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Picture It: Spring, 2024

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Four-and-a-half months since my last update. The TL;DR: Life is good. This update will be lengthy, and organized in sections that appear in no specific order, so grab your favorite beverage and let’s get down to business.

The Winter That Wasn’t

So, uh, how about last winter, amirite?

In Grand Rapids, we had roughly two weeks of legitimate winter, which wasn’t terrible. But it wasn’t good, either. I was rather excited to drive a full-sized truck with new tires and four-wheel drive through many mountains of snow. But alas, most of the winter was snow-free and hovering within that awkward range of cold that’s too chilly for being coatless but not chilly enough to feel like winter.

That meant that a lot of green appeared unseasonably early — I saw trees budding in early April, when they shouldn’t have budded until the first week of May. Lucky for them, we didn’t experience a meaningful frost after that point, but still.

The view out of my home-office window, that one day we had snow this winter. 🙁

The upside? The Climate Prediction Center suggests that West Michigan will have a 40 percent to 50 percent chance of higher-than-normal temperatures through the November-through-January window, at which time (December-through-February) we’re back to equal probabilities of warmer or cooler weather through the second half of next winter. Also, equal probabilities or wetter or dryer than normal conditions through the summer, and a 40 to 50 percent probability of higher-than-normal precipitation from December through March.

I love Michigan’s climate. I love hot, humid, sunny summers and cold, snowy winters. And everything in between. It felt weird to not really have much of a winter this past season, but perhaps we’ll make up for lost time six months from now.

A Productive Lent and Easter

For several years now, it’s seemed as if I keep trying to have a spiritually enriching Lent or Easter or Advent or Christmas or whatever season. And then — poof. Nothing happens.

This year was different.

I decided to tackle Lent the down-and-dirty way: One day at a time, driven in large part by the gratitude I felt from Cade’s cancer being classified as Stage II instead of Stage IV. I started on Ash Wednesday, partaking of the noon service at St. Mary’s in downtown Grand Rapids. That Saturday, I attended Confession for the first time in a couple of years, at Sacred Heart. Then Mass at St. Anthony.

Holy Week split between St. Anthony for Good Friday and St. Isidore for Easter Sunday as well as for another stint in the penalty box confessional.

Given my weekend schedule as of late, I’ve settled on a routine of Sunday evening Mass at St. Isidore while also observing my normal First Friday Adoration schedule (midnight until 2 a.m., if anyone’s up for joining me!) at Sacred Heart. I’ve been reading the Bible cover-to-cover while in Adoration. I started in 2021 with Genesis and now I’m up to Micah, although I’m reading the RSV-2CE (the Didache Bible from Ignatius Press) so the Maccabees appear after the minor prophets instead of with the rest of the historical books. I figure in another couple of years, I’ll be through Revelation.

Oh, and I’ve been praying the Liturgy of the Hours much more frequently. I’m especially a fan of combining the Office of Readings with one of the major hours (morning or evening). The Psalms are growing on me, it seems.

I’ll probably be a three-parish Catholic going forward, depending on my schedule for any given weekend. I’m technically registered at Sacred Heart, but usually attend the Sunday evening Mass at St. Isidore. I love everything about Sacred Heart (the Extraordinary Form liturgies, the beauty and reverence, the preaching) but it isn’t an especially warm place; I don’t feel “home” there. I do feel at home at St. Anthony, but liturgical practice there is so trapped in the disco era that it’s rarely spiritually fulfilling. I also like the decor and the liturgical reverence at St. Isidore — and monsignor is a thoughtful homilist — but the evening Mass is very sparsely attended and their otherwise divine music director seems to favor the most kitschy folk tunes that the abysmal Gather hymnal can muster, set to organ and delivered operatically. Quite disorienting.

The Church of the Age of Aquarius

Oh! Speaking of the disco era, on a recent episode of The Pillar Podcast, Ed Condon made a point about the state of the Catholic Church in the English-speaking world that I think is profound.

He argues, in short, that a lot of the liturgy wars of the last 40 years have sprung not from disagreements about Vatican II but from “the spirit of the age” that infused the first round of implementation strategies for the Missal of Paul VI. That age was the early 1970s, and so it’s not a surprise that a lot of the trappings of “bad liturgy” are holdovers from that specific moment in time. It would be odd if it were otherwise! And now that the vanguard of that age are starting to die off, the fruits of Sacrosanctum Concilium may flower with the deeper authenticity that comes from its distance in time. Just as has happened after every major council of the Church from antiquity.

