This past week something truly unprecedented occurred in Anglican history. There are now two provinces of the Anglican communion that overlap territorially: The Episcopal Church of the United States of America (ECUSA) and the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). For those of you interested in the Anglican Way, you have probably followed these developments over the past 7 years. Since the last Lambeth Conference, then the Jerusalem GAFCOM in 2008, the push to unite the disparate dioceses and parishes that have successfully disassociated from the ECUSA has triumphed.  I have a new Archbishop. Moreover, I have a new province. My diocese is the network formerly called AMiA (Anglican Mission in the Americas), and my bishop, Thaddeus Barnum, has been retained. ACNA has now been recognized by the Most Rev. Dr. Mouneer H. Anis, presiding bishop of the Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East, the house of bishops of the Church of Uganda, and also bishops of the Southern Cone, and Australia, I believe. Very sensationally, the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America, His Beatitude Metropolitan Jonah, has broken ecumenical ties with the ECUSA and established them with ACNA. Also, the Reformed Episcopal Church, which severed ties with the ECUSA in the late nineteenth century, has acceded into ACNA.

None of this is conservative in a certain sense. On the other hand, the quest to maintain Tradition, by which I mean as a Reformed Catholic–the deposit of faith once received and passed down from the Apostles, that “sound pattern of words and doctrine” that constitute the Gospel and Christian orthodoxy–can lead one into unconservative action.  But the telos of such action is conservative in the highest sense, if by conservatism we mean, along with Eliot and Kirk, the preservation of the Permanent Things.  The Episcopal Church in the United States has fallen into deepest error and conduct unbecoming of Christians. I would have had problems seceding and making a new denomination, but that is not what ACNA is.  We are a new province that is now in direct competition with the ECUSA.  That competition is the race of faith.  But we of the Anglican Church in North America are not competing with the Episcopal Church for an earthly crown–from the way the ECUSA has sued so many of its former parishes one knows which prizes they want.  Therefore we run thus: not with uncertainty.  Thus we fight: not as one who shadowboxes. Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize?  We are running in a way that we obtain it.

And it is an imperishable crown.

Tags: ACNA, Anglicanism, the Episcopal Church

From a fantastic piece on Burke’s intellectual fatherhood of conservatism:

Third-and this subtends and modifies the two principles above-Burke is not really a Whig in a particular sense.  Unlike so many of his contemporaries and antecedents (one thinks of John Locke), Burke sincerely and consequentially holds that belief in the Christian God precedes and informs all other human activities:

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long.

He defends the Established Church not as one more convenient and beneficial artifice for the service of human wants; it is the portal through which man can look into his nature most clearly and see his true place.  Most distinctively modern philosophies think of human society as conventional, contingent, and artificial; they justify thereby man’s sovereignty over everything he knows, because he can know nothing he has not made.  Burke tells us something different.  Society and government are artificial not primarily in the sense of being the unnatural contrivance of human hands, but in being the instrumental means to human beings’ supernatural end.  The English, with their inheritable crown and above all their Established Church

conceive that He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection-He willed therefore the state-He willed its connexion with the source and original archetype of all perfection

Man, as a religious animal, is by his nature destined for a supernatural end; the state, a work of artifice, is one proper and instrumental contrivance that makes it possible for the natural man to work toward that perfection which will someday allow him to see his supernatural God face to face.  If temporal government appears as a “contrivance” it is thus only because it is ultimately subordinate to the Divine, not to man.

Consequently, at a moment in Reflections when Burke seems merely to be affirming the mortmain hold of the social contract on all generations, he in fact inserts the horizontal succession of those generations through constitutionalism into the vertical relation of each human being to the supernatural end for which he is destined:

Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible worlds, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.

For Saint Augustine, the visible world of the City of Man was in conflict with the invisible world of the City of God.  Not for Burke.  When he speaks of an “eternal society” he is speaking first of the Kingdom of Heaven, and he is speaking secondarily of the extended kingdom of man cradled within it.  The apparent sovereignty of government in the face of “natural rights” breaks down when confronted with the supernatural sovereignty of the Creator.  Or rather, human society is not merely patterned on the natural world, it is informed by its function to bring men to perfection, to aid them in becoming suitable for eternal life.  At the heart of Burke’s politics is an eschatology-one that refuses to follow the path of the Revolutionaries and become immanent.

