but a drenching, reviving rain.

Stephen M. Barr is professor of physics at the University of Delaware and author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith and A Student’s Guide to Natural Science.

Dissenting Catholics in the public square seem to unite around at least two principles. One is their dogged pursuit of the appearance of ideological consistency. However grave the division between their public and private beliefs, persuading the public of their supposed unity of mind is a priority often pursued with rhetorical acrobatics. Consistency is thus enshrined as the chief virtue of public life, even as such contortions place those with the highest ideals in graver danger of hypocrisy. The second rallying point among dissenting public Catholics is—oddly enough— also common among cohabiting couples: the urgent desire to reap the benefits of affiliation without the commitment of oneself to a cause, whether it be the Catholic Church or the institution of marriage.

We see these principles in action in Catholics from Mario Cuomo to Patrick Kennedy, but, as Archbishop Charles Chaput observed in a speech on Monday, the trend began with John F. Kennedy’s famous “Houston Speech,” delivered to an assembly of Protestant pastors while campaigning for the presidency fifty years ago. Kennedy’s assertions about religion and public life were, as Chaput put it, “sincere, compelling, articulate—and wrong.” Moreover, the archbishop said, Kennedy’s remarks “profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation.”

Speaking to a group of Texas Protestants just as Kennedy did in 1960, Archbishop Chaput identified Kennedy’s errors as political, historical, and religious. Broadly, JFK’s political and historical error was to misidentify the American understanding of public life as one “where the separation of Church and state is absolute” rather than a mere prohibition on state-run religious denominations. While forgoing discussion of how church and state can be mutually nourishing when not tied together, Kennedy’s speech equated religious membership with the corporate imposition of ecclesial law on civil life. As the then-senator put it, “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”

But, as Archbishop Chaput noted, relegating religious acts to the private domain contradicts the principal tenets of Christian religious ideals, and Christians “have a mandate to share [the] Gospel of truth, mercy, justice and love. . . . Real Christian faith is always personal, but it’s never private.” Privatizing religion is, as it were, the imposition of a particular religious doctrine on religion—namely, the doctrine that religion is essentially a private pursuit.

Kennedy’s religious mistake, Chaput went on, was to tone down his Catholicism by advancing secularism. Or, as Jesuit scholar Mark Massa has said, Kennedy “secularize[d] the American presidency in order to win it.” Kennedy’s praise of religious freedom elsewhere in his speech was, of course, nothing but a canard, as the free exercise of religion was not at issue, either for him or for the Protestant ministers to whom he spoke. Kennedy was, it seems, the only voice advocating for a curb on the exercise of religion, by deeming it a private matter. And it seems he was just as unwilling to impose his religious values on himself as he was to impose them on the public.

In the address, Archbishop Chaput drew attention to Kennedy’s surprising claim that, would his presidential duties “ever require me to violate my conscience or violate the national interest, I would resign the office.” Kennedy also promised not to “disavow my views or my church in order to win this election.” But, as the archbishop countered, Kennedy’s Houston speech did just that.

What modern trends in public Catholicism, then, did JFK set into motion? There seem to be at least three. Archbishop Chaput was careful to note in his speech that Christianity is not primarily about politics, nor do theories of political justice and policy play a prominent role in the spiritual life of Christians. By identifying the visible Church primarily as a political phenomenon, Kennedy and his successors refer to a facet of Catholicism that isn’t one. In this vein, Catholic public figures have at times made their reception of communion a highly political (and sometimes defiant) act, despite its wholly apolitical theological meaning to Catholics.

A second trend is an ideological pragmatism that hijacks conscience. It’s fine, politicians tell us, to employ religious reasons on matters of universal agreement, such as the need to end homelessness or violence. But there remains a set of issues off-limits to the Catholic conscience. As Kennedy put it, “whatever issue may come before me as president—on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject—I will make my decision . . . in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” The only way to interpret this claim honestly, it seems, is to conclude that we ought to form both a Catholic conscience and a secular one—one for each set of issues. On that distinction, Kennedy cleverly equivocates. Using this strategy, Catholic politicians have retained the allegiance of Catholic voters while all but adopting atheistic consciences in the public square.

Incidentally, support for the modern analogues (abortion and same-sex marriage, among other concerns) of Kennedy’s hot-button issues has become the calling card of dissenting Catholics. Just as Kennedy distanced himself from scrutiny by equivocating on the meaning of conscience, modern-day Catholic politicians may enact their own JFK moments merely by repudiating the Church’s teachings on two or three symbolic culture-war issues.

Perhaps the most cognitively dissonant trend that Kennedy set in motion was his self-styled dualism, a vice of mind now ubiquitous among Catholic politicians. The personal–private gap can hardly be parsed logically without resort to a radical division in the mind. Just as Kennedy claimed to be a neutral instrument of justice while privately a Catholic believer, so do modern Catholic politicians claim to possess multiple consciences to deal with ethically charged issues. Rhetorical acrobatics notwithstanding, this public–private divide simply fails to meet the standards of common sense. When would a Catholic politician claim private opposition to larceny while supporting it as a valid choice for a segment of his constituents?

It is sad to see that, with his desire in 1960 to secularize the American presidency, John F. Kennedy set in motion currents of thought that today have made significant headway toward the secularization of Catholic life in America.

Kevin Staley-Joyce is a junior fellow at First Things

Woody Allen’s Whatever Works, a serious contender for worst movie of 2009, is noteworthy mostly as a disastrous attempt to channel Allen’s humor through the caustic verbiage of the increasingly unfunny Larry David. But the problem is deeper than casting. In Whatever Works, David plays the New Yorker Boris Yellnikoff, a once-famous scientist who inexplicably ends up taking in a young homeless woman, Melody St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), a former beauty-pageant queen from Mississippi who embodies every caricature of the God-fearing, gun-loving South. Replete with Yellnikoff’s screeds against the South and its religiosity, the film sees New York as the place of cosmic enlightenment for backward outsiders. The film also shows how ill-suited David is to anything beyond an extended skit and how astonishingly in decline are the artistic powers of Woody Allen. It is as if Allen set out to make a film that would fulfill the religious right’s worst allegations about Hollywood. Exceptional only for its poor quality, Whatever Works is among a group of recent films that embody the shallow critique of theology pervasive among the so-called new atheists.

This is not, of course, the whole picture on religion in film in 2009. Indeed, one of the year’s most popular films, an Oscar nominee that clearly benefited from the expanded pool for Best Picture, is John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side. The antithesis of Whatever Works, The Blind Side celebrates both the life of Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman Michael Oher and the white, upper-class family that adopts Oher and gives him a chance at living well. Criticized in the mainstream media for its “selective charity,” the emotionally predictable but nonetheless enjoyable film depicts the Southern and Christian Tuohy family as thoughtful, industrious, generous, and good-humored. Religious themes also surface in dour apocalyptic quest films such as The Road and The Book of Eli. Perhaps most significant of all is the success of Avatar, a deeply religious film that embodies not so much Christianity as the form of religion that has come increasingly to function as a simulacrum of Christianity in our culture, Romanticism.

Ricky Gervais’ The Invention of Lying might be said to articulate the common thesis of the new atheists: God is the big lie. Gervais plays Mark Bellison, a struggling scriptwriter in a world where lying does not exist and is, indeed, for everyone except Bellison, inconceivable. In a world without fiction, scriptwriters are reduced to constructing bland recitations of historical fact. Bellison is not a success, either in his writing career or in his pursuit of attractive women like Anna (Jennifer Garner). For overweight, unattractive guys like Bellison, universal honesty is painful. This is made clear in the phone conversation Anna has with her mother during a date with Bellison. Seated across the table from him, she recounts his physical defects and announces that she won’t be sleeping with him.

Experiencing inner conflict and some sort of genetic transformation, Bellison eventually seizes on an opportunity to lie. The pivotal scene in the film occurs as Bellison visits his dying mother in the hospital and strives to console her. After hospital workers overhear him describing the pleasures of the afterlife, they spread the good news. Soon crowds are camped outside his house, demanding further information about the “Man in the Sky” and his criteria for deciding who gets to live in a mansion in the next life. Gervais / Bellison appears on his porch with a pizza box on which he has written a set of commandments. If this were a Monty Python film, such a scene would be rife with comic possibility. Not here. One friend, realizing that all he has to do to gain eternity in a mansion is to avoid serious wrongdoing, decides simply to stay home, drink beer, and watch TV. Although the film introduces tensions between fact and fiction, truthfulness and lying, it is so devoid of imagination that it simply does nothing with these tensions. Gervais seems to want to poke fun at the banality of religion, but the dullness of this and other scenes to the banality of his own humor.

One wonders whether Ricky Gervais was an adviser for the latest Coen brothers film, A Serious Man, which stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik, a physics professor awaiting a tenure decision. A sort of postmodern Job, Gopnik is in a bad way; up for tenure, he is receiving secret letters attacking his prospects. His wife is having an affair with a friend of the family, and his kids are deadbeats. On a quest to read the signs of the times, particularly as they apply to his own cursed life, he consults various rabbis, who wander from reflections on the difficulty of seeing Hashem—that is, God—in the world to oracular recitations of Jefferson Airplane lyrics: “When the truth is found to be lies.” But the Coens have not updated Job; they have served up a dramatically diminutive version and paired him with a vastly diminished divinity. Gopnik somberly muses about God and the uncertainty principle, which, according to his version, means that “you can never know what’s going on.” One searches the screen for Gervais’ pizza box when Gopnik concludes: “The boss isn’t always right, but he’s always the boss.”

Another contender for worst film of the year is The Road, based on the absorbing and luminous Cormac McCarthy novel, a brilliant piece of literature into which are woven subtle theological themes. The nearly complete absence of religious themes, particularly from the film’s closing moments, is not, however, what makes The Road such a dreadful movie. McCarthy’s book—a story about a father (Viggo Mortensen in the film) and son trying to make their way along a perilous path to the sea in the wake of a cataclysmic event—is an emotionally rich exploration of loss and longing, of the loving obligation of a parent not to despair in the face of the most daunting odds. In the transition to the screen, the poetry is lost; in its place is an exhausting repetition of grotesque, stomach-churning events.