Consider all the cringeworthy guitar Masses, felt banners, hand-holding, and jokes from the pulpit. Or the “liturgical dance.” The absence of Latin and any ad orientem celebrations. Proliferating announcements in the middle of Mass. The vast, chaotic horde of extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion. The communal penance services and the whole “let’s let everyone wash everyone else’s feet” nonsense of Holy Thursday. And don’t get me started on the music, which in many parishes is stuck in ’60s- and ’70s-era folk tunes that are hard to sing but do a great job of either glorifying the congregation (Tom Conry’s atrocious Anthem) or audaciously acting in persona Christi (Toolan’s insipid I Am the Bread of Life).

None of the above was mandated by the Council. None of it. It flowered because a certain class of reformist-slash-hippie experts who surrounded the Council and the implementation immediately after it exercised a disproportionate influence on English-speaking Catholicism. They hard-coded a very “1972” ecclesiology and anthropology into their experimental new rites. It wasn’t for nothing that in November 1985 the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needed to explicitly ban the Clown Mass, after all. But the problem is that 1972 didn’t move forward in conjunction with the calendar. So now it’s 2024 and a large group of modern Catholics formed in the Ordinary Form of the Mass still worship as if it’s 1972. And when the Church moves on, they get mad; the Associated Press, in a much-heralded recent article, shows the resentment of these Age of Aquarius Catholics even as the more mature fruits of the Council — branded as “conservatism” or a “return to old ways” — begin to manifest among younger Catholics with no bone to pick about the Extraordinary Form. The Catholics who were active from the mid 1960s through the late 1990s and haven’t kept up with the times are being left behind even as they clutch their horrid Gather hymnals and natter on about female ordination and synodality and whatnot.

The problem with the “full and active participation of the Faithful” is that the word participation does a lot of quiet heavy lifting. In the 1960s and 1970s, a popular but hollow anthropology arose that equated doing something (speaking, singing, acting) with engagement. The idea that a person could engage quietly, through private prayer, to contribute to the Holy Sacrifice seemed like an outdated notion — an idea best left with the old babushkas toting their mantillas and their pocket missals and their rosaries. But that diversity of engagement is precisely what the Council mandated from the beginning.

Arts-and-crafts decorations and folk tunes and blessings by EMEs are not the authentic fruit of Vatican II. We’re only now starting to see the Council’s fruit blossom, after a transition period where the heralds of the new discover they’re fighting to sacralize the same pop-culture mentality that gave us bell bottoms and brutalist architecture. Parishes that close the door on the Age of Aquarius (e.g., Sacred Heart) will thrive; parishes that don’t will decline along with their Mainline Protestant brethren.

(Oops, sorry — I meant “along with their Mainline Protestant sisters and brothers.“)

Of Cats and Snakes

My four felines are a-purrin’ along. Team Orange (Murphy and Fiona d’Cat, at home) are aging but doing great. Team Grey (Theon and Kali d’Cat, at the office) have settled into a comfortable friendship.

Apollo d’Snek recently came out of brumation; he’s now hyperactive, looking for a mate, instead of burrowing in his substrate. We transferred him to a new, larger enclosure a few weeks ago and he seems to be digging it, although he needs some new branches to climb upon. And Athena d’Snek is growing rapidly. Despite being juvenile, she’s very chill and has responded well to being handled, including by children at the dojo.

Clockwise from upper left: Theon d’Cat; Fiona d’Cat; Murphy d’Cat; Kali d’Cat; Apollo d’Snek; Athena d’Snek.

Horsing Around

Joining me this month is Tyr d’Horse.

Tyr is a 4-year-old mustang from the Eagle HMA, which is just north of Las Vegas. He’s already 15.1 hands tall. He’s sorrel with a flaxen mane and tail as well as an elegant and controlled gait. He needs a bit more meat on his bones, but we can fix that. And somehow his tail and mane got chopped, but that’s also a solvable problem.

