Among the hot-button issues in the November elections, support for Israel will figure prominently. But the issue is not Israel, and surely not the eventual construction of apartments in East Jerusalem. It is the Administration’s neglect or sabotage of vital security interests of the United States.

Erstwhile supporters of President Obama are shocked—shocked—to discover that President Obama wants to appease Iran and intimidate Israel. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith pronounced himself “shocked and stunned at the administration’s tone and public dressing down of Israel on the issue of future building in Jerusalem,” adding, “We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States.”

US-Israeli relations are the least of the problem. As the Associated Press reported March 15, “Since the controversy erupted, a bipartisan parade of influential lawmakers and interest groups has taken aim at the administration’s decision to publicly condemn Israel for its announcement of new Jewish housing in east Jerusalem while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting on Tuesday and then openly vent bitter frustration on Friday.”

In fact, American sympathy for Israel is close to its all-time peak (only exceeded during the First Gulf War), a Gallup poll concluded in late February.

Even more to the point, independents’ sympathy for Israel stands at an all-time high of 60 percent (with Republicans at 85 percent), while Democrats’ support remains roughly unchanged.

It is easy for Republicans to chide the Administration for taking an inappropriately hostile tone for an American ally popular with the public. But the real scandal in American foreign policy, and the Administration’s point of greatest vulnerability, is continued appeasement of the Iranian regime despite Tehran’s open contempt for American overtures, and commitment to developing nuclear weapons.

On this issue the poll numbers are just as lopsided. Sixty percent of respondents in a March 2 Fox News poll said they believed force would be required to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, while only 25 percent believe that diplomacy and sanctions will work. Fifty-one percent of Democrats and 75 percent of Republicans polled favored the use of force. Obama’s job approval for handling Iran was at only 41 percent, with 42 percent disapproving.

The president’s approval rating would be considerable lower if voters were well informed about the extent to which American policy has groveled before the Islamic Republic.

First of all, Obama’s rancor towards Israel has little to do with apartments in Jerusalem and everything to do with discouraging Israel from striking Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity. As the Israeli daily Ha’Aretz reported March 3, Sen. John Kerry told a press conference in Israel that the purpose of Biden’s visit to Israel, and that of other senior administration officials, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Michael Mullen, aims at restraining Israel against the possibility of unilaterally attacking Iran.

In response to a question on whether the U.S. is concerned about the possibility of such Israeli action, he said that “the prime minister is more than aware through his conversations with the Secretary of State and the President himself, as well as just through his own common sense—I think he is very tuned in to not being rash or jumping the gun here or doing something that doesn’t give those other opportunities a chance.’”

The Administration, in other words, is twisting the arm of America’s principal Middle East ally to prevent Israel from doing what an overwhelming majority of the American public wants America to do in any event. Obama proposes pressure on Iran, so long as it is not effective. “It is not our intent to have crippling sanctions that have a significant impact on the Iranian people,” said a State Department spokesman Feb. 25. “Our actual intent is to find ways to pressure the government while protecting the people.”

While pursuing a lukewarm and ineffective sanctions strategy—which most Americans consider futile—Washington has openly offered Iran an expanded regional role, including influence in Afghanistan, despite the Tehran regime’s longstanding support for the Taliban. Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad was received as a friend by Afghanistan’s President Karzai in Kabul March 10. Karzai’s Vice President, the Northern Alliance leader Mohammed Fahim, met the Iranian leader at the airport.

The United States responded to Ahmadinejad’s Afghan visit by paying obeisance to Iran’s influence. “The future of Afghanistan has a regional dimension and we hope that Iran will play a more constructive role in Afghanistan in the future,” said US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley. He added in the past, the US and Iran have “cooperated constructively” and hoped that they would do so again, given that Iran has “a legitimate interest in the future of Afghanistan”.

The administration, meanwhile, has attempted to court Syria, returning the American ambassador (withdrawn in 2005 after Syria arranged the murder of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri), and sending a parade of senior State Department officials to Damascus. Syrian President Bashir Assad responded by inviting Ahmadinejad to Tehran and ridiculing American efforts to separate Syrian and Iran. Standing next to the Iranian leader, Assad said of Washington, “I am really surprised how they talk about stability in the Middle East, peace and other beautiful principles and they call two countries, any two countries and not necessarily Syria and Iran, to keep distance.”