If The Road is one of the great disappointments of 2009, The Book of Eli—an early 2010 release that features Denzel Washington on a post-apocalyptic path to deliver a mysterious book to a place where it can become the basis of a new civilization—is better than advertised. There are hints at the power of reading and of authoritative words—especially when those words emerge from the Word—to undergird political deceit or, by contrast, to provide the seeds for a renewal of civilization. The problem is that the filmmakers seem not to have read much of the good book; the only scriptural passage recited at length is Psalm 23. It fits, but it is also the most obvious passage. Much worse is Eli’s summation of what he’s learned from years of protecting and reading the holy book: Give more to others than to yourself. But Washington’s performance as a man gifted with supernatural powers of self-defense and an undivided will to fulfill the command of God is surprisingly credible. He makes the viewer believe that he has heard the Word and been called. Like McCarthy’s novel The Road (but not the film), The Book of Eli manages to portray God as mysterious and more worthy of our obedience than the jejune “Man in the Sky” of The Invention of Lying and other films.

If the box office is any indication, the most compelling portrait of divinity in the films of 2009 is not the Man in the Sky but the Lady in the Tree—the goddess Eywa who is worshipped by the Na’vi on the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar. The much-touted look of the film is, indeed, mesmerizing; but the visuals work largely because Cameron is so effective in constructing an entire world, that of the Na’vi tribe. The very blue inhabitants of Pandora are deeply bound, one to another, and to a particular place, particularly to the sacred tree and the goddess who dwells there. The tree happens to sit on mineral deposits that are valuable to the militaristic capitalists who want to relocate the tribe, by diplomacy or war (preferably the latter), so as to exploit Pandora’s natural resources. The film delivers its share of politically pointed clichés, as when the merciless military commander announces a policy of “fighting terror with terror.” What is more telling is the way Avatar, like many recent sci-fi films (The Matrix and The Children of Men, for example), deploys symbols and themes from a number of world religions. The dominant and unifying myth, however, is that of Romanticism. Avatar embodies a set of standard Romantic divisions between a primitive, basically peaceful, and organic culture, on the one hand, and an advanced, bellicose, and artificial culture, on the other.

Perhaps the most instructive lesson to take away from the religious themes in recent films is the way our popular culture seems to vacillate between essentially empty conceptions of a transcendent God and increasingly fertile notions of divine immanence. Given that choice, the attraction of the latter is clear. In nature, we encounter a mysterious other whose regal power is palpable. In either case, we encounter lesser gods than the One who speaks in Eli’s sacred book.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

First Things: So I think the first thing we would like to know is what it was that brought you to New York in the first place and how you met Father Neuhaus and your background.

James Nuechterlein: In the early '60s, he was then Pastor Neuhaus of St. John the Evangelist in Brooklyn, and I met him at a convention of the Atlantic District of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

I was a lay delegate from my congregation in New Haven, Connecticut, where I was attending graduate school. We met briefly then, but we really didn’t get to know each other well until, oh, I guess, the mid-'80s. I wrote a long review essay of one of his books, Christian Faith and Public Policy. And he got in touch with me about it, and we talked, and I came out to New York and we visited.

And then all of a sudden—or it seemed all of a sudden to me—he invited me, in 1989, to come out and be editor of a quarterly magazine called This World. I was then a professor of American studies and political thought at Valparaiso University and editor of the university's journal, the Cresset. And that’s how we got together.

FT: So then the Raid happened.

JN: Right, the Raid that shut us down. And then began the planning for the new journal. Originally the idea was to continue what we were doing—that is, to do a quarterly like This World. And Richard was then putting out a newsletter, the Religion and Society Report. So the idea was to continue doing the same things, but now under independent auspices.

And then it was, I believe, Peter Berger, a good friend of Richard’s, who came up with the idea of putting out a monthly. And he convinced Richard . . . against my inclinations, because it’s obviously much easier to edit a quarterly than a monthly. But I saw the wisdom of it, and somewhat reluctantly went along with it. . . .

FT: Yes, so would you say that the mission was different once it became a monthly or . . .

JN: The mission didn’t change. It was still the application of religion to public life and it was simply a matter of finding the right format; of course it turned out that First Things had far more impact than the old independent things had had combined.

FT: Was there any plan to change the audience when you moved from This World to First Things, from a quarterly to a monthly, to reach a larger audience?

JN: I was always looking towards a theologically informed public, but we were very conscious of not making it too academically theological. We were writing for a generally educated, religiously informed audience, so there really wasn’t a change in the target audience. And we were very conscious . . . of making it truly ecumenical, open to—obviously overwhelmingly Christians and Jews—but to make it accessible to Protestants and to Catholics and to Jews.

And that didn’t change, by the way, when Father Neuhaus became a Catholic. He became a Catholic in 1990 and then a priest in 1991. But I remember the first thing he told me when he let me know that he was becoming Roman Catholic, which came as a great shock to me. But he immediately said, I want you to be sure that the journal will not change; this is not going to be a Catholic magazine. It’s going to continue to be interreligious and interdenominational.

FT: Immediately after the Rockford Raid, when you guys were set up at 338 E. 19th, did you ever have any doubts that the magazine would succeed?

JN: Oh, we had questions about how it would do and there were, of course, initially just very fundamental questions of whether we could get the funding when Rockford cut us off. Now . . . Richard had been working toward going independent when the Raid occurred, so it didn’t hit us—it wasn’t totally a blindside hit. And he just had to hurry with his negotiations for funders, mainly foundations that supported us.

But there was a track record there, of course. This World was established; the Religion and Society Newsletter was established. The assumption was we wouldn’t have to worry about breaking even as a journal, that we would always lose money strictly speaking and be supported by foundations. But we had no guarantee for the future.

FT: But it was an optimistic climate and you guys were excited. What was the overall feeling there in the house?

JN: We were very excited. It was a very exciting, heady thing, starting a new journal and making every decision from scratch: What kind of paper are you going to use, what kind of type, what kind of cover stock? And so we were tremendously busy. But then the numbers—I must say, one of the things that made us optimistic very quickly was that we started out with very low assumptions as to what the impact would be.

I remember Richard saying, “Well it would be nice if we could get up to 8,000-12,000.” And very quickly we went well beyond that. We had a very rapid early ascent. If you go back and look at circulation figures, we had a rapid early ascent, and got near to where we are now reasonably quickly, but then we reached what I thought was a natural saturation point. Richard had some disagreements with that. He always had dreams of getting us up to 75,000, that sort of thing.

But I thought we had found our niche audience. Anyway, we were extraordinarily pleased by how quickly the journal caught on.

FT: What would you attribute that early success to? What was the powerful combination that people were latching onto?

JN: Well, it was a niche. I mean, there was nothing quite like us. I suppose the closest thing was we were a kind of ecumenical and, frankly, more conservative Christian Century. But simply, to do the kind of thing we were doing, this monthly journal, there was a kind of unique audience and, of course, Father Neuhaus was already very well known, and so from the beginning his impact was enormous. As everyone says to this day—or at least they did when Father Neuhaus was still alive—“You know, I read the magazine from back to front.” From the beginning, Public Square was the thing that got us the most noticed and the most attention.

FT: One thing that Davida Goldman pointed out was that he had been doing Public Square before First Things at This World, so he had been doing it for a while.

JN: He hadn’t really been doing Public Square. He was doing his own separate newsletter.

FT: But the format was just so similar, it seemed.

JN: It was similar, yes. It was not a new thing for him to do. And before he was doing the Religion and Society Report, he had for a long time been editor of a little journal called Forum Letter, a Lutheran newsletter. So he had been doing this kind of thing for a very long time before First Things started.

One thing I want to emphasize is that we had a very lean staff. That first year there were basically three of us. I mean, there was Father Neuhaus and myself and Maria McFadden, but she was only there for the first three issues or so. And then Matt Berke came in to replace her as managing editor.

Paul Stallsworth was listed as an editor, but he mainly worked on Public Square with Richard and did a little bit of proofreading. At the end of the first year Midge Decter joined us, and she was a terrific help, a great editor. But basically it was a handful of us putting out the journal. When I look back, I’m kind of amazed by it.

Richard always wanted to keep the journal as lean as possible. I think that was a wise instinct. Of course, we had nothing in those days like what you have today—the interns and the junior editors, that only came in the late '90s.

FT: Did you start building up a base of writers quickly? How did that develop? It seems like, if you look through the pages of First Things, there definitely seems to be a stable of writers that contribute on a regular basis. And how did that family of writers develop over the time that you were here?

JN: Partly it came, again, as a continuation from This World. And, of course, Richard knew a lot of these people and it came also from two continuing quarterly seminars, one on theological ethics, and one more explicitly on theology that we ran. It was the Ramsey Colloquium on Theological Ethics, and the Dulles Colloquium, which was more explicitly theological.

And the people who were part of that were a stable of people that Richard had gotten to know over the years, with some new people added. And there were, from among those people, a lot of people who became board members, regular contributors, and so on. We were in constant contact with those people through these quarterly seminars.

FT: Was there a point where you felt like—you started the magazine, and was there a point where you didn’t feel like you were starting a magazine anymore, that it was established, and that you had arrived in a sense? When was that?

JN: That’s hard to say. In one sense, the success was so rapid that, after the first year or so, we had a strong sense that we had a going thing. If there was a single incident when we sort of knew that we had established ourselves, I think it was the famous “End of Democracy?" symposium in 1996. That caused an incredible uproar in our circles, both pro and con.

The reaction was by no means all positive. I mean, as you know, we lost people over it and there was significant disagreement about it. But all sorts of people picked up on the debate and on the divisions that arose from it. They had a symposium in Commentary a few months later that was heavily about us and it was picked up. New Republic ran pieces on the whole thing, and all sorts of places that hadn’t paid close attention to us were suddenly very much aware. And from then on we kind of became known in a broader sense. We had been known within academic, religious circles heavily earlier on, but it was the “End of Democracy?" symposium that really made us nationally known.

Even though, I have to admit, I sat there in disagreement. I was the one editor who disagreed with it. Midge Decter also disagreed, but she was no longer on the editorial staff. But we rode through that.

FT: What was your relationship like with Father Neuhaus? I mean, were you like sounding boards for each other?

JN: Yes, we worked very closely. And we were constantly bouncing ideas off each other and we spent a lot of time outside the office together. I spent endless hours in his apartment; we had dinner often, and other times I would just come over and have a drink in the evening. Then, when I moved into the apartment and into the house in 1995, all that became even more frequent. And so even when we weren’t at the office, talking about the journal, it just came up constantly in conversation. So it was a very close working relationship.