Tags: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Eschatology, Nota Bene, Philosophy

Roger Scruton has an excellent piece in StandPoint Magazine on the virtues of wine. One of my favorite excerpts:

And here we should again return to the religious meaning of wine. At the risk of drastically oversimplifying, I suggest that there are two quite distinct strands that compose the religious consciousness, and that our understanding of religion has suffered from too great an emphasis on one of them. The first strand, which we over-emphasise — this, too, being part of our puritan legacy — is that of belief. The second strand, which is slipping away from modern thought (though not from modern reality) is that which might be summarised in the term “membership”, by which I mean all the customs, ceremonies and practices whereby the sacred is renewed, so as to be a real presence among us, and a living endorsement of the human community.

…

When people sit down together in a public place — a place where none of them is sovereign but each of them at home — and when those people pass the evening together, sipping drinks in which the spirit of place is stored and amplified, maybe smoking or taking snuff and in any case willingly exchanging the dubious benefits of longevity for the certain joys of friendship, they rehearse in their souls the original act of settlement, the act that set our species on the path of civilisation, and which endowed us with the order of neighbourhood and the rule of law.

Tags: Nota Bene, Religion, Roger Scruton, Wine

In my opinion–and this comes from looking at modernity from a theological perspective, a political philosophical perspective, a political science perspective, and (now, learning) from an international relations perspective–modernity is a mindset that touches everything from science, to politics, and religion, and “big social institutions” to relationships, and it can be summed up in two words.  Modernity is new power.  You can see this in Francis Bacon’s famous declaration that “Knowledge is power” when previously both in Christianity and classical philosophy, “Knowledge was virtue.”  That is, knowledge was intrinsically bound up with right action–to truly know the good, one must do or practice the good. In other words, knowledge of stuff isn’t neutral.  There aren’t a bunch of disconnected “facts” floating around–they are only truly known when they are integrated into a connected whole, the end or meaning of which is the Good, or the purpose of life.  And you can see this in many strains of antique teaching–from Aristotle to Jesus. 

The shift to modernity comes from too many events and sources that I can usefully summarize (many people point to Machiavelli as the source of modernity in politics, others to the breakdown of natural law in theological ethics with the Medieval nominalists in religion, and others to Bacon in the field of scientific inquiry, and in economics when capitalism disrupted the feudal system and made commoners as wealthy as aristocrats), but suffice it to say that when people viewed the pursuit of knowledge as the pursuit of our ability to stamp our image on the world and be free from the limits on our choices, the intellectual transition from pre-modern to modern occurred.  It was the Second Fall.  Modernity exacerbated a fundamental aspect of our fallen world–namely, alienation.  Without the power to choose otherwise, a person may be forced to live a certain way, and may be forced into virtues (or vices) that he or she would not otherwise choose.  “Modern politics” or “modern science” or modern this-that-or-the-other is giving somebody the power and therefore the choice to either continue in the way of thinking, living, and relating which they received by custom, convention, or tradition, or “become” an individual and elevate their own preferences and dreams of what could be as the standard (you can already see the dividing line between conservatism and progressivism here).  In politics, economics, religion, and science, modernity was the move away from constrained options to unconstrained options, and increasing power for individuals to opt out of non-contractual relationships.  In modern Western society now, people can live their whole lives in a world where everything reduces to a matter of their personal “choice,” or preference.  And a dividing line between conservatives and liberals is the degree of comfort of having that kind of society–where duty, i.e. deference to non-contractual relationships, and history, and a sense of natural limitation, constrain our own egoism.

Deference to such non-contractual relationships in a world of proliferating positivist law and contract came to seem romantic, even wistful.  I would affirm an affinity between romanticism and conservatism. The greatest poets are conservative, because they write about conservative things like home, family, love, place, and the past. As opposed to liberalism, which is more concerned with maximizing freedom of choice for everyone and not judging what one does with that freedom (hence the so-called “neutrality thesis” of J. S. Mill, stating that as long as you don’t interfere with someone else’s freedom of choice, you should have unlimited freedom of choice), conservatism tries to construct a more holistic account of the Good for the person and that person’s relationships (his society). By resisting the proposition that we are all individuals, conservatism affirms all the great and small connections we have with others, all the networks upon networks that form like a spider’s web the relations we have, which connects us to more people than we realize (heck, to prove this just look at the financial crisis!), including our ancestors.