Added Ahmadinejad: “(The Americans) want to dominate the region but they feel Iran and Syria are preventing that. We tell them that instead of interfering in the region’s affairs, to pack their things and leave.”

Turkey, the only NATO member in the region, has taken Iran’s side against the United States—not a surprising outcome given the reluctance of the American side to assert its own interests.

Meanwhile, the clock ticks away for Iranian nuclear weapons development. In the view of America’s Arab allies in the Persian Gulf, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s talk of an America “defense umbrella” for the Gulf States was a de facto admission that American anticipated that Iran would succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons.

Edited into bullet points for attack ads, these instances of White House fecklessness will eat deeply into Democratic support in the November elections. Obama’s obsession with mollifying a hostile and dangerous regime exceeds the intelligible boundaries of political sentiment. He is at odds with essential American security interests and with the healthy common sense of the American public. Fortunately, America is a democracy. The remedy is to hammer this home to the voters between now and November.

David P. Goldman is senior editor of First Things.

On Sunday, March 7, five hundred Christians were killed—slaughtered with machetes by Fulani Muslims in the Nigerian state of Plateau. The latest in religious clashes that the state has seen in recent months, the bulk of the attacks this time were in three farming villages (Dogo Nahawa, Zot, and Rastat) near the town of Jos, with reports claiming around 75 houses burned.

Christian leaders say they telephoned for protection from the national security forces as the Muslim crowd gathered, but the military apparently refused to react until 3:30 a.m., by which time the slaughter was mostly finished. Indeed, the failure to protect the Nigerian Christians was even more egregious—for the assailants seem to have come from out of state. Despite advance notice of their arrival, the military made no plans beforehand to protect the threatened villages.

Some of this governmental failure comes from sheer incompetence, and some derives from an unwillingness of Muslim political and military leaders to attack their own people. But mostly the failure to protect threatened Christians seems to originate in the strange fear of action the military forces seem to feel. Even while Church burnings and assassinations continue, the military—which acts as the national rapid-response police force—is terrified of being perceived as taking sides. Hundreds of deaths later, they move into an already burned-out territory and declare victory.

Christians outside Nigeria have been oddly quick to seek non-religious reasons for the murders. It’s true that ethnic battles align with some of the religious conflicts, as do geographical divisions between the oil-rich south and the impoverished north—to say nothing of the old wounds still felt from the civil war, from 1967 to 1970, over the attempt of Biafra to secede from Nigeria.

For that matter, Nigeria has been plagued with attacks on its oil wells and pipelines. Officials, including three state governors, meet yesterday to discuss an offer of amnesty for rebels who disarmed—and a militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, promptly bombed the building.

But the fact remains that, whatever the cause, violence in Nigeria always ends up as religious. Authorities have arrested and charged 49 of those who attacked the villages around the state capital of Jos, but they still have no plans in place to prevent future attacks.

And so the violence will go on. And what advice can we give the Christian communities? The incapacity of the government to protect its citizens will have—must have—one sure result: When government fails, people take on the roles of government—especially the military roles. If the Nigerian authorities cannot act, the Christian communities will have to arm themselves and form mobile, rapid response military groups to safeguard their members.

It’s hard to advise the Christians not to arm themselves, but this is not a result anyone wants to see. International pressure on the Nigerian government may help force the authorities to act more seriously. Indeed, it’s the only possible help, and here at First Things we are organizing a protest rally, to be held at 5:00 on April 7 at the Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations, 828 Second Avenue, here in New York.

How many more rampages will it take? How many more murders of 500 people here, 500 people there—a land red with blood—before the Nigerian government understands its responsibilities? It took more than a decade for the world to understand the slaughters that were happening in the south of Sudan and apply pressure to the Sudanese government. We cannot allow the same delay to happen now. Join us on April 7 as we rally to bring attention to the murderous consequences of the failure of Nigeria to defend its own people.