FT: I was wondering too how Father Neuhaus’ pastoral sensibility worked its way into office life and then in addition, the mission of the magazine. How did his pastoral vocation change that?

JN: You mean pastoral as both as Lutheran and as Catholic, or the change from Lutheran to Catholic?

FT: I guess both. Just in terms of him, because the folks that we’ve spoken with have talked about how he viewed First Things as having a pastoral mission broadly.

JN: My sense was he always kept that pretty separate. When we worked together at the office he was my employer and colleague, he wasn’t my pastor, even when he was still Lutheran.

And the worlds were kept distinct for Father Neuhaus. I think especially the older he grew, he didn’t want to be known around his parish for his work as editor of First Things, which was often controversial, and ideological to a degree—although he tried to minimize that as much as possible. But his work as pastor was really quite distinct. Now, of course, there were times—and you’d have to talk to the various individuals involved—when people would go in to see him on personal things or private things, and he would then become somewhat pastoral. I suppose that even happened, now that I think about it, on rare occasions, between him and me.

But most of the time, for us, he was Father Neuhaus—but Father Neuhaus the editor of First Things, rather than Father Neuhaus the priest.

FT: Continuing on the theme of Father Neuhaus, if you had to choose a period of time during the time you worked at First Things—could you point out a moment in time, maybe in the '90s or afterwards, when you feel that First Things, or Father Neuhaus, sort of reached their apex, in terms of writing or insight, or what were the best days of the magazine, in your opinion?

JN: That’s very hard for me to say. And I would be reluctant to pick any particular period.

FT: You don’t remember a golden years?

JN: No. It’s the normal sort of thing one has looking back on the past, but I don’t recall thinking, “You know we’re getting better, we’re getting worse, we’re staying the same.” I think I can go back there—though I don’t spend a lot of time doing it—but I can look back at some of our early issues and think we had some terrific stuff that we ran.

And we tried hard to keep it up over time. And, in an odd way, it became harder over time, because you were now visiting issues, not for the first time or second time, but revisiting them over and over. And I think to a degree, perhaps, that became occasionally a problem for Father Neuhaus. His stuff was wildly popular, and it was extraordinarily well done, but inevitably he repeated himself. And so every now and then I’d go in and say to him, “Richard, do you really want another three items attacking the New York Times?”—that sort of thing. Or, in the early days, the National Council of Churches.

And like anybody, he had periods when he’d sometimes say, “I feel written out and burnt out,” but he always had these incredible powers of self-renewal. He always seemed to think, “Look, we’re doing something important; it deserves our very best effort; we must continue to work really hard on this and not rest on our laurels.” He was always worried about that. “Are we losing our edge? Are we becoming complacent?” He was very self-conscious about maintaining quality and freshness. And with the business of having a continuity of writers: That’s very good in certain ways, but on the other hand people say: “Oh, yes, well there is so and so, we know what he thinks.” So there was always a problem of looking for new writers, new ideas, new insights. And he was constantly aware of that.

FT: Could you just say a few words about his work ethic?

JN: He was extraordinary. I think, quite literally, I’ve never known a harder working man, and he had an incredible focus. I mean, when he went into the office and sat down at his desk and worked, he worked. Richard was not a big one for schmoozing at the office. And our meetings—well he didn’t rush our meetings; we’d joke and so on—but they were serious and there was a focus and his work schedule was pretty tight.

He’d get up and he’d do his prayers and say mass early, read the Times, work at home, usually until about late morning, often until noon, have a light lunch, unless he was having lunch with someone. And he’d come in and work all afternoon and not stop until 7:00 at night for evening prayer back at the house. Then, most nights or a majority of nights, he would continue to work until 9:00 or so and then stop for a drink and dinner.

And he’d have work on the weekends. I remember, one of the first weekends I was there, and it was a Friday afternoon, I went into his office and I said, “Well, what are you going to do this weekend?” And he looked up rather surprised and he said: “I’ll do what I always do, I’m going to read, write, and think.” He was just a man of extraordinary energy, focus, discipline. He liked to relax late at night over a drink. But, basically, life was serious. Life was to do things, accomplish things. He was aware that he had great personal gifts.

He had a strong sense of using those gifts for the best, for God’s purposes. And so he was very much aware of that. I used to tease him: “You are a Lutheran who turned Catholic who behaves like a Calvinist.” But that was Richard.

FT: What about you, Jim? What are you most proud of? Do you have a particular piece of work that you wrote or a period of time when you were writing, where you really felt like you were proud of what you did and what you accomplished? What was the hardest thing you had to write? That kind of thing?

JN: I did the column, basically, for seven years, from ’94 to ’01, and then dropped it, except for a few occasions. I’d run out of steam. Unlike Richard, I could not revisit issues freshly. Once I had written on something, I had written on something, and that was it.

So I wrote my column for seven years and I can look back on those and say, “I think they were pretty good. I am not ashamed of that work.” And I did several longer pieces, some of which I am very happy with.

But, oddly enough, my most—from my point of view, at least—important writing was actually done before I came to First Things. It was done in a whole series of articles I wrote for Commentary in the 1970s and '80s. And at this point in my life, retired and looking back on it, the pieces that I think are the most significant are mainly essays I wrote in Commentary in the '70s and '80s. And now some recent things I've done for FT.

So for me, my main job at First Things was not as a writer. I was trying to see to the best of my ability, through editing, and choice of materials, and so on, that the journal stayed at a very high level. In a way, I think—I don’t know if I can go back and measure this—but I almost felt as if I did less writing, especially early on, than I had done earlier before I was at First Things.

This is because with starting the journal, especially at the beginning, when we were a very lean staff, I found myself pretty much overwhelmed just getting the journal out and getting it done.

FT: It’s remarkable how quick you guys, the magazine, found success and then it was in 1993 that Father Neuhaus had his first battle with cancer . . .

JN: Right, ’93.

FT: How did that affect . . .

JN: That was an enormous shock because he was so strong and vigorous and then, suddenly, this thing hit. I had dinner with him on a Thursday night, and he was complaining about some bowel problem and some pain, but I didn’t realize how serious it was. I think it was the following Sunday that fortunately George Weigel was in town and they had to rush him to the emergency room and they had this operation under the worst conditions. They couldn’t properly prep him; they couldn’t clean him out. It was truly emergency surgery.

And, frankly, I thought he was going to die. I didn’t think he’d make it through that first week afterwards. And, of course, it was a tremendous sense of loss, first of all, and the horror of contemplating Richard going.

But then the second thought was, well, what’s to become of the journal? But of course, he recovered and everything was fine until it came back . . .

FT: Who pitched in and who did the work when he was sick? I mean, he wasn’t writing, was he, when this was going on?

JN: Well, fortunately he had written a fair amount of Public Square material in advance. So when he became sick, there was some amount of backlog. And we sort of rested on that for a couple of months, and then Richard very quickly recovered, and in the meantime we put out the journal.

I mean, Richard was always, of course, deeply involved in all the work of the journal, in the planning, in the sense of planning ideas, and what goes in and what doesn’t go in. But he was never involved in the mechanics of putting out the journal—copyediting and proofreading and any of that. So when he became ill, the problem was not, “Can we keep putting out the journal, at least for a while,” the question was, “If this is the end, can the journal go on without him?” But fortunately, of course, we didn’t have to face that until many years later.

FT: Keeping all these points in mind, do you have any thoughts about the role that First Things plays in the lives of its readers? It seems like it’s kind of a sustaining force for the intellectual life of a lot of subscribers and—I just wonder if you can comment on the role it plays.

JN: Yes, I was often really quite touched and moved by letters we'd get from people, simply saying “Thank you, thank you, thank you for First Things.” And it was especially people who felt—often theologians either in the academy or parish priests or pastors—isolated and there really is nobody around here that thinks the way I do.

And our emphasis on cultural conservatism and theological seriousness—for many people, it really was a kind of lifeline. As I say, I was amazed by this and it was really very moving. It gave you a sense that what we were doing was so important that people out there would talk about getting the journal and sitting down to read it and it was the greatest pleasure of their month. Part of me used to say, “Wow, get a life.” But I knew this was important. We’re providing an important spiritual and intellectual service for people, and we better keep doing it right—and that was true for all of us. We were really affected by that, the sense of people just constantly letting us know how important we were to them.

FT: Do you feel like over the years, reading the responses of readers, that the scope of First Things changed at all, or the mission, from the input you had from the readers on what they liked or didn’t like?

JN: Well it clearly, over time, became a more Catholic magazine. That was, I think, inevitable, simply from Richard becoming a Catholic priest. And you could trace it—if you wanted to do this in some semi-scientific way—you could trace it by simply looking at the way the ads have changed over the years and how it looks more and more Catholic. . . .

And I don’t know if there’s been a recent reader survey or not. We did a few early on. And when we first started, there was a clear, but not overwhelming, plurality of Protestants over Catholics. As I recall, and this is from vague memory, but at the time of our first reader survey, we were something like 54 percent Protestant and 41 percent Catholic and the rest “other.”

And then we did another one a few years down the road, and it was closer, Protestant to Catholic. And since then, I'm sure, the Catholic readership has increased proportionally.

Now, as I say, I don’t know if there have been any reader surveys since I left at the end of 2003. But there was certainly often this sense in the public—among the public that was aware of us—that we were simply a Catholic magazine, even though we were never a Catholic magazine in terms of our mission statement or intent.

Given Father Neuhaus’ overwhelming presence within the journal—in writing more and more about Catholic matters in Public Square—it was, as I say, rather inevitable that we became more and more regarded as Catholic. In a way, Richard was uncomfortable with this. He didn’t want it to be that way, but we all kind of understood why it was that it became more and more considered a Catholic journal.

FT: Were there any experiences that you had that gave you an indication of how influential First Things had become in public discussions, in ecclesial life, or in other settings?

JN: Well, certainly, as I mentioned, “The End of Democracy?" symposium—the fact that this was picked up in so many places, and simply the fact that from the mid-'90s on we were just more and more mentioned all over the place, that people would make references to us, and often without having to do a long description of what we were.

When we first got going they’d say, “First Things, a religious journal on religion and public life,” and it became less and less necessary over time for that description to be used by people who were interested in this sort of thing—which is a very small world, of course, in many ways.

And simply on a personal basis: people ask you what you do, “I’m editor of First Things.” Well, when we first started, nobody had the vaguest idea what that was, and over time it became—in the small intellectual world of New York and Washington, especially, which is where I suppose we were the most publically identified—known and didn't require explanation.