Photos really don’t do him justice, so here’s a video of him with the two-year-old that the trainer purchased in Cassopolis:

Tyr is curious and slightly cautious, but despite being an untouched feral gelding, he never freaked out and never showed signs of distress or anger. For the princely sum of $125 I obtained him through an Internet auction run by the Bureau of Land Management. He was shipped from Wyoming to Cassopolis, Mich., where my trainer and I signed for him. At the trainer’s facility, he got very close to me and Cade to munch a book of hay by our feet, and when the trainer entered the pen, he was alert but didn’t panic. All of this is a good sign that he’ll be calm and easy to work with.

He’ll be with the trainer in Big Rapids for two to six weeks for basic gentling (wearing a halter, allowing hoof inspections, allowing me to approach and touch, and being willing to trailer) before he goes to his “forever home” in Marne. From there, I’ll work with him (and also with a different trainer) to get him trail-ride ready. Of course, he needs to gain some weight and I need to lose some before you’ll see me on his back, but we have all the time in the world. He’ll have a mustang friend at the boarding facility in Marne — Cade’s gelding, Oliver, who followed the exact same path a year ago. (And now, Ollie is super chill and fun to work with. And incredibly smart: he knows which pocket contains the treats and he also knows when all the treats are gone.)

Oliver (L) and Kodiak, Cade’s horses. Ollie is a 5-year-old gelding from Divide Basin who arrived in Michigan last year, along the same trajectory as Tyr. Kodi is roughly 8, small, and dead broke — although he seems to have been a bit maltreated with his former owners, a problem that Cade is rectifying with some gentle care. And don’t let the photos fool you; Ollie is probably only around 14hh.

So stay tuned for equine updates, pardners.

Long Live the King of Statistical Improbabilities

Speaking of Cade — his chemo has been doing well. He underwent surgery in January to remove a large mass. After that, and after two (unnecessary and invasive) lung biopsies, he was cleared to begin chemo. He started on a potent fortnightly drug combo and recently stepped down to something more tolerable. He’s still on a treat-to-cure pathway, which we both see as a gift.

It’s been remarkable to watch his journey of “kicking cancer’s ass.” Since the new year, I’ve been with him through three surgeries, an E/R visit, a half-dozen imaging studies, and countless ambulatory appointments. Together, we’ve had fun (penguin feeding!) and experienced anxiety (a kidney crisis for Chloe the Elderly Leaky Chihuahua). We’ve worked with his horses, set life plans, visited a casino, taken road trips, cared for his mini-zoo, gone on picnics, and enjoyed date nights. Much of what’s happened to him and to Chloe has been highly improbable — which is why I want him to play the lottery! — but he’s kept up a good attitude. I’ve been impressed by his quiet courage, his determination, and his limitless empathy.

Clockwise from top left: Cade with the Snake Discovery people at Tinley Park; Cade enjoying a picnic lunch at Tyr’s trainer’s barn; Cade and I last weekend, at Secchia Meadows; Cade with my ball-python buddy Kovu; Cade feeding the penguins at John Ball Zoo; Cade helping Oliver realize that gloves aren’t edible.

Adventures in Zookeeping

After Cade’s surgery, he enjoyed limited use of one arm for a while so I helped him with the maintenance and feeding of The Menagerie. He cares for a dog, two cats, two horses, a rabbit, a chicken, a quail, two rats, a half-dozen mice, a toad, several frogs, a scorpion, a tarantula, an anole, a crested gecko, a couple of bettas, a guppy tank, and a goldfish tank. And did I mention the 29 snakes, ranging in size from a baby palmetto corn to a full-grown female boa constrictor?

Helping him tend to these animals has been eye-opening and incredible, as has working with him to help Chloe the dog with some kidney problems — e.g., by giving her subcutaneous fluids and injectable meds on occasion.

I suspect that starting an animal rescue will be in our future.

Settling Into Paris

For the most part, I’m completely settled at The Chateaux, my new home in the Heritage Hill district of Grand Rapids. One of the last things I needed to do was to attend to the basement. A previous occupant had left some miscellaneous boxes in the basement hallway, so I’m dispensing with those. I’ve moved my storage stuff to the storage room (shocker!) and the big main space has now been fitted with a 12-foot-by-16-foot half-inch foam mat system so I can practice karate down there. I even put up a mini shomen on the north wall, with pictures of our founding masters as well as my own lineage and a copy of my nidan certificate.