Joseph Bottum is editor of First Things

We are now a few weeks into the Chinese New Year (a year of the Tiger, elementally specified as metal, metaphysically specified as yang), and this seems a fairly auspicious time to pay tribute to one of my favorite of Chinese culture’s immortals: the great poet T’ao Ch’ien (A.D. 365–427), also known by his birth name, T’ao Yüanming. Revered as the father of the high tradition of Chinese poetry, T’ao is also regarded as something of a great sage and has been claimed, at various times, by Confucian, Taoist, and Ch’an (Zen) tradition (the last even though he was not a Buddhist). Popular legend occasionally names him as one of the figures in the iconic image of the Three Laughing Sages (sometimes as the Confucian, sometimes as the Taoist), and some scholars of Chinese Buddhism accord him an absolutely seminal importance in the evolution of the peculiar sensibility of Zen. All of this, I suspect, he would have thought rather silly.

T’ao was not a prolific writer. He left behind only a small collection of verse, a few short essays, and a single letter, written to his son. In his own day his poetry was scarcely noticed. But the great efflorescence of Chinese poetic culture during the Tang and Sung dynasties sprang, in large part, from the rediscovery of T’ao, both as a poet and as an ideal. The greatest writers of China’s poetic golden age regarded him as the absolute virtuoso of “the natural voice,” almost magically able to combine the subtle and the simple in verse that was most lyrical precisely where it appeared least adorned. “On the outside,” remarked the great Sung poet Su Shi (Su Tung-p’o), “it is withered, but on the inside abundant. It seems plain, and yet is truly beautiful.” It was T’ao, more perhaps than anyone else, who bequeathed to classical Chinese literature its most central aesthetic values: its immediacy, its limpidity, and its veneration of nature.

All of this is cause enough to celebrate the man. My own reason for calling attention to T’ao just at the moment, however, is my firm conviction that he may have been, quite simply, one of the sanest human beings who ever lived.

I want to be clear here. Sanity is not sanctity (indeed, the latter often requires the forfeit of the former), and T’ao was neither a saint nor a mystic; his wisdom, which was deep, was nevertheless of a thoroughly earthly and ordinary variety. He scrupulously avoided, in fact, the only path of spiritual liberation on offer in his day. Hui Yüan, the Buddhist abbot of Lu Mountain, was so anxious to win T’ao over that he even allowed wine (the poet’s one notorious weakness) to be served on monastery grounds. But while T’ao was happy to drain his cup when visiting the monks, he still declined to embrace the dharma. He was temperamentally averse to asceticism and inflexible regimens, and he valued the joys of family and household far above the prospect of a salvation so laboriously won.

Which is very much to my point. The essence of mental and spiritual health is, after all, to care deeply about a very few, particularly precious, and intimately familiar things, and to regard the rest of reality with generous indifference. Of course, if everyone were sane in this sense, nothing ever would get done—and that would, I suppose, be a bad thing. We seem to have some need, for instance, for politicians, at least under our current system. Considered rationally, however, only a person who is somewhat deranged could ever possibly care enough about politics to want to participate in its processes. Anyone able to read a piece of legislation with interest is already a tad demented, and anyone willing to write a piece of legislation clearly suffers from a minor obsessive psychosis. So God bless them, but God spare us their derangement.

T’ao was entirely devoid of whatever spiritual malady or degeneracy of the soul it is that makes certain persons ambitious for political office. He assumed the cognomen Ch’ien—“Recluse”—in middle age precisely to give notice that he would never resume any of the official responsibilities or titles that occasionally had been thrust on him as a younger man, both by the accidents of his birth and by the exigencies of poverty. Although he was born of a distinguished family of classically educated Confucian scholars and trained to serve in the administrative class of the Middle Kingdom, he preferred farming. For many years, however, he could not make his farm solvent.

At the age of twenty-nine, he reluctantly took up a post in his local provincial government, near Hsün-yang, but bureaucracy and the intolerably deferential protocols of office soon drove him back to his farm. Financial necessity forced him once more into public service from 395 to 400, but he fled homeward again in 401 and managed for a while to wring a bearable subsistence from the soil. In 405, however, when an injury made the exertions of farming too difficult, friends prevailed on him to return to public service. He accepted the position of government magistrate in P’eng-tse.