FT: Just one issue, in particular, that we certainly covered repeatedly, is the right to life. Do you feel that First Things—let’s say on some of these life and bioethical issues—has had an impact in making the pro-life case and then sort of closing the case, in a way?

JN: Well you’d like to think that. But I am not sure, in terms of the larger picture, to date, how much influence we’ve had. Richard used to say that, in general, we wanted to be careful about repeating ourselves, but there was the one great exception to that, which was the abortion issue and more broadly the life issues, but certainly abortion above all. He said, “I wouldn’t mind if we had a piece about abortion in every issue.”

It was that important to him and to the journal. And I think we made the case as winsomely and effectively as we could. We covered it from every imaginable perspective. After a while I was kind of in despair: “How can we find something new to say about abortion?”

But then there is the Human Life Review, which covers nothing but abortion and the life issues, and they keep going as a quarterly continually. But it’s hard with any issue to keep it alive and fresh and find a way so you are not just preaching to the choir, to find ways to engage people . . . People are instinctively pro-choice, at least in intellectual circles: it's hard to try to get those people to think again, to engage them, to make them stop and think about what it is they are really arguing. And I like to think that we had some impact. But it’s terribly difficult to measure something like that.

Of course, Father Neuhaus had significant public influence, especially with President Bush, and President Bush said publically that Father Neuhaus was important to him in advising him on life issues and abortion. And not, of course, just with President Bush, but he just had an enormous range of people he knew and influenced and who respected him even when they disagreed with him.

FT: What was it about Father Neuhaus—of course there were many things about Father Neuhaus that gave him his popularity and commanded the respect—but what talent of his showed through the most? Was it his writing or his thinking or his reading or which of those stood out, in terms of what made him be noticed by people?

JN: Well, that’s a little bit complicated. For people who met him and knew him personally, he was simply a charismatic figure. He was a man who wound up running practically any organization he ever joined. Richard was a natural leader and so among people who got to know him personally, it was mainly the impact of his personality.

But wedded to that, both in those circles and, of course, the wider public—people who didn’t know him or saw him occasionally on TV—I think it was the sheer power of his intellect. He was obviously a very, very smart man who wrote very well and very clearly, and yet subtly, about the issues of religion and public life. And there weren’t that many people doing that and very few people, if any, doing it as well as he did.

And so there were often people I ran across many times . . . who disagreed with him on a general ideological or theological basis, but who had great respect for his intellect and his ability and his knowledge. He was an extraordinarily widely read man. He knew more about more things than I think just about anyone I’ve ever known, and I’ve spent my life around academics. I’ve known a lot of very bright and well-read people. But he was really quite extraordinary.

FT: We just began a new decade. And it seems like the mission of the magazine is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. Could you maybe speak to the goals of the magazine and maybe what you think you hope it addresses in the near future?

JN: We want a religiously informed public philosophy. We don’t want a religiously suffused politics. We never supposed that politics becomes applied Christianity. Richard was of a Niebuhrian frame of mind and I certainly was too. Most of the major editors had that view.

But to want a religiously informed public life, and yet without having theocratic ambitions of any sort, that’s a fine line. But it’s a very important voice to continue to add to the American cultural conversation. And very few people are doing that. It’s simply the case that First Things still has that niche, it still has that peculiar, special role to play, to add to the cultural conversation with a sophisticated religiously informed public philosophy—and one that is theologically serious. So much talk on these matters—either on the far right or far left—is simplistic in its theology and sloppy in its application of religion to public life.

And it's all been about a sense that we should try to enter this conversation and maintain it at a very high level of intellectual quality, so serious people will be forced to pay us serious attention.

And I think that role is still very important in American public life. And so I think First Things will have an important part to play in the American conversation for a very long time to come.

March 2010 signifies First Things’ 20th Anniversary. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a cross-section of the magazine's highlights from the last two decades. We had an embarrassment of riches to choose from, a reminder to all of us of the lasting significance of the magazine’s achievements. Please join us in celebrating, and enjoy the 20th Anniversary Issue, available on newsstands and online today.

First Things began as not only as the vision of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, but also the result of efforts by a small group of advisors to help him nurture it from idea to reality—trusted friends and partners in what would become his extended professional family. One was James Nuechterlein, who came aboard as Fr. Neuhaus’ editor and remained with First Things until 2003. Another was George Weigel, a close advisor to Fr. Neuhaus throughout the transition, who joined the magazine’s board of directors where he has remained a close friend and guiding spirit to the magazine ever since. And Maria McFadden Maffucci, now editor of Human Life Review, served the group with distinction during that crucial year of gestation as the magazine came to life.

Recently, First Things’ current fellows—Ryan Sayre Patrico, Meghan Duke and Kevin Staley-Joyce—interviewed Nuechterlein and Weigel about their memories of the magazine’s earliest days. We’re presenting them here as an oral history of that exciting period, along with Maffucci’s memorable memoir/essay on the April 2009 issue of First Things, “The Rockford Raid”.

First Things: How did you get involved in the magazine? Where and when did you meet Fr. Neuhaus?

George Weigel: I first met Father Neuhaus in May 1978, in New York, when I was arranging a conference on international human rights in Seattle, where I then lived and worked. We quickly became fast friends and coconspirators. The magazine was planned in conversations between us on the deck of Father Neuhaus’ cottage in the Ottawa Valley in the summer of 1989, in the aftermath of the Rockford Raid; our deliberations were aided by a liberal use of bourbon and cigars. As I recall, we thought the top circulation would be 20,000, and we worried that we’d not have enough authors to fill a quality monthly (the predecessor journal, This World, was a quarterly). Turns out we were wrong on both counts: The circulation quickly exceeded 20,000, and an entire generation of writers we hadn’t known about came out of the woodwork. It was a great example of “If you build it, they will come.”

FT: What were you doing before the magazine got started?

GW: Working in the think tank world at the interstices of moral argument and public policy, writing books, and generally making a nuisance of myself to the then-regnant Catholic Establishment.

FT: What role did you play in the founding of the magazine? And after it got started?

GW: See above for founding. I’ve been on the board since the git-go and have contributed regularly.

FT: How would you describe or characterize the early years?

GW: Richard had an ability to energize and inspire other people in the way that’s the essence of a true leader. And America was clearly waiting for something like First Things. So it was all exhilaration, all the way.

FT: What contributed to the magazine’s early success? Was there one thing in particular that helped it succeed?

GW: Obviously, RJN’s personal stature and scintillating prose gave the whole enterprise an enormous jump-start. Just as obviously, it filled a need, particularly among Catholics and evangelicals, for a serious journal of religion and public life. If you take that, in the case of the Catholics, as an implicit criticism of America and Commonweal, you won’t be mistaken.

FT: Looking back over the years, the magazine, in its own particular way, influenced the course of certain debates in American society. Which of the magazine’s contributions to public discourse are you most proud of?

GW: (1) Creating a new awareness that the First Amendment was at the service of free exercise, meaning that religiously informed moral argument must have a place in our public life. (2) Strengthening the intellectual architecture of the pro-life movement but insisting that the cause of life was the natural successor to the civil rights movement. (3) Providing a forum for the authentic interpretation of the pontificate of John Paul II (a regular reader, by the way). (4) Giving a platform to the new ecumenism embodied in “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” (5) Raising the flag about the judicial usurpation of politics.

In a New York Times column today, Mark Oppenheimer reviews the controversy surrounding former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen’s efforts to square waterboarding with Catholic moral doctrine. Mr. Thiessen has some ill-informed views, and Mr. Oppenheimer seems to have failed to do his homework.

First error: Thiessen mishandles the principle of double effect.

The principle of double effect tries to distinguish the goal or intention of an action from its likely outcome. Let’s say that a woman’s life is threatened by a cancerous tumor in her uterus—and she is also pregnant. The principle of double effect allows us to distinguish between what the doctor intends to do as he removes the cancerous tumor, which is to cut it out, from what he foresees to be a result, which is not just the removal of the cancer but also the likely spontaneous abortion of the fetus.

St. Thomas applies this principle to self-defense, not because killing an unjust aggressor is wrong, but because Jesus seems to prohibit killing in self-defense when he tells us to turn the other cheek. Here is how the reasoning works. A man attacks me in the dark. In order to protect myself, I grab a pipe and hit him over the head. I intend to defend myself, but I foresee that the hard blow may well kill him.

There are two important constraints to the principle of double effect.

First, double effect can never be used to justify an intrinsically evil act, and for the obvious reason that intentionally undertaking intrinsically evil acts cannot, by definition, be justified. John Paul II was crystal clear on this point in Veritatis Splendor. So let’s go back to the examples. There is nothing immoral about removing cancerous tumors. There is also nothing immoral about killing assailants who pose an immediate threat to innocent life (again, the moral problem for St. Thomas rests in self-defense, not using lethal force against aggressors.)

Waterboarding? If it is torture, then it is immoral in itself. Double effect can’t change that fact.

Second, the key test for the proper use of double effect is to determine if it is possible to separate intention from outcome. What if the fetus is viable? If so, then the doctor can remove the child, send him or her to neo-natal care, and then turn to the job of cutting out the cancer. What if the assailant does not die? I can call and ambulance, and hopefully save his life.

On precisely the point of distinguishing intention from outcome, Thiessen gives double effect a bad name. As Oppenheimer reports, Mr. Thiessen argues, “the intent of the interrogator is not to cause harm to the detainee; rather, it is to render the aggressor unable to cause harm to society.” In effect, Theissen is saying, “I’m sorry to inflict pain on you my dear Sheik, but I’m not really intending to do so, I just want information.” The spurious reasoning is obvious. What is intended is exactly what is intended—to inflict pain for the sake of extracting information. Imagine an abortionist saying, “I didn’t intend to kill the fetus; rather, the procedure was done solely to render it unable to cause psychological harm to the mother by remaining alive.” Or closer to home: “We didn’t intend to kill tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima; rather, the nuclear blast was solely for the purpose of persuading the Japanese to surrender.” These are exculpatory pseudo-distinctions.

Finally, Oppenheimer lets a howler go by. “Mr. Thiessen points out, correctly,” we read, “that the church does not forbid specific acts.” Huh? Last I checked the Church forbids quite a few specific acts: abortion being an obvious example. Thus the Catechism: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion” (#2271). I find myself wondering: which part of every doesn’t Thiessen understand? It is true that the Catechism treats torture as contrary to human dignity, not specifying that all acts of torture are intrinsically evil (#2297). But the emphasis certainly falls on the side of prohibition, not permission.