I’ve also set up my exercise bike, additional LED lighting, a side table, and a fan. I’ll soon order a treadmill and a cable-driven weight bench, as well as some smaller hand weights to work with my multipurpose bench and its elastic-band system.

The movement of the recumbent bike has led to a cascade of minor changes on the second floor. My Yamaha keyboard has relocated from my office to the Adventure Room, for example. I replaced the bookshelves in my office and bought a new reading chair, so the older reading chair has also moved to the Adventure Room.

I also finished smarting-up the joint. I installed two interior surveillance cameras, both pointing at the exterior doors. I added a video doorbell, an outdoor weather station, a smart door lock for the front door, and a smart thermostat, in addition to a half-dozen smart light bulbs. All of these are controlled through Apple Home. I’ve set several handy automations to instantly transform the lighting depending on my mood and the time of day.

A few things remain to wrap up (seating in the three-season porch; seating on the front porch and planters for my seeds) but the big stuff has been done for a while now. It’s a significant improvement upon The Fortress.

Truck Camping, & Sundry Other Adventures

A few weeks ago, my brother and I camped at Mud Lake State Forest Campground. It was the first time I had set up the truck tent in the back of the Silverado. With his help, I erected the tent and the rain fly, set up my 10-foot-by-10-foot popup tent, and got everything into good order. I even used a cot with a mattress pad and slept reasonably comfortably that night.

Everything worked out well. I brought a two-burner Coleman stove, a couple coolers of food and beverage, a comfortable camp chair, a folding table, and all the other little necessities that made for a much more pleasant camping adventure. We planned to spend three days and two nights there, but a band of severe weather passed through with extraordinarily high winds, so we called it off by mid-day Saturday.

However, on Friday night, we enjoyed a roaring campfire, plenty of bourbon, and a couple of cigars, as well as good conversation. And the next morning, we chatted about his own rig — a utility trailer that he can also use as a more rustic camping trailer.

We definitely want to get out more often. I’ve already scheduled a couple of long-weekend camping trips this summer. Plus, I’m thinking long and hard about Brian’s trailer setup. Ideas, ideas.

Adventures in Analytics

Life on the work front has been interesting. My two biggest clients have both used me for a combination of revenue strategy, analytics, and business-process management. Since I started independently consulting in 2018, much of my time has been spent as a virtual CIO.

One recent takeaway: The SMB market doesn’t use advanced analytics, and I’m increasingly skeptical of the claims that Big Data or Big Analytics (or, I suppose, Big AI) will prove meaningful at anything lower than an enterprise level. And even then, it’s more about the culture of the C-suite than the skillset of the analytic corps.

Give a company a well-designed, well-documented SQL server with a robust, normalized data model and an open-source visualization tool (Metabase, Superset, Redash, &c.), and they’ll do 95 percent of what needs to be done. The real question is whether that extra 5 percent is worth the time and expense to achieve.

In some — many? — cases, I don’t think it is. At least, not for SMBs.

Bookstore Growth …

The bookstore is taking off. I think I’m up to more than 4,000 books in stock and I’m still on deck for my plan to start investing in new local-author titles later this summer.

It’s nice to have a series of regular customers who come in, browse, shop, and chat. We’ve done no advertising — it’s all been word-of-mouth, plus additions to mapping tools — but the reaction so far has been great. And, the weekly seminar program has been a lot of fun. We have a book group, a game night, a writing-craft night, and a big-idea discussion night.

At the end of the month (May 29, to be precise) we’re going to have a community potluck and grill-out for writers and their families. Should be a good time!

… and Publishing Shrinkage

I’ve formally closed Lakeshore Literary, Inc., and have decided to stop publishing long-form fiction. (Some publishing operations, like a reboot of The Lakeshore Review, will restart in a few months under the Foundation as a purely non-profit undertaking.) Some of the admin stuff is still unwinding, but the State of Michigan has endorsed the resolution to dissolve and so I’ve been slowly spinning the company down since January.

The biggest reason is financial. Lakeshore Literary has never made money; in fact, it’s lost me considerable money, in addition to the expense of uncompensated editorial and administrative time. The small amount of revenue we received for published books and journals paled in comparison to the cost of actually running and maintaining the business. I don’t have the bandwidth to manage projects that need hundreds of hours of time, especially when the terms of those projects shift unexpectedly and the cost-benefit ratio is on the wrong side of green.