T’ao held this, his last government post, for a tenure of only eighty days. Soon after taking up his seal of office, he dictated that all the government fields in his jurisdiction be planted exclusively with glutinous rice used for making wine (though his wife soon convinced him to plant a sixth of the fields with a comestible variety instead). Otherwise, he discharged his responsibilities conscientiously, but not avidly, and he still could not bend his nature to official ceremony. When, one day, his assistant informed him he would have to fasten up his girdle to pay his respects to a visiting government inspector, T’ao groaned and remarked that he would not bow and scrape to some oaf just to earn a few bushels of rice. That same day, he resigned.

Thereafter, for more than twenty years, T’ao politely refused every entreaty to return to public life and devoted himself only to what he loved: farming, poetry (which, he said, he wrote only for his own amusement), the perennial cycles of the natural world, the transitory music of familial affection, and wine. Everything else he did his best to ignore. He chose obscurity over preeminence, poverty over wealth, and family over society. He was, the records report, almost boundlessly contented. In those years, although he was not a sociable man, there was no one whose society was more eagerly sought. One of his friends, just for the pleasure of his company, once even laid a “honeyed” trap for him—a table decked with cups and a flagon of wine, set up along a path where T’ao often walked. The friend knew that this was the only thing that could detain the poet for more than a few moments.

The virtue that T’ao ultimately refined to utmost perfection was hsien, “idleness.” Not “laziness” (farming, after all, is no occupation for the indolent), but rather a condition of deep peacefulness and interior quietude. Hsien is not exactly detachment, since it flows most properly from genuine attachment to the right things, nor is it any kind of spiritual austerity. It is simply an inability to be agitated by trifles or distracted by irrational appetites, and the sublime capacity for total contentment in doing nothing when nothing is what needs to be done.

Around this still center within himself, this abiding hsien, T’ao cultivated a character that was gentle but never mawkish or servile, humorous but never cruel, proud but never arrogant or pompous, and sensualist but never depraved or avaricious. He made room for his appetites (which were moderate) without being enslaved by them. He could certainly drink too much now and then, but he usually drank only enough to bedizen the world with an amiable glow. And he was blessed with a deep and sympathetic kindness. His one surviving letter rather touchingly enjoins his son to be kind to a peasant boy who works on the farm, “for he too is someone’s son.”

In any event, for all that he craved rustic obscurity, T’ao ultimately became one of the indispensable pillars supporting the “gold and jade palace” of Chinese cultural identity. Indeed, but for his want of worldly ambition, this would not have happened. He died largely impoverished but left behind a joyful and inextirpable cultural memory, a particularly delightful pattern of the ideal man, and a small body of perfectly accomplished art. And he was able to do all this because—again—he was so imperturbably and incorrigibly sane.

David B. Hart is author of The Beauty of the Infinite and Atheist Delusions.

The Senate version of health care reform currently being forced ahead by congressional leaders and the White House is a bad bill that will result in bad law. It does not deserve, nor does it have, the support of the Catholic bishops of our country. Nor does the American public want it. As I write this column on March 14, the Senate bill remains gravely flawed. It does not meet minimum moral standards in at least three important areas: the exclusion of abortion funding and services; adequate conscience protections for health care professionals and institutions; and the inclusion of immigrants.

Groups, trade associations, and publications describing themselves as “Catholic” or “prolife” that endorse the Senate version—whatever their intentions—are doing a serious disservice to the nation and to the Church, undermining the witness of the Catholic community and ensuring the failure of genuine, ethical health care reform. By their public actions, they create confusion at exactly the moment Catholics need to think clearly about the remaining issues in the health care debate. They also provide the illusion of moral cover for an unethical piece of legislation.

As we enter a critical week in the national health care debate, Catholics need to remember a few simple facts.

First, the Catholic bishops of the United States have pressed for real national health care reform in this country for more than half a century. They began long before either political party or the public media found it convenient. That commitment hasn’t changed. Nor will it.

Second, the bishops have tried earnestly for more than seven months to work with elected officials to craft reform that would serve all Americans in a manner respecting minimum moral standards. The failure of their effort has one source. It comes entirely from the stubbornness and evasions of certain key congressional leaders, and the unwillingness of the White House to honor promises made by the president last September.