This more holistic way of viewing ourselves means that we actually don’t know how many people we are connected with, nor to what extent.  There is no way to calculate how one man’s life influences the lives of others (think of what Clarence says to George in It’s a Wonderful Life when he shows George what the world would have been like without him).  Therefore, since we cannot rationally calculate the quantity and quality of all our relationships, to some extent our social life is mysterious.  Mystery in the face of life is a conservative value, not a liberal one.  Liberals are too rationalist about things, and rationalists hate mysteries.  And mystery is romantic, I think.

Many people have a feeling of life being more comprehendable, more stable, and just better, in a previous time.  This can be true of people as they reflect on their own life.  Now, obviously, not everybody feels this.  Or, at least, not everybody feels this all the time.  Nostalgia is most acute when you realize you lost something you valued, or didn’t even realize you valued.  To someone who never lost anything they ever valued, nostalgia doesn’t arise.  But for us in the 21st century, the conservative argument is that “we” have lost something we valued, or that many people unconsciously valued before the transition to modernity.  For different conservatives this lost “thing” can take many forms: small-town community, closer family relations, inherited jobs or ways of life, the comfort of religious authority, or a simpler pace of life.  But what unites conservatives is the feeling of loss–hence conservatism arises not from rational analysis but from the heart, or imagination, and is (again) romantic rather than rationalist.  This feeling of loss is what I meant by the “aura of nostalgia.”  I’ve often thought, “What would satisfy us conservatives?”  I’ve concluded that it comes down to feeling: what would satisfy us would be the justified feeling that the things we want to recover are here again, and constitute the life we want.

Tags: Conservatism, Modernity, Nostalgia, Romanticism

There is a romance to conservatism which I’ve often felt but had difficulty communicating.  The depth and grandeur of conservatism comes from its non-systematic nature, how it taps the imagination and the heart as well as the mind.  It is a way of viewing the world that tries to feel for the Permanent Things of life.  It has a tragic nature to it, as Mark likes to note because it is a reaction to modernity, and there is a felt sense of loss, and therefore a “loss of innocence” in the knowledge of a lost good… very like the feeling Adam and Eve had once they acquired the knowledge of Good and Evil. Very like the feeling we have as we leave childhood.  But as we exist now after the fact of modernity (and, in a different sense and more broadly, the Fall), the only way we can intuit and relive the experience of the life we wish to lead is under the aura of nostalgia.  And nostalgia is a combination of two Greek words: nostos and oikos, which denotes return to the home (the great theme of all conservative literature, beginning with Homer’s Odyssey!).  Conservatives want to feel settled in a home, or to make a home out of their environment.  Because a home is where you are known personally, which is a pre-requisite of love.  And love is a value of conservatism, not liberalism.  The home is the place where we first experience the world, relate to others and see relationships of equality and hierarchy, and experience loyalty, community, and responsibility… which are all pre-requisite to liberty.  Liberals and libertarians alike jump too fast to make liberty and freedom their first principles, when in fact freedom is a mature achievement of adults, but the dream of children.  By not explicitly making duty, natural-limitation, and hierarchy a deeper part of their view of society, liberals literally offer people an adolescent view of the world.

One thing I realized about conservatism is that it sees liberty as a power, not a right.  (This is very classically Greek, by the way).  Liberty is the power to shape the res publica into an intelligibly humane reflection of the common good.  When people demand liberty, they are demanding the freedom to act in some way.  Political liberty is the freedom to act politically.  What is acting politically? It is authoritatively deciding to prioritize one value over another.  What for?  If it isn’t some pure power politics move, political action is meant to make this world “better,” that is to say, “more livable.”  And how do we interpret things as being “more livable”?  I would say, by making things more fit for humans, or, making something more humane, that is, on a more human scale.  That’s what I mean about shaping the public world into a more humane reflection.  God imprinted his reflection on us, and we cannot help but want to imprint our image on the world.  We want to see a human face on things, on institutions, on our world.  Again, what for?