Relatedly, I’m also closing Diction Dude LLC, my writing consultancy. I haven’t really done much writing consulting and having yet another business entity floating out there, consuming resources without contributing revenue, makes no sense.

I’m kinda-sorta-but-not-really sad about this turn of events. Of all the things on my plate, publishing was the thing that took a heck of a lot of time for no discernible ROI. It was a pricey hobby that must now yield to more productive pursuits.

An Author Alliance

From October 2023 through April 2024, the staff of National Novel Writing Month (which eventually dwindled to just one person) experienced a catastrophic implosion related to a series of scandals involving shady sponsors, incompetent staffers, and the failure to take seriously some complaints about forum moderators who may (or may not) have abused their authority — including, in one case, a moderator alleged to have groomed minors to join a fetish-story community dedicated to adult baby diaper lovers. Over the last few months, all of the staff but one seem to have quit. And the one remaining staffer decided to fire all 800-plus municipal liaisons worldwide who manage NaNoWriMo regionally, with no good plan in place to bring them back aboard.

You can’t make this [expletive deleted] up.

Anyway, our NaNoWriMo region has elected to go independent. As of last month, we formally separated ourselves from HQ and have become the West Michigan Author Alliance, a loose writing group under the aegis of the Lakeshore Literary Foundation. More to come!

Writing Projects

My personal writing has been largely on hold given time constraints, but when I get the chance, I do spend some time re-constituting From Pencil to Print, a book I started in 2017 but then blew up into several smaller books. It’s a book about the craft and business of writing. My revised plan takes the content of two of my manuscripts (one published, one at 85 percent completion) then adds a bit and subtracts a bit to arrive at a more coherent final output.

No sense yet of how long it’ll take to finish; I’m simply taking time where I can to work on it without being driven toward an artificial deadline.

The 17th, Yet Again

I’m running unopposed for the Republican nomination for Kent County Commission for District 17. Although I’m sure to lose the race in the general election (this district is something like D+50), it’s a good exercise in civic engagement to “fill the tree” to ensure that people have options as they cast their ballots.

This is, I believe, my fourth run at this office. We shall see if, this year, I crack my P.R. of 22 percent in the general election. 🙂

The Last Tech Tweak

In my last post, I noted that I had migrated from Logseq to Bear. I didn’t stay on Bear long before migrating (again), this time to Obsidian. So far, Obsidian is everything I wanted from Logseq but with none of the vexing sync errors.

Fingers crossed, this incarnation of a PKM will stick around a while. Using Obsidian and Todoist together, and being more thoughtful about which calendars and email accounts I provision to which devices, has certainly streamlined things for me.

The Discovery Era Ends

As I write this, two episodes remain in the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery. Nerds — especially Trek nerds — will quibble, but the popular reception of Discovery hasn’t been all that hot. There’s a lot wrong with the series; several gifted actors (Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, David Cronenberg, Tig Notaro, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Yeoh) did their best with uneven writing and myriad Mary Sue moments and a push from execs to boldly go (into trans and non-binary spaces) where Trek had never gone (so ham-fistedly) before. Basically, the same problem that Doctor Who experienced in the Jodi Whittaker years.

But I’ll admit: I really like Discovery. A part of it stems from its reboot of the franchise after so many years of dormancy. But another part is that the series brought me joy in a rough time. When Season 1 debuted in late 2017, I was going through a politically toxic patch at work. Weekly Disco drops gave me something to look forward to. Now that the show ends in just two weeks, I find I’m a very different person occupying a very different and much happier personal and professional place. But I will still miss the show, and I will miss Martin-Green’s Captain Burnham continuing to settle into her well-deserved center chair.

Making Time

Connecting over a campfire is more important than Inbox Zero. This picture captures the campfire at Mud Lake, where I enjoyed great companionship with my brother last month.

I’ll wrap up with an observation.

Longtime readers know I’ve had a running personal debate about time and communications. I tried an experiment in January and I’ve found it to be extraordinary helpful. To wit: Consolidating email accounts and calendars, limiting what accounts load on my phone, and suppressing notifications for most communications services (including email).