Third, the health care reform debate has never been merely a matter of party politics. Nor is it now. Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak and a number of his Democratic colleagues have shown extraordinary character in pushing for good health care reform while resisting attempts to poison it with abortion-related entitlements and other bad ideas that have nothing to do with real health care. Many Republicans share the goal of decent health care reform, even if their solutions would differ dramatically. To put it another way, few persons seriously oppose making adequate health services available for all Americans. But God, or the devil, is in the details—and by that measure, the current Senate version of health care reform is not merely defective, but also a dangerous mistake.

The long, unpleasant and too often dishonest national health care debate is now in its last days. Its most painful feature has been those “Catholic” groups that by their eagerness for some kind of deal undercut the witness of the Catholic community and help advance a bad bill into a bad law. Their flawed judgment could now have damaging consequences for all of us.

Do not be misled. The Senate version of health care reform currently being pushed ahead by congressional leaders and the White House—despite public resistance and numerous moral concerns—is bad law; and not simply bad, but dangerous. It does not deserve, nor does it have, the support of the Catholic bishops in our country, who speak for the believing Catholic community. In its current content, the Senate version of health care legislation is not “reform.” Catholics and other persons of good will concerned about the foundations of human dignity should oppose it.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M Cap., is the archbishop of Denver.

So the Vatican’s chief exorcist insists that the joint is demon-possessed.

Well, if you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

I mean, he’s an exorcist. What else is he going to say—it’s the plumbing? And not just an exorcist—he’s chief exorcist, which is to say head of a group of exorcists. In the Vatican. The one in Rome.

What I’d like to know is, when you say someone is “linked to the Demon,” does this mean that a member of the species homo sapiens has signed a pact, made a blood oath, offered invocations and conjurations, sold his immortal soul to Beelzebub and his minions, received the diabolical mark forever branding the bedeviled as hell-bound, in exchange for health, wealth, and acclaim? Or do the parties in question merely hang out on the odd Saturday night? And if Mephistopheles is a resident of the Vatican, does he get his own apartment, or is it sharesies? (That heating bill must tax the house accountants sorely. I know Rome is warm, but it ain’t that warm.)

Many a thriller has used Vatican hijinks, not to mention deals with the Devil, as its hook. Think of Windswept House by Malachi Martin, himself a novel-worthy character. And of course, the Reformation produced some nice woodcuts in which the Archfiend and the Bishop of Rome are . . . linked. Luther himself was often referred to as a cohort of the Evil One, but only by his father, and then after he’d had a brewski or two. (Luther’s father, not Satan, who prefers Fresca.)

I wonder if diabology is a growing field? One would have thought that the science of Satanism would have gone the way of phrenology, astrology, and sociology as so much folderol. But given the evil that men do, spiritual causes are as likely as psychological, societal, and biochemical ones. Unless you’re a pure naturalist, in which case, it’s all in the wiring. And electricians we will always have with us.

But where does all this talk of demons finally get us? Can’t we simply agree with Lord Acton that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and leave it at that?

Anthony Sacramone is a freelance writer and the former managing editor of First Things.

Eric Rohmer, leading director of the French New Wave, died in January at age 89. During a career that spanned fifty years, he gained international acclaim and some box-office success. But he died having been loved for the wrong reasons. His art-house fans described his films as “sexy . . . nonjudgmental, and liberating.” In fact, his deeply Catholic films were models of restraint that praised virtue. It’s time to liberate Rohmer from the libertines.

Among the best known of Rohmer’s films are his Six Moral Tales, movies imbued with delicate longing and keen moral awareness in which characters struggle to come to terms with their duties and desires. It’s easy to see, in these films, why some have suggested that the central principle of Rohmer’s personal life was fidelity, a quality exhibited as much in his unfailing punctuality as his deep Catholic faith.

It’s natural that Rohmer’s faith shaped his films; the movies played a large part in leading him to belief. Rohmer experienced a “road to Damascus” moment while watching Stromboli, a film by Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Rohmer was so inspired by Rossellini’s Catholic vision that he turned away from the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and adopted an outlook grounded in the Catholic faith and animated by the reality of incarnation and being.

Christ was not a theme of Rohmer’s art, but we find Christ there nonetheless: in the Mass scenes of My Night at Maud’s and on the cross in Perceval. We find Christ unexpectedly in the prologue to Love in the Afternoon, when the protagonist imagines that he has a device that allows him to seduce any woman who passes him in the square. Only one girl is able to resist the character’s power: “I’m going to see someone else,” she says, as a rose window looms behind her. “He’s the only one I love.”