The Catholic Church gives a great deal of leeway to public officials when it comes to the determining conditions for the legitimate use of force to forestall evildoers and protect the common good (see the Catechism, #2309), but the Church does not write a blank check. Intrinsically evil acts are never justifiable, and actions that assault human dignity are censured. Furthermore, the Church certainly does not endorse the corrupt use of double effect that Thiessen puts forward.

R.R. Reno, senior editor at large of First Things, is a professor of theology at Creighton University.

Recently it was observed that novelist Anne Tyler “writes about middle-class people trying to endure life in Baltimore.” Tell me about it. The snow that came earlier this month—and came, and came—never left because we Baltimorons (as we like to call ourselves—but don’t you try) are inept at clearing it away. Ten days on, my curvy, hilly street is still mired in sooty, icy layers of snowpack. We’ve been parking our car on a flatter roadway down the hill just to be able to get in and out. Some streets get plowed, but not ours. Yesterday we delivered our own garbage to the city dump because the city’s crew refuses to drive up here.

Being snowbound makes you stir-crazy. After the cable TV channels have disclosed their unwatchability, and the house has been cleaned (even stray socks have been reunited with their mates insofar as possible), you look for something that will catch your interest. Like Anne Tyler. Or Anne Tyler’s mail—or at least the piece of it that was delivered mistakenly to our house. The packet came bundled with three days’ worth of mail that the postman managed to hand to us before he got his van stuck in our snowbank. (We spent 45 minutes digging him out.)

The misdirected missive was addressed to “Anne Tyler IV:4.” The sender was the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It turns out that the author of Breathing Lessons and The Accidental Tourist has the same house number as we do but on a street four blocks away. Many frigid fjords separated us from Tyler, however, so the packet sat for two days on my newly cleared and freshly dusted desk. During that time, I admit I peered at the packet. I resisted the temptation to steam it open. It was clear from the outside of the envelope that it contained material to be used to pick new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was also clear—from the parts of the cover letter that were legible through the envelope in strong light—that there was a deadline in mid-March. You’ll be relieved to know that on February 17 I redirected the packet (unmolested, let the record show) to its owner.

That done, I got on the computer and looked up the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anne Tyler is listed as a member in category IV:4, described as “Literature (Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories, Nonfiction, Playwriting, Screenwriting).” I’d like to present my findings from this research: first, because they’re kind of interesting, and, second, so that I might redeem this semi-sordid situation by helping Ms. Tyler (who may or may not read the website of First Things, but, anyway) fill out her ballot with the names of the most distinguished and deserving individuals who have not yet made it into the 4,600-member American Academy.

If you go to the academy’s user-friendly web site, you will find, among the hoity-toity assembly, not only MacNeil, but Lehrer; not only Mearsheimer, but Walt; every living former president who is a Democrat; and the almost-president Al Gore. There’s an apparent ban on Bushes (except for Guy L. Bush, a zoologist from Michigan State). On the other hand, you can’t say that the academy completely ignores high achievers who are right of center; Jacques Barzun, Robert Bork, Robert Conquest, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard Epstein, John Lewis Gaddis, Mary Ann Glendon, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bernard Lewis, Richard Pipes, Diane Ravitch, and William J. Stuntz are members.

The most recent crop of inductees is interesting. Among the choices for 2009 were Robert Gates, Colin Powell, appellate judge Harvie Wilkinson, historians James McPherson and Robert Caro, Emmylou Harris, Dustin Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Dame Judi Dench (honorary only, because she’s a foreigner), Nelson Mandela (ditto), dance masters Bill T. Jones and Edward Villella, translator Edith Grossman, Thomas Pynchon, Tobias Wolff, and political theorist Danielle Allen.

What’s Allen doing there? Premature at best. Nor am I a big fan of John Doerr, another 2009 inductee. Doubtless he’s done a fine job as a Silicon Valley financier, but his recent notoriety comes from his climate alarmism. In his public speeches he extols the burning of food (that dumb ethanol idea) as the solution to global environmental problems. Weak picks from past years include such boringly ubiquitous Beltway types as Norman Ornstein and Marvin Kalb, people like Justin Kaplan who mainly seem well-connected, Russell Banks, who writes bad novels, and Robert Venturi, who adorns his buildings with tacky architectural flourishes.

Surely we can do better, Ms. Tyler. Herewith, my humbly offered suggestions. (As science, mathematics, and engineering are deep mysteries to me, I will not recommend scientists, mathematicians, or engineers.)

Let’s start in Tyler’s bailiwick. I spent some time trying to think of American novelists for whom she should vote. No names came to me. In that case, why not go for an honorary membership for a foreigner? I nominate Javier Marias. The Spaniard is rather obnoxiously anti-American in his political views, but such views don’t generally make it into his fiction. (Marias has written around a dozen novels, among them All Souls, A Heart So White, and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.)

Moving right along—and assuming that Tyler is allowed to weigh in across the full range of categories, not just in her own—Emmylou Harris is a national treasure, I agree, but how about anointing Jerry Douglas and Tony Rice, two guitar maestros who have spent decades making performers like Harris sound even better than they would otherwise? Along the same lines, Leontyne Price is surely an ornament to the organization—but can it not find room for Renée Fleming, Jessye Norman, or Patricia Racette?

The academy has admitted plenty of industrialists and entrepreneurs: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates’ father, and people with surnames like Bechtel and Lauder. To balance the big-name fat cats and the politically correct Doerr, it would be nice to let in Whole Foods CEO and cofounder John Mackey, who took a lot of heat for expressing his opposition to government-run health care.

Several reporters, editors, and publishers from the Washington Post and the New York Times are members, but so far the academy has skipped the Post’s David Ignatius, an astute commentator, and the Times’ Carlotta Gall, the stalwart presence in the paper’s Afghanistan bureau for lo, these many years. This seems to me remiss. Moreover, it would be a good idea for the organization to branch out. How about giving the nod to Claudia Rosett, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and currently of Forbes, who did such fine work exposing the U.N.’s corrupt oil-for-food program, and whose 1989 dispatches from Tiananmen Square were, according to Richard Brookhiser, “the bravest, noblest reporting I have ever seen.” Another vote well cast would be for Jack Shafer, the witty and fearless critic of media heavyweights who writes for Slate.

The membership list has an entire subcategory honoring “Literary Critics (including Philology).” That’s how Frederick Crews and Marjorie Perloff got in, and if they got in, Camille Paglia deserves to. She’s not always right, but she’s erudite, and she writes with verve.

Strobe Talbott is in—he arrived in the 2009 batch, in fact. On the other side of the aisle, Dov Zakheim, former under secretary of defense and comptroller, is at Talbott’s level of policymaking and government service. Given that Zakheim is at least as wise a “wise man” as Talbott (possibly more), he deserves a shot.

Lastly, one finds on the golden list Milos Forman and Ang Lee but, alas, not James Ivory. It was he, along with Ismail Merchant, who filmed Howards End and so many other literary adaptations some years ago, many of them quite good. It is too late for the Mumbai-born Merchant, who is deceased, but why not write in Ivory (a Californian)? Also leaping to mind is the director who raised the “mockumentary” to high comedic art: Christopher Guest has not only directorial but screenwriting credits on most of his movies, which include Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind. Screenwriting is deemed to be part of “Literature,” as I said, so Guest rakes in points there and in “Visual and Performing Arts—Criticism and Practice (including Art, Architecture, Sculpture, Music, Theater, Film, and Dance).”

Oops! Got to go; I see out the window that a Bobcat earthmover is rumbling and scooping its way up from the block below. Finally. There’s also a big Volvo spinning its wheels in the middle of the street. It will stop the Bobcat’s progress if I don’t get out there and lend a pushing hand.

Lauren Weiner is a freelance writer in Baltimore.

In the Wall Street Journal, Michel Gurfinkiel reviews the new book by Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France—an account of nineteenth-century France, in all its glory and all its disaster. As Gurfinkiel remarks, from 1830 to 1905,

Gurfinkiel is an extremely sharp commentator, but doesn’t that last phrase of his make you hesitate, just a little? I mean, since when has the Dreyfus Affair been primarily about French laïcité and the separation of church and state? Yes, the liberals triumphed over the long course of the affair, but I had never thought it a struggle over religion—certainly not over the restoration of Catholicism as the French national religion.

Except, as Gurfinkle observes, Brown’s book takes everything in nineteenth-century France to be about Catholicism: “Brown simplifies his task by operating with a single organizing principle: Most of the turmoil in France during this period stemmed from battles over the restoration of the Catholic Church as France’s main societal institution.”

Hmm. As Gurfinkle recounts Brown’s narrative, For the Soul of France insists:

And, of course, “the crusade culminated in what came to be called the Dreyfus Affair. . . . The sorry episode certainly didn’t result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism, but its clerical proponents—and their broader hope for the restoration of a royalist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-republican France—were discredited.”

The (understated) admission that the Dreyfus Affair “didn’t result in the abandonment of French anti-Semitism” suggests that perhaps Gurfinkle knows he shouldn’t quite buy Brown’s thesis of liberal advancement quite so uncritically. But, regardless, the Dreyfus Affair was a horse everyone tried to ride at the time—and continued to ride for many years to come. Not least among them are the liberal Catholics whom Gurfinkle ends his review by praising:

Those Catholic dissidents, too, got plenty of mileage from the Dreyfus Affair, using the whole mess—in the French equivalent of, say, anti-anti-Communism—to discredit their opponents in the Church.

Given all this, it’s tempting—oh, so tempting—to rage against Brown’s book, and Gurfinkle’s surprising less-than-critical acceptance of its account of its thesis, for buried in all of it is a pretty straightforward anti-Catholicism that takes Zola’s version of the Dreyfus Affair as the only correct version.

But, you see, if you begin walking down that path, you end up having to defend Action Française and the whole mess of French conservative reaction. Yes, the triumphant French liberals were awful, and the hatred of Catholicism they indulged produced a church-state relation among the worst in the Western world.

But, the truth is that the conservatives were just as bad. There remains to this day a snarl in French conservative thought, where all sorts of threads are knotted together: nationalists tangled up with anti-Semites, monarchists, anti-Dreyfusards, Lefebverists, and those aging colonialists who long to reconquer Algeria. They infect one another with their paranoias and they blacken one another with their pasts. And, since often the only thing they actually have in common is Catholicism, they offer a perpetual occasion for anti-Catholicism to feel good about itself.