I’ve only been reading messages intermittently and on a per-account basis. This has been great for keeping me focused on what I planned to do instead of reacting to whatever came into the inbox. I’ve got a lot on my plate and compartmentalizing has been a solid success strategy.

Cade’s cancer diagnosis really whacked me over the head with the value of finding time for the things that are important and stopping things that aren’t. That process starts with getting control over a day. You can have all the insight into emails and task lists that you like; if your day is not yours to govern, then the odds you’ll make progress are greatly diminished.

I’ve found great comfort in having an up-to-date 50,000-foot view of what’s on my plate. But for a long time, other people could add whatever they wanted to that plate on any random day. It’s not visibility, but decisiveness, that frees up opportunities to do the important-but-not-firedrill things that make life worth living.

When I was a hospital chaplain, I often visited the elderly who were close to death. Not one of them — not one — ever lamented having less-than-perfect credit or wishing their car was cleaner. Instead, they felt loss about relationships and about dreams not pursued. They regretted all the time wasted on things that seemed important in the moment but offered no meaningful strategic value. They felt shame about pursuing vendettas or punishing slights instead of just moving on and opening their hearts to other opportunities.

Dreams are real. To live them, you must seize control of your day to ensure you can give the right resources at the right time to manifest them in the universe.

Thanks for reading. May you have a happy and productive summer!

Hiking, Personal, Politics & Culture, Reading, Religion, Writing, Editing & Journalism

An Update, 18 Months Overdue

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I used to maintain this blog with one to six posts per month, but my last post was September 2020 and I’d been flaky since late spring. There’s a reason for that, albeit not a super-compelling one. The pandemic and its associated drama affected me as much as anyone, and it’s only been in the last few months that I’ve been comfortable closing the door on one chapter of my life — running mid-2016 until late-2021 — and moving definitively into the next one. 

Oh, and a blessed Christmas to you and your family. I write this post on Christmas Day, with coffee at hand, classical Christmas music softly playing, the cats docile, and some myrrh incense burning near the window. My family routines were “mostly normal” this year and I hope they’re “fully normal” next year. May you each find some measure of joy this holiday season.

This’ll be a massive update, so buckle up and grab the extra-large-sized beverage of your choice. As usual, subjects aren’t presented in any particular order.

Health and Well-Being. After re-reading my recent posts, I think I was a bit inconsistent with how I characterized my run-in with the coronavirus — mostly to avoid in-the-moment questions or swoop-ins from readers. Here’s how it all ended up going down. First, I contracted Covid-19 (we think; tests weren’t available at the time) in early March 2020. I had come back from the lovely Bonaire diving trip with my friends Jen and Dave and then a few days later: wham. Much of March and April were pretty much lost; I was able to basically sit at my desk and do my contract editing job, but not much else. Exhaustion was pervasive and I had an entire week where my nights were interrupted by high nocturnal fevers and shortness of breath. I never experienced the loss of smell or taste, but virtually every other box was checked. From the beginning of May, when the worst of it has passed, until probably mid-to-late January 2021, I wasn’t quite right. Whether you call it Long Covid or just some lingering malaise, it came and went in fortnightly spurts. I’d enjoy roughly two weeks where everything was right as rain followed by a fortnight of exhaustion and mental fog. During this period, my weight yo-yoed like a sixth grader on the playground. But by late winter, I have consistently felt fine. I’ve been symptom-free since February, and now I sit comfortably in the “double vaxxed and boosted” category.

Ironically, despite the excellent “no sickness” theme of 2021, I’m writing this while battling a mid-grade sinus infection (thanks, dry winter!). I also had a bout of norovirus that first manifested itself on my return flight from Las Vegas this past summer. I am still apologetic to Delta Air Lines for not anticipating that gross liquid sludge would spew from my body from both ends simultaneously a mere 20 minutes out from landing. At least I managed to close the lav door one millisecond before the eruption.