Any writer of subtitles who renders that He in the lower case has failed to hear the ambiguity of a pronoun that reaches upward toward the transcendent. Here, as in all Rohmer’s work, the force comes from a delicacy and understatement that are in absolute earnest. There is great substance in Rohmer’s work, but nothing preachy or polemical.

At the beginning of Rohmer’s career, his reticence on matters of religion and politics was itself fraught with political significance. He was part of a group of young critics who gathered at the magazine Cahiers du cinema and rejected the Marxist insistence on seeing art in primarily political terms. Rohmer and the others stressed, instead, the way some films, including some Hollywood films, should be considered works of art that bear the personal stamp of their creators, or auteurs.

Thus the political heresy: To claim that Hollywood films could be great and lasting works of art was to say that capitalism, in the form of profit-driven movie studios, could create works of beauty to rival any product of the Renaissance studio or medieval workshop.

Old grudges die hard, and some of the political resentments Rohmer elicited have outlived their object. Rohmer’s political apostasy was probably behind the confused claim, in the New York Times obituary, that Rohmer’s radically innovative films exhibited a “conservative” visual style. Meanwhile, the Trotskyites on the still-active International Committee of the Fourth International responded to news of his death by publishing a piece that accused Rohmer of “removing money pressures from the artistic treatment of love relations”—an ideological way of saying that Rohmer refused to drown the reality of love in doctrinaire political ideologies. In Rohmer’s world, in fact, the exchange of money is often a prelude to his characters’ romantic monkeyshines precisely because he was aware of all the innumerable pressures sometimes exerted on love. But these pressures are part and parcel of our humanity, not the “system.”

A much more common complaint about Rohmer’s films is that they are boring. A character played by Gene Hackman in Arthur Penn’s film Night Moves says, “I saw a Rohmer movie once. It was kind of like watching paint dry.” A subtler form of this criticism is present in the habit—especially noticeable in the obituaries—of comparing Rohmer to great novelists and painters. Whether the reference is to Sherwin-Williams or Cezanne, the insinuation is that while Rohmer may have crafted delicate tales and created striking visual compositions, he was not really a filmmaker; he never made movies. Rohmer did place speech over spectacle, but only out of a belief that in life the real action takes place in conversations. In his essay “For a Talking Cinema,” Rohmer noted that twenty years after the introduction of sound to film, words still were seen as secondary to the image. Rohmer called for the kind of cinema he would go on to create, one in which speech was integral to the structure.

Rohmer also pursued technological and formal innovation. The Lady and the Duke, from 2001, was the first all-digital film in France. In the medieval tale Perceval, the characters narrate their own actions and recount conversations instead of actually conversing. (The actor who played the title character called the film “a scholarly project, touched with insanity.”)

But the critics who do not see the filmmaker in Rohmer are misguided for a more important reason: We live in an age allergic to self-discipline and restraint. For Rohmer, making spare use of technical effects was itself a calculated cinematic effect. A Rohmer film might employ only a single pan, for instance, during its two-hour duration, but that pan is sure to reflect a moment of profound importance, and its effect on the receptive viewer will be far more moving than the cinematographic antics of less restrained directors.

The best assessment of Rohmer’s films may have been his own: “Our time is such,” he wrote, “that the most profound instances of originality and modernity are hidden behind the mask of classicism and discretion.” Here, at least, his criticism is as eloquent and exact as his films. Both express a commitment to a profound creative asceticism that serves as a witness to the truth of the Christian faith as powerful as many more explicit proclamations.

Given the intimacy of Rohmer’s films and their subtle critiques of our self-indulgent visual habits (habits that reflect, perhaps, our overall spiritual lassitude), it is perhaps no surprise that many remembrances of the great director have taken an intensely personal tone. Fama has many faces, but the fame granted to Eric Rohmer appears very much like the normal condition of life: to be loved by a few, disliked by some, and unknown to most. May he rest in peace.

Matthew Schmitz is a research associate at the Witherspoon Institute and the managing editor of Public Discourse.