The Biblical narrative is about transforming a garden into a city.  We start out in a garden in Genesis, but we don’t stay in the garden.  In Revelation we see the final end of humanity–it is in a celestial city. As co-redeemers in Christ’s work of restoring creation we are tasked to go out in the wilderness of this world, the broken relationships, the chaos of sinful souls that overflows in the world, and make gardens–the Gospel and salvation is only the beginning!  Because Christians do not leave gardens unattended: we cultivate them, we engage in culture to dig out–to unearth–the divine design in every pursuit; to find the right relationship of every person and institution; the common good in every level of community.  Why?  To humanize our environment, to “fill the earth and multiply” is, as image-bearers, to fashion a human face in the public square, which is to see God’s face in the re-creations we make on top of his.

And this notion of liberty is the cause of self-government.  To be able to experience the public square for every community of people, so that they may realize in their particular time and place and circumstance the proper humane society that is fit for them–is the necessity of self-government, of tying government–and the power to shape the res publica of every level of community–to the liberty of that people who are governed.  And this notion of self-government is the cause of America.  The restrained republicanism of early America, which is what  the shorthand of “limited government” is about, has always been the cause of conservatives in America.  And this cause is nothing less than the cause of civilization itself, of transforming wilderness into garden, garden into City of God.  And what is civilization after all?  Nothing less than the cultural mandate of Genesis–the work of making this planet into our home.

Tags: Conservatism, Liberty

I meant to post this awhile ago, but seem to have forgotten. So here it is, an excellent article by Daniel McCarthy in The American Conservative, “What would Burke do?” Excerpt:

For the low church conservative, politics is teleocratic—a purpose-driven activity. In the language of British philosopher Michael Oakeshott (very much a high church type), the low church conservative views the state—and perhaps his church, too—as an “enterprise association.” The high church conservative, on the other hand, considers the state to be a “civil association,” whose enjoyment is its own reward. He believes politics should be nomocratic—a matter of upholding a constitutional framework within which diverse ends can be pursued. As Oakeshott says, “the intimations of government are to be found in ritual, not in religion or philosophy; in the enjoyment of orderly and peaceable behaviour, not in the search for truth or perfection.”

This poses a fascinating question. Which is better: teleocratic or nomocratic government? I lean, unsurprisingly perhaps, towards the Burkean, “high church conservative” preference for nomocratic government. Yet, I’m also extremely sympathetic to the Platonic/Socratic conception of a teleocratic City. Are these mutually exclusive? Does it depend on scale, scope, or context? Perhaps this is a sub-discusssion within subsidiarity. At the end of the day, however, I just can’t shake my skepticism of the ability of civil organization to engage in soul formation. Nomocratic may not be the best government, per se, but it might just be the best possible. We wouldn’t want to immanentize the eschaton, now would we?

Tags: Anglicanism, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Nota Bene, Subsidiarity

An interview with Jean Bethke-Elshtain, one of my favorite professors from UofC, on the works and thought of Vaclav Havel:

So we have in a sense politicized the private and privatized the political, and it’s very hard for us to think about what is of authentically public concern, about what concerns all of us in our civic capacities. Part of what we’ve seen over the last half century is a diminution of the importance of what it means to be a citizen, which means you’re a human being with civic capacities. So, what do we share as citizens? Do we even think in that way any longer? We have to ponder what is the concern of citizens, which means the concern of all of us in common. Unless you have some recognition of that, it’s very difficult to have authentic public speech because we don’t have a sense of what the public means anymore.

…

And the problem is, it seems to me, that the wager of democracy is that there is a sense of the worth of civic life, the importance of dialogue and exchange. Having words that are full of meaning and import is vital to that. Think about human rights—we’ve contrived a way to even trivialize that. So, everything we want or prefer we call a right and scream about it, but then we have people, like the folks in Darfur, and there we’re reminded about what human rights and human dignity is all about. We need those reminders. We need to remind ourselves that these words really have a deep meaning and significance for the lives of millions of people in the world. We need to remind ourselves that we trivialize words at our own peril.

Tags: Jean Bethke-Elshtain, Nota Bene, Philosophy, Politics, University of Chicago, Vaclav Havel

Soldier #1: What about all that preachin’ you do back home, bishop? Don’t you believe in God?