Gillikin & Associates. Contract work over the last two years has been — well, inconsistent. I started 2020 with a full-time contract-but-W2 assignment performing content renovation for Dotdash. That contract expired in July. In that peak-of-pandemic period, the employment outlook was double-plus ungood. I acquired another contract gig, for blog-article writing in the tech sector, but it didn’t come within a country mile of paying all the bills. The enhanced unemployment benefits of that period saved me from an ignoble return to the metaphorical “mom’s basement.” By Memorial Day 2021, I landed an analytics-consulting contract thanks to my friend Patrick, and then a curriculum-development contract with a university thanks to my friend Andrew. What had been famine turned into feast, and the second half of 2021 has been one of the most financially well-performing periods of my entire life, with no signs of impending abatement. When you bring in enough revenue that you have to actually put yourself on payroll and provide yourself benefits, you know something is going well. May it persist!

Lakeshore Literary. When we shut down Caffeinated Press in December 2019, it was with some degree of both relief and disappointment. Relief, insofar as a business that didn’t grow quite right was finally allowed to slip gently into the night. Disappointment, insofar as part of the hope and promise of local literary excellence suffered because of the well-intended peculiarities of our business model. I launched a business structure for Lakeshore Literary — a successor company, but without the complexity of business partners — in early 2020 but apart from publishing my friend Lisa’s college-success textbook, it didn’t do anything. That is now changing. My colleague Garrett and I are co-editing a new triennial literary journal, The Lakeshore Review, and I’m re-doing the small press thing, as a part-time one-man shop. Significantly, it’s going to include retail: I’m planning for roughly 250 linear feet of shelf space to play with, to open a hyper niche bookstore focused on literary journals, small-press titles, and strictly curated self-published works. No general-catalog stuff. Plus, cafe seating, coffee and tea, and packaged snacks. Things get moving as of January 3. More about that in the next paragraph.

The L&G Center. The biggest news of Q4 is The L&G Center. It’s a 2,800-square-foot office space located near the intersection of 44th Street and Burlingame Avenue in Wyoming, Mich. My business partner Allison and I co-lease the building through an LLC formed solely to address our real-estate arrangement. I run G&A and Lakeshore Literary out of it; she runs her own business, Fourth Form Martial Arts Studio, out of it as well. The 1,200-square-foot front space is a mix of literary retail and cafe (15′ x 30′), plus an open studio that serves as the karate dojo or for special events (like poetry readings). We make the space available for rent if the situation feels right. The “dojo side” (which is roughly 25′ x 30′) when used as an events space can hold, we think, roughly 80 people auditorium-style or 48 people seated four to a six-foot table. With three generous storage rooms, funky cantilevered cabinetry, two ensuite restrooms, a kitchen, a skylight, a large conference room, and private offices for me and Allison, it’s a comfortable location that we rented for a steal. But it was a steal because we needed to replace the 30-year-old carpet, repaint everything, and perform non-trivial interior maintenance on our dime. We leased the space in mid-September and will enjoy our grand opening on January 3. It’s got a bit of an industrial/rustic feel to it, yet it’s a great multipurpose space with plenty of parking and easy access to US-131, M-6, and I-196.

Karate. So why, pray tell, did we start The L&G Center? Blame karate. 🙂 In November 2020, in the throes of National Novel Writing Month, I connected with a writer named Allison who, as fate would have it, I had met before — in karate class, ca. 2007-2008. She was a shy wisp of a blonde teenager at the time, but she ended up becoming a fierce, whipcrack-smart woman whose favorite word directed at me is a poorly considered “Veto.” When I studied karate in those days, it was at East West Karate Center. It turns out, East West persisted until the pandemic killed it off. One of the sixth-degree black belts rented space at a gym in Dorr, Mich., for twice-weekly informal karate and weapons classes. Allison encouraged me to go to those classes, and I did. I reconnected with so many folks I remembered from those long-ago days. In July, Allison and Muhamet tested for higher-degree black belts. Then in August we had a karate pool-slash-whiskey-sampling party and the subject of moving out of that tiny rented gym arose. I mentioned I was looking for office space, the group had convinced Allison to start a dojo again to replace East West — and six weeks later, we took possession of The L&G Center and she founded Fourth Form. I am the dojo’s most senior kyu student, anticipating black belt testing in the summer of 2022. We’ve welcomed back some of the old East West students and even a few new ones. It’s an exciting time, and my Kent County-based peeps should strongly consider coming to the dojo’s hard launch and karate demonstration at 6p on Monday, January 3. (We’re at 1590 44th St SW, Wyoming MI, 49509.)