Can anyone pull free the important threads in modern French thought from all the ugly and extraneous material with which they are entangled?

I doubt it. On all topics that touch on religion and public life—from Jewish relations to Catholic relations to Muslim relations—I can’t think of anything good the French state has to teach. Left or Right, the only lesson about democracy that France offers the world is: Don’t try this at home.

Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things.

In a 1967 lecture on the “cruciform character of history,” Dartmouth professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy—the anniversary of whose death is today—observed that the pace of contemporary life makes it easy for the young “to forget the greatest riddle of mankind,” that is, “the peace between fathers and sons, and grandsons.”

It is an ancient riddle. A good bit of the Old Testament depicts troubled transitions from generation to generation. Even Samuel, David, and Hezekiah had hellion children, and Isaac was nowhere near the model of faith that his father was. The depressing cycle of apostasy and judgment in Judges is a failure of in inter-generational faithfulness, and the history of the Davidic dynasty is the same story. By the end of the Old Testament, the promise of blessing “for a thousand generations” begins to sound like a cruel joke.

But the story is not done. Malachi (4:6) promises that the Lord is coming to come to turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and children back to their fathers, a promise that begins in the ministry of John the Baptist (Luke 1:17). Jesus carries on John’s work, but in a paradoxical way. First Jesus brings a sword to divide between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and everyone else (Matt. 10:35; Luke 12:53). Since his sword is a sword of sacrifice, though, he divides and dismembers in order to transform all to smoke, which ascends as a pleasing aroma to his Father. Having passed through sword and fire, generational wounds will—so we are led to hope—be healed.

Yet, peace between generations remains chimerical. Rosenstock-Huessy saw inter-generational conflict at the heart of modern revolutions. He claimed, with typical hyperbolic flair, that the Russian Revolution was decided as early as 1863, when Turgenev published Fathers and Sons. If such catastrophes are to be avoided in the future, he argued, humanity will have to relearn some basic laws of history.

Speech is the medication for healing the wounds of time. When fathers speak, they throw a line into the future, and try to secure some influence on the world that will last after their death. When sons speak, they also seek to shape the future, but they will form a healthy future only if they also throw a line to the past, and try to retain and recover what their fathers have did and taught. Mutual speech between fathers and sons, along with mutual and respectful hearing, intertwines into a coherent and peaceable present time.

One of the keys to faithful speech, Rosenstock-Huessy thought, is to recognize that we are all always living in several generations at once. Fathers don’t disappear as soon as they have sons or when their sons are grown; they stick around, sometimes much longer than sons wish. Fathers also have fathers, and can speak as fathers only by remembering they are also sons, not only representatives of the past but molders of the future. Sons fail as sons if they spend their energies twisting free of the constraints of the past while forgetting they are also fathers, responsible for their sons who will shape of the future. A human being “can’t be the image of God if he serves the spirit of his own time.”

Ultimately, the riddle of intergenerational peace is a theological one. As fathers turn to sons and sons to fathers, they replicate on earth the cross-generational loyalty found in God. Within the Trinity, there is an older generation, so to speak, and a younger generation, the Father and Son, but these are in perfect harmony. The Father glorifies and honors his Son, and the Son does all He sees the Father doing, and renders perfect obedience to his Father. As Rosenstock-Huessy remarked, the Spirit is the generational bond, uniting Father and Son in an unbreakable, eternal bond of love. The Spirit’s outpouring at Pentecost fulfills the promise of Malachi, since the Holy Spirit is the One who transcends the “spirit of the age”—both the spirit of the fathers and the spirit of the sons—and unites them. As he wrote in The Christian Future, “Father and Son unfold the quality of being, by spreading it through two generations. And the Spirit, lest he be confused with the wit of the moment, is explicitly said to descend from the interaction of two generations, the Father and the Son.”

Rosenstock-Huessy died thirty-seven years ago today, when the world was a very different place. Fortunately, he did not serve the spirit of his age, and as a result he offers wisdom from which, decades later, we can still learn much.

Peter J. Leithart is Senior Fellow of Theology and Literature at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and pastor of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow.

Our nation has begun a modest surge in Afghanistan, ostensibly as a prelude to substantial withdrawal of ground forces from that country, if not from Southwest Asia altogether. The decision to surge seems to be based upon two key assumptions.

First, some new violence is necessary. Prosecuting this war justifies not only the surge but also the increased use of assassination in Pakistan and presumably elsewhere. The relationship between the war in Afghanistan and diffuse but real security interests once referred to as the “War on Terror” is unstated, but the tacit belief seems to be that success in Afghanistan will ameliorate problems in other places, mostly by denying terrorists a safe haven like Amsterdam or Fort Hood.

Second, the solution in Afghanistan is political. Afghanistan will not know peace until it has a minimally competent government, its tribes use law instead of violence to resolve disputes, the populace is better educated, and so forth. In short, peace requires, if not the robust democracy of Neocon dreams, at least a substantial degree of modernity.

The Obama administration was slow to formulate its strategy for Afghanistan. Supportive as ever, the New York Times lengthily described the administration’s process as deliberative and thorough, and therefore presumably wise. Having carefully collected and sifted through the available intelligence, President Obama, who as head of state and Commander in Chief holds both the olive branch and the arrows, came to the conclusion that the United States should augment its force in Afghanistan with 30,000 new troops, though their stay will not be long.

While I, too, must hope this was the right decision, exactly what was discussed for all those months remains unclear. In saying that this surge will “get the job done,” the administration implicitly asserts a causal relationship between the proposed violence and our objectives. So just how does our new violence lead to a political solution in Afghanistan? Violence is usually opposed to politics; killing people is not the same as building institutions. I am not a pacifist, and sometimes violence does lead to new politics—but we seem to be assuming that if we achieve our military objectives, good politics will naturally arise. Why?

Such questions have been reduced to an obscene parody of accounting. How many troop days buys an institution in Afghanistan? Michael Bloomberg could hardly price a vote in New York, yet we think we know how much force it takes to engender sound governance in Afghanistan. What backs up the claim that a relatively short-term commitment of 30,000 troops, aided by Predator drones and an increasingly paramilitary force of CIA operatives, will generate politics—that is, institutions, consensus, and a functional state? What is the political logic that our killing advances?

Spurious accounting fills the silences in policy discourse. Posturing aside, what could confidently be said about our proposals for Afghanistan? The politics of the future is hard to know under the best of circumstances; the future politics of a failed state in the midst of civil war is almost entirely speculative. The effect of present military intervention upon future politics under such circumstances is speculation squared.

Why do we think our leaders know how to think about this? Whose experience, what learning, could they draw upon to make a good guess? No doubt they have heard from experts, but we do not have experts who have built a nation out of the raw material of present-day Afghanistan. Even the best experts, when confronting the fundamentally unknown, can only offer their guesses. Their speculations, incidentally, would be more convincing if they were publicly articulated. The question remains of how the surge is supposed to work. How will it further our security interests here and abroad? What is the logic of our strategy? History suggests some ways to think about how invaders might construct a political system. There has been much talk about counterinsurgency—establishing order in discrete areas and expanding those areas until the mass of people, who only wish to get on with their lives, do not feel compelled to help the insurgents. Denied the support of the population, insurgents can be isolated and defeated. While counterinsurgency can work, it requires enormous time and resources—much more than have been publicly contemplated for this mini-surge.

Counterinsurgency verges upon (and was theorized in the context of) colonialism. If invaders are to have a lasting impact on the political life of their conquered territory, they need to win ideological battles—in the minds and perhaps then the hearts—of the conquered population. So did the Spanish in what is still called Latin America, the British in India, and in modern times and with different language, the Allies in Germany, all of whom were able to build new political orders not just because they invaded, but because they stayed, and they convinced the conquered people. But colonization is illegal, and we are not about to colonize Afghanistan.

Colonization usually entails settlement. Invaders do not leave after the invasion; they take up residence. They bring or take wives and give their labor, their children, and ultimately themselves to the new land—Jericho for the Jews coming out of Egypt, Belgium for the Spanish under Charles V, or the American colonies for European settlers, for examples. Such commitment, if massive enough, can give birth to a new politics. In due course, settlements thus established may be incorporated into the founding polity. The Romans made the people they conquered into Romans. Or the colonies may break free, as did the United States and India, ever after bearing the marks of their institutional parentage. But we are not going to do anything like that with the Afghans. We will return to our own homes, not make new homes with them.

So I do not know how we propose to establish politics in Afghanistan—a real problem if our security requires a political solution. Perhaps the surge is the right approach. Surely we have serious security concerns and deep responsibilities to the Afghan people. But I fear we literally do not know what we are talking about, do not know how to think through what we are proposing, and are whistling past graveyards of our own making.

I also worry that talk about engagement and the necessity of a political solution is merely a pious charade. After all, we should reassure the world that this administration thinks before it acts. It is also widely believed that we cannot simply leave Afghanistan, lest we damage the credibility of our military. (Our history with Vietnam echoes loudly.) Or perhaps the surge really addresses other, unstated, national interests. It is difficult, however, not to fall into the cynical suspicion that the “deliberation” was merely the usual bureaucratic jockeying over issues of institutional prestige, resources, and the avoidance of blame. Those things said, in considering our Afghanistan strategy, I have tried to take my leaders at their word.

While being thoughtful is essential, understanding the limitations of our own thought is better. If we have no real plan for Afghanistan and are sailing on a wing and a prayer, we are left to hope that the Afghans will suddenly, wearily, come to their senses, stop fighting, and build a semi-functional state. But if that is our hope, why have we been deliberating for so long? There is always time for a miracle. God help us, and the Afghans, too.

David A. Westbrook is Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law, The University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. His book, Deploying Ourselves: Islamist Violence and the Responsible Projection of U.S. Force is forthcoming from Paradigm Press.

Colleges and universities today manifest a paradoxical combination of remarkable success and abject failure. Vast resources and extensive funding for research have made our system of higher education the envy of the world—but its extraordinarily ideological homogeneity corrupts its contribution to American society. In their relentless liberalism, not only do our institutions of higher education fail to train liberal leaders capable of governing a pluralistic nation, the intolerance they foster stokes the fires of the culture wars.