Solider #2: Well now I believes in it at the time I was preachin’ it. Hell, now I just believe in pictures of old white men on green paper.

Solider #1: That ain’t no way to live. God don’t like ugly.

Solider #2: He ain’t no fan of pretty, either… Why, why do you think God allowed all this killin’ all over the world to happen? Hm? See, that’s why I don’t believe in him.

Soldier #1: Well, if you don’t believe in Him, bishop, then why are you worried about why God’s the one allowin’ all the killin’?

Tags: Movies, Theodicy

Question: What is the essence and physical referent for community?  I submit: Meals.

Culture is closely tied with food, as anyone who has ever traveled the world can testify. The kind of food that is made and the way it is shared is the primordial stuff of culture, which defines communities.  Meals give a reason for being to a community.  Think of a family. Which is weirder: a family that shares work every day but takes every meal in total solitude, or a family that works separately but comes together during the day and shares every meal?  Clearly, eating together is more essential to the nature of family than working together.

Working together is accidental to community.  Working is oriented to obtaining material conditions to subsist materially. But if you work to obtain material conditions to subsist materially… to enable you to work better to obtain more material conditions, your life is circular. What is the point? (Now, most people in history have led this life, but despite the nobility of hard work, subsistence living does not produce culture).

Clearly, you work to provide leisure for yourself and others.  Leisure is the basis of culture, and nothing signifies leisure more than sharing meals. It is at table where we enjoy each other as ends-in-ourselves, and enjoy life as a participatory end-in-itself. In short, the table is a foundation of culture. It gives us a reason to be together, and that reason is relationship itself.

The Lord’s Table is iconic of this.  For the Christian, we feast every Sunday together in a ceremonial replication of the Last Supper, where Christ revealed that he himself is the reason for our life, and thereby explicitly identified himself as our food.  Our relationship with God is tied to our relationship with fellow members of the Church, and our relationship with each other reflects on our relationship with Christ himself.  How do we physically affirm these intertwining relationships?  A meal.

Other human institutions organize our relations on a contractual basis (employment, for example) or a voluntary basis (a social club), and are sealed by meeting contractual obligations that do not essentially build relationship.  But non-contractual relations, such as church and family, force us to share a common life together, and they are sealed by pursuing leisure: sharing meals, the only reason for which is to build relationship.

The Eucharist is iconic of the ideal community.  It is a picture of a feast, the sponsor of which is the patriarchal founder of the community, God the Father, who sent his Son to become mankind in order to reconcile us into true brotherhood, a resurrected humanity that finds in each man a brother.   How do we enter into this fellowship?  Confession, greeting one another with the Peace of God, and breaking bread together. 

The Eucharist is also a generator of culture, since with a meal comes conversation.  For the Church, conversation takes the form of the Homily, a meditation on history—namely, sacred history, or God’s redemptive actions in time—which reinforces a tradition, and gives us an identity in time. This traditional identity places us within the company of those who shared this meal before us, thereby connecting us with a family greater than our own present company.  We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, and they are known to us, and we to them.  This religious identity tells us who we are; our identity is received and not invented by us.

The problem with ideology is that it is an invented identity.  Nationalism, for example, is invented to overthrow foreign governments and build new states.  Nationalism says that you are part of a greater community, but it is a parochial community of blood or land.  This is different from Christian identity which rests in no racial or territorial distinction.  Ideology is an invention of modernity, which sought to overthrow all received identities and inherited meanings in order to give the individual the power to determine his own meaning.  In actuality, I would argue that modernity was promulgated by the rise of states to break down the loyalty to intermediary institutions in order to enlist the loyalty of newly atomized individuals by aggregating them into resources for the state (whether for economic or military reasons).  Modernity came from state power.  And state power has always been the side of the coin with Caesar’s image. 

Biblical prophesy from Daniel to Revelation is essentially a message that the temporal will seek to dominate the transcendent, that governments will seek to dominate the church, that Babylon will seek to carry Jerusalem into captivity. 

But this is leading me into ground I plan to address later.

Suffice it to say, that Christian community is iconic for the community for all renewed humanity, and its chief event is a meal and conversation.

Tags: Community, Culture, Eucharist

Tags: Easter