Writing. I’ve made minor progress across several projects, but nothing to speak of. I’m focusing next week on my project list, to see if a bit of sorting and prioritizing will make things easier to execute. I think I’m leaning toward spending the entire year drafting The Bear of Rosebriar Creek, which is a literary novel featuring four broken main characters who each find a measure of healing during a community’s panic over a man-killing bear. I’ve been noodling over this story for years but haven’t had the cojones to tackle it. Until now, I guess. No promises.

Top: Round Lake, and the flooding of our campsite. Bottom: Clear skies along the Manistee River.

The Great Outdoors. I haven’t done any scuba diving since Bonaire, nor have I yet resumed flying lessons, but I have done some hiking. Twice this year — once with my brother, and once with my friend Scott — I trekked to the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula for overnight hiking adventures. Scott and I did a section of the North Country Trail between the Fife Lake Loop and Hodenpyl Dam; Brian and I did two nights at Round Lake State Forest Campground. Both trips were “car camping” with day hikes. Scott made delicious food near our campsite overlooking the Manistee River while Brian made delicious food while we hammocked in a hurricane. I also went on a few night walks at Millennium Park. Just me, my headlamp, the critters, and a few meth addicts scurrying through the underbrush.

Faith Formation. I’ve been more active at church lately. I’m a member of the Communications Apostolate, which is a fancy way of saying that I’m part of the volunteer team that prepared our parish’s annual report and helped pull off our “renewal of fidelity” annual commitment program. Sacred Heart is a parish where stewardship is a four-letter word — an approach I find most refreshing. We had a pastor transition this summer; the Rev. Robert Sirico was granted senior priest (i.e., retired) status and the Rev. Ron Floyd was appointed as canonical administrator. I moved to Sacred Heart for Sirico but I’m staying for Floyd. It’s a vibrant, intellectual, humble community with rich worship and a spirit of service. I miss my old friends at St. Anthony but spiritually, the trade was worth it. 

Intellectual Formation. This topic could be a blog post in its own right, but I’ll keep it brief-ish. I started 2020 working full-time as a contract editor for Dotdash, and all the while, I spent countless hundreds of hours background-watching lectures and podcasts on YouTube while I worked. I mostly stopped reading books and flipped to consuming videos over much of 2020. I absorbed such treasures as Jordan B. Peterson’s extended series about the book of Genesis, Joe Rogan’s shows, the Dark Horse Podcast livestreams with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and countless other bits of content from the center-right and the non-woke left. Early on, I became enamored with the “Intellectual Dark Web,” but eventually the luster dimmed. Stuff like Weinstein getting on the Ivermectin train and Peterson’s extended illness changed the nature of the beast. Toward the end of 2020 I eventually stopped watching YouTube videos and moved back to a beefier podcast roster, augmented by much more reading.

On the podcast front, I’ve found that tend to not miss many episodes of Sway, Pivot, and Your Undivided Attention (tech-focused); Blocked & Reported and Useful Idiots (media criticism); Left Right & Center, Checks and Balances, and The Argument (bipartisan/centrist issues-focused); Action Unwind, New Discourses, Three Martini Lunch, The Editors, and Mad Dogs & Englishmen (conservative-leaning politics); and FiveThirtyEight Politics, Slate Political Gabfest, The Ezra Klein Show, and The Weeds (left-leaning politics). Fitting imperfectly into the mix are The Glenn Show, Conversations with Coleman, and Honestly with Bari Weiss, each of which comes from an anti-woke center-left perspective. Atop that listening, I subscribe to National Review and have been working through a slush pile of books. Currently on the table: The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie, The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die by Niall Ferguson, and Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals by Tyler Cowen.

I’ve always positioned myself as something of a center-right thinker, although the Hidden Tribes report doesn’t really capture me very well. A lot of the strident, populist, more authoritarian streams of conservatism strike me as both silly and sinister, but the progressive left seems morally bankrupt and incapable of engaging the world outside its bubble. One of the take-aways from my podcasts is that when I disagree with the content of a particular episode, when the podcast hails from the right I tend to disagree on specifics of policy, whereas when I disagree with the content from a left-leaning episode, my frustration sources from the content presenting a caricature of the world. Too many straw men, too little understanding of countervailing