Ideally, college and universities provide a world set apart, an “ivory tower” where debate and argument can take place at a remove from the usual pressures of power politics and economic competition. Needless to say, the ivory has never gleamed a spotless white. Donors, legislators, trustees, and fee-paying parents have all sorts of economic and political interests that inevitably exert influence. Meanwhile, even as they complain about these sorts of nonacademic pressures on university policy, the professors quietly maintain preferential faculty hiring for their spouses and preferential admission for their children. It turns out that there’s nothing about the academic life that exempts us from the consequences of the fall.

In spite of original sin, however, it’s not hard to picture American universities playing a positive civic role. The relative leisure of the college classroom provides opportunities for wide-ranging analysis and discussion of different visions of human flourishing, political arrangements, and policy options. Professors with different political views and cultural sensibilities share a common commitment to academic rigor, and this unifying culture of inquiry should allow them to mix it up on occasion in public debate without triggering ideological alarm bells. The same holds for invited speakers, endowed programs, and research centers.

In such a setting—which, I emphasize, is not hard to imagine—students would see reasoned debate at work. The various political outlooks on offer could be scrutinized, and even those who disagree might find themselves understanding why well-meaning people end up supporting policies, positions, and programs that are (to their minds at least) mistaken and ill considered. Encountering smart, well-informed, and well-spoken people who think differently about the world does a great deal to promote the development of a critical mind.

The gain is not just intellectual. We live in a gloriously pluralistic society. Thankfully, our political class gains its power from representing rather than dictating, and the most successful among them know how to broker deals and create coalitions across real but often bridgeable differences. In a healthy democratic culture, we don’t need cultural and political therapists or conflict resolution experts to manage our political differences. Instead, we need intelligent partisans who struggle to realize their competing visions of the common good, but do so with a sober recognition of their own limitations, as well as an appreciation for the intelligence and good intentions of their opponents.

The civic function of higher education is therefore obvious. A serious intellectual encounter with alternative views of morality, culture, and politics—an encounter given flesh and blood on a campus populated by faculty who carry forward these alternatives—prepares the mind for intelligent partisanship. If a liberal, for example, knows why a conservative opposes government run health care or abortion, he has the basis for discerning common ground on the margins of these disagreements, and perhaps on other issues as well. At an even more basic level, the liberal will find it difficult to simply pigeonhole conservatives as greedy, ignorant, and mean-spirited.

Unfortunately, this does not happen in higher education. As civic institutions, our colleges and universities have become closed communities of the like-minded. Conservative ideas are never engaged but only ignored and dismissed.

The raw numbers are shocking. As a 2007 study by Neil Gross at Harvard and Solon Simmons at George Mason shows, the professoriate has become ideologically homogeneous. Once we strip out the natural scientists, who rarely weigh in on cultural and political issues, the percentage of self-described conservatives in academia drifts down to around 4 percent of all faculty. Data from elite universities indicates even fewer. As Louis Menand reports in a recent book about some of the challenges facing higher education, The Marketplace of Ideas, the number of social science professors at elite universities who voted for George Bush in 2004 was so small that it came to a statistical value of 0 percent. Humanities professors? Zero percent.

The trends have nuance. Gross and Simmons observe that younger faculty continue to be overwhelming liberal, but less ardently so. Nonetheless, the overall picture is clear. As a student or professor or anyone else who has a passing acquaintance with higher education knows, American higher education is a closed shop. There are of course exceptions—Pepperdine, University of Dallas, Hillsdale, and others. Moreover, most schools have one or two courageous, articulate conservatives like Robert George at Princeton. But for every exception there are thousands who fall in line according to the ruling ideology of academic: an establishmentarian liberalism eager to accommodate the more extreme views on the Left, but (with the notable exception of departments of economics) unwilling to tolerate representatives of mainstream conservatism.

Why academia is so relentlessly homogeneous is a difficult question to answer. Menand offers some jejune observations in a few short, half-hearted paragraphs. Liberals, he observes, are more critical and thus attracted to academic life; conservatives want to make more money in lucrative professions. He even makes the bizarre suggestion that “there may be fewer institutional havens for left-wing intellectuals than there are for right-wing intellectuals, so liberals tend to congregate in universities, conservatives elsewhere—in foundations or, during the years of the Bush administration, in Washington.” The sociological ignorance behind such a statement boggles the mind.

Anecdotal evidence suggests a more plausible answer. There is widespread blackballing of conservative job candidates in the hiring process, and an atmosphere of intense hostility discourages conservative undergraduate and graduate students from going forward in academia. Consider one topic of controversy in the public square. Although voters consistently reject same-sex marriage, it’s hard to think of a single elite school where a published argument against same-sex marriage, no matter how nuanced and responsibly argued, wouldn’t mobilize powerful faculty members to block an appointment. And they would almost certainly succeed, as indeed they have on countless occasions involving this and other issues.

Discussions about causes aside, the bizarre social reality is plain to see. A 2009 Gallup poll indicates that 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative or very conservative. Twenty-one percent call themselves liberal or very liberal, while most of the rest describe themselves as moderates. The academy, meanwhile, tilts overwhelmingly to the left. George W. Bush was the first president since Ronald Reagan to be elected by an absolute majority—and that majority is statistically absent from elite universities, and barely present at the rest. The conclusion is irresistible. Our present academic culture continues to churn out good scientific research, but as a civic institutions our colleges and universities have become profoundly and dangerously perverted.

In my adult life I have experienced something few suspected possible when I was a young college student in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the success of conservatism as a governing philosophy. It has shown itself to be the source of compelling new ideas, as well as capable of building a capacious coalition in the Republican Party, a coalition that has elected Presidents in recent decades who can work with leaders from both parties to pass legislation and chart national policy.

As a professor for twenty years, I have come to see that the success of conservatism may indirectly owe a great deal to our distorted academic culture. Today, American liberalism is perhaps fatally hobbled by a fossilized outlook and parochial arrogance. These qualities are unfortunately encouraged by the civic failure of higher education. Of course conservatives can be aggressive, arrogant, and small-minded. We’re human. But few conservatives are so insulated from reality as to imagine that no thinking and well-intentioned person could disagree. After all, most of us had professors in college whom we respected—whom we admired and to whom we were devoted—but whose political views we thought wrong-headed. Sadly, never needing to encounter sophisticated representatives of conservative ideas while college students, many liberals are sorely tempted to treat those who oppose them with a patronizing critical hauteur—clinging to their guns and religion, as then candidate Barack Obama said in an unguarded but surely honest moment.

It’s not good for America to have a major political party and important elite institutions dominated by people trained to ignore—or worse, sneer at—the conservative ways of thinking that motivate most Americans. The civic failure of higher education has contributed to this sad state of affairs, and, unfortunately, there are no signs that it will change. Although he likes to fashion himself an outsider of sorts, formerly of Columbia and now at Harvard, Louis Menand is an archetypical member of our academic establishment. He gave his book on higher education an ironic title: The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. Marketplace of Ideas? American colleges and universities run a monopoly business, not an open marketplace. Like most of the academic mandarins, who by and large are academic specialists rather than political ideologues, Menand shrugs his shoulders and leaves things as they are.

R.R. Reno is senior editor at large of First Things.

On a Wednesday afternoon I made my way from my office on the Baylor University campus over to the central administration building to begin the process of reviewing candidate files for the next president of Baylor. I had no idea what I would find. As a member of the advisory committee, I had been involved in initial conversations with the regent search committee about the desired qualifications of the new president and in a listening session with the group I represented, the Council of Deans. That was months ago. The regent committee had held its silence. There had been no leaks. Rumors, mostly from those mistrustful of the board, had circulated. There were no good candidates; the board was not doing a serious search, certainly not a national search; the board wanted a toady; the board was planning to appoint one of its own.

I began to look through the files and was pleased both by how many there were and by some of the high profile names. One in particular jumped out, Ken Starr. Yes, that Ken Starr.

Now, the members of our advisory committee did not have a vote. Yet, on what was certain to be, initially at least, a controversial selection, the board would not, I think, have acted without our support. Much to our surprise, the members of the advisory committee, with representatives of groups (faculty senate and alumni) that had been at odds with recent administrations, ended up unified in support of the candidacy of Ken Starr. What made us overcome whatever initial reluctance any of us might have had?

Certainly folks felt good about the process itself, but beyond that Ken Starr himself emerged as a compelling candidate. He is at once a commanding and a genial presence who combines intelligence and humility. He never seems to forget a name or to miss a chance to take a conversation back, often in a humorous way, to comments made earlier by others. He is also a gifted orator, as was clear in his first public speech at Baylor. On Tuesday afternoon, before a large and enthusiastic crowd, he spoke eloquently of Baylor’s origins, its traditions, and its role in and beyond Texas.

As John Garvey, Dean of the Law School at Boston College and recent president of the American Association of Law Schools said, “Ken is a well known public figure, and people form ideas about such celebrities from what little they read in the media. There are sides of him that are less well known. One example is his representation of Robin Lovitt, a death row inmate whose sentence was ultimately commuted to life in prison. Another is his serious commitment to his faith.”

Pepperdine President Andrew Benton observed, “Ken has had a tremendous impact on our students, the law school, and the Pepperdine community at large. His leadership, his love of scholarship and his devotion to our students helped raise the national stature of our school, and we will benefit from the good he accomplished here for many years to come.” This might seem a pro forma statement from the president’s office but it is echoed by numerous Pepperdine faculty members, including those who identify themselves as politically liberal, and by students.

Defying expectations about what the search committee was up to, this election of Judge Starr as Baylor’s next president was a surprising choice. As a colleague said when the news broke, “I could not have been more surprised if you told me it was SpongeBob.” Initial press reporting has been, as expected, mixed, but even the Houston Chronicle, which has hardly been friendly to Baylor’s leadership in recent years, delivered a quite positive article about the appointment.

Altering and shaping the conversation about higher education is something Ken Starr will, as president of Baylor, be in a position to do. He said as much about what he hoped to do at Baylor in a response to a question from George Stephanapoulos in an interview on Good Morning America. Noting that Baylor has been making significant strides in faculty scholarship even as it remains focused on the integration of faith and learning, he noted that Baylor is in a position to be an important voice in higher education.

In a landscape that is becoming increasingly homogeneous, the world of American higher education needs institutional diversity; it especially needs the distinctive contributions of its religious colleges and universities. On that score, recent history is not comforting. What seems to be an inertial slide toward secularization has plagued many once great religious institutions of higher learning. According to studies by Jim Burtchaell and George Marsden, secularization has not been a plot perpetrated by malicious university leaders. Instead, it typically occurs under capable and personally pious presidents, who seem to suffer from a certain naivete. One might, for example, hear a president at a Catholic university say something like, “Secularization will not affect Catholic schools the way it has affected Protestant schools because of the distinctively Catholic understanding of faith and reason.” The problem of course is that if very few members of the faculty can articulate with any clarity or sympathy that distinctive understanding, it is hard to see how it will forestall secularization.

The vision under which Baylor University now operates (Baylor 2012), articulated during the presidency of Robert Sloan, is designed to counter the inertial slide even as it aims to make Baylor more of a national university. Disputes over the implementation of that vision were the occasion for much publicized divisions at Baylor during the presidency of Sloan, now president at Houston Baptist University.

The goals and “Guiding Convictions” of that document remain. They were part of our committee conversations in this presidential search. These are noble goals for Christian higher education. Much is at stake in their prudent and vibrant realization. Because we have a history of division, tempered certainly in recent years, combined with great aspirations for the future, Baylor desperately needs a president who can hear all voices, someone who will listen, not passively but with intelligence, discretion, and judgment. One thing is clear about a selection that surprised nearly everyone. With the election of Ken Starr, Baylor has entered a period of presidential leadership that is in many respects unprecedented in its entire history.

Thomas S. Hibbs is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and dean of the honors college at Baylor University.

In his Cairo speech in June of 2009, President Obama gave religious freedom a place of heightened importance in his administration’s agenda. His speech both emphasized the importance of religious freedom when considering overall human dignity and human rights, as well as acknowledged the fact that good diplomacy must take religion into consideration as a fundamental component of international engagement. Both were tremendous steps forward in how this nation engages a world facing encroaching religious fundamentalism and ever-receding religious freedom.

Why then, is his administration shrinking from a robust understanding of religious freedom in its rhetoric of late?

Recently, both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been caught using the phrase “freedom of worship” in prominent speeches, rather than the “freedom of religion” the President called for in Cairo.

If the swap-out occurred only once or twice, one might appropriately conclude it was merely a rhetorical accident. However, both the President and his Secretary of State have now replaced “freedom of religion” with “freedom of worship” too many times to seem inadvertent.

As Tom Farr, Professor of Religion and World Affairs at Georgetown University and the former head of the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Office, stated at a recent congressional hearing forecasting international religious freedom issues to watch in 2010, “Those of us in the business of sniffing out rats know that this is a rhetorical shift to watch.”

“Freedom of worship” first appeared in a high profile speech in Obama’s remarks at the memorial for the victims of the Fort Hood shooting last November, a few months after his Cairo speech. Speaking to the crowd gathered to commemorate the victims, President Obama said, “We're a nation that guarantees the freedom to worship as one chooses.” Given the religious tension that marked the tragic incident, it was not an insignificant event at which to unveil a new way of referring to our First Freedom.

Shortly after his remarks at Ft. Hood, President Obama left for his trip to Asia, where he repeatedly referred to “freedom of worship,” and not once to “freedom of religion.”

Not long after his return, “freedom of worship” appeared in two prominent speeches delivered by Secretary Clinton. In her address to Georgetown University outlining the Obama Administration’s human rights agenda she used “freedom of worship” three times, “freedom of religion,” not once. About a month later, in an address to Senators on internet freedom at the Newseum, the phrase popped up in her lingo once again.

To anyone who closely follows prominent discussion of religious freedom in the diplomatic and political arena, this linguistic shift is troubling.

The reason is simple. Any person of faith knows that religious exercise is about a lot more than freedom of worship. It’s about the right to dress according to one’s religious dictates, to preach openly, to evangelize, to engage in the public square. Everyone knows that religious Jews keep kosher, religious Quakers don’t go to war, and religious Muslim women wear headscarves—yet “freedom of worship” would protect none of these acts of faith.

Those who would limit religious practice to the cathedral and the home are the very same people who would strip the public square of any religious presence. They are working to tear down roadside memorial crosses built to commemorate fallen state troopers in Utah, to strip “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, and they recently stopped a protester from entering an art gallery because she wore a pro-life pin.

The effort to squash religion into the private sphere is on the rise around the world. And it’s not just confined to totalitarian regimes like Saudi Arabia. In France, students at public schools cannot wear headscarves, yarmulkes, or large crucifixes. The European Court of Human Rights has banned crucifixes from the walls of Italian schools. In Indonesia, the Constitutional Court is reviewing a law that criminalizes speech considered “blasphemous” to other faiths. Efforts to trim religion into something that fits neatly in one’s pocket is the work of dictators, not democratic leaders. So why then have our leaders taken a rhetorical scalpel to the concept of religious freedom?

This shift in semantics could have huge implications for how the United States promotes religious freedom in countries such as these, as well as how we engage in international institutions regarding the ongoing efforts to restrict religious expression around the world.

In just a few weeks, the Human Rights Council will once more review the “defamation of religions” resolution in Geneva. The resolution, passed every year at the United Nations since 1999, claims that speech deemed offensive to another faith is a violation of international law. While the resolution is relatively toothless, it provides cover for domestic blasphemy laws used to restrict proselytism and religious speech around the world. However, the Ad Hoc Committee on Complimentary Standards, a rogue UN body with a nebulous and expansive mandate, is currently reviewing a proposed amendment that would criminalize defamation of religion to the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), a treaty to which the United States is a signatory.

Given that a fundamental element of any religion are truth claims that by nature may conflict with or offend those of another faith, the efforts of international institutions to restrict expression of these claims go right for the religious jugular. And in reducing freedom of religion to “freedom of worship” in its political and diplomatic pronouncements, the United States can no longer invoke the First Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, thus weakening its ability to combat the international movement to criminalize religious speech.

This early, one is left only with conjectures as to why “freedom of worship” seems to be the favored phraseology of this administration when discussing religion of late. It could just be sloppy work coming out of someone’s press office. But rhetoric matters—particularly when one is the leader of the free world. In Secretary Clinton’s Georgetown address she said, “Freedom doesn’t come in half measures.” The Obama administration should heed its own words when it comes to religious freedom.

Ashley Samelson works in International Programs for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. She blogs about her personal views on faith, feminism, and politics, at www.rogueinrouge.com.

Last weekend President Obama announced the appointment of Rashad Hussain as Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Already embroiled in controversy over remarks Hussain was alleged to have made in 2004 concerning the prosecution of Sami al-Arian, this appointment warrants careful consideration because of the problematic mission and track record of the OIC, which has embraced an intolerant religious agenda antagonistic to international human rights standards.

Comprising 57 states, the Organization of the Islamic Conference is the second-largest intergovernmental institution in the world after the UN. It is a unique body. A political organization, it pursues a religious mission. The charter of the OIC makes clear that it exists, not only to promote the economic and humanitarian goals of member states, but also to “defend” and “disseminate” Islam itself. The OIC even has a “Department of Islamic Propagation (Dawa) Affairs” dedicated to establishing Islam. Earlier this month the OIC’s High Commissioner for Dawa, Salem Al Houni, presented a speech in Cairo in which he affirmed the OIC’s commitment to spread Islam through the world.

It would be inconceivable for nations with Christian majorities to band together to form an intergovernmental organization devoted to advancing Christianity and the global interests of the Christian Church. The existence of the OIC is testimony to the reality that mainstream Islam recognizes no distinction between politics and religion.

In fact the OIC lobbies aggressively in UN forums to shield Islamic states from criticism on human rights grounds. The key issue is the role of the OIC in advancing Islamic Sharia. In 1990 the OIC promulgated the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which subordinates human rights to the Sharia, declaring in Article 24 that “All the rights and freedoms stipulated in this Declaration are subject to the Islamic Shari’ah,” and in Article 25 that “The Islamic Shari’ah is the only source of reference for the explanation or clarification to any of the articles of this Declaration.”

One of the subsidiaries of the OIC is the International Islamic Fiqh Academy, which claims to rule on doctrine and issue religious edicts in the name of the OIC for the whole Muslim world. In May 2009 it promulgated a series of fatwas, including rulings on Religious Freedom, Freedom of Expression and Domestic Violence. These affirm support for Islam’s traditional apostasy laws (which require that those who leave Islam should be killed); they call on the Muslim world to prevent freedom of speech from being used to criticize Islam; they declare that in Islam it is not “violence or discrimination” to criminalize homosexuality or apply Sharia laws for adultery (which include stoning adulterers); they endorse “non-violent beating” of wives; and they call upon Islamic nations to reject provisions of international covenants on the rights of women and children, if they “conflict with the provisions of Islamic law and its purposes”.

In announcing his new Special Envoy’s appointment, it is commendable that President Obama expressed hope that Rashad Hussain would be able to strengthen partnerships with the Muslim world in education, economic development, science and technology and global health.

But conspicuously absent from this list was human rights.

Without a doubt, Rashad Hussain has strong religious credentials for this appointment. The Texas-born and Yale Law School-educated Hussain was characterized by President Obama as a hafiz, someone who has memorized the whole of the Arabic text of the Koran. This skill reflects a pious Islamic upbringing. His position on individual rights and freedoms under Sharia conditions, however, is not so apparent. One clue can be found in a co-authored 2008 article he published through the Brookings Institute. In it, Hussain argues that the counterterrorism efforts “must reject labels that make mainstream Islam a part of the problem,” and the US should recognize “the benefit of strengthening the authoritative voices of mainstream Islam”. Does Hussain also believe that, when it comes to human rights in OIC member states, “mainstream Islam” is the solution, and not part of the problem?

At his most recent post as White House Deputy Associate Counsel, Hussain helped draft President Obama’s “New Beginning” address to the Muslim world in Cairo last June. That speech mentioned human rights, but it emphasized dialogue rather than defending individual liberties as the key to improving relationships with the Muslim world.

The OIC makes a strong claim for itself to be considered the global voice of mainstream Islam. However killing those who leave Islam, criminalizing homosexuality, banning any critical analysis of Islam, wife beating (non-violent or otherwise)—all these are antithetical to international human rights principles, and impediments to a true partnership between the OIC and the United States. Strengthening the authoritative voice of the OIC, while it actively works to defend such practices, would harm American interests. Lack of engagement on these central human rights issues would be understood as acquiescence or approval. This could be a high price to pay for a New Beginning with the Muslim world.

Mark Durie is a human rights activist, Anglican pastor and author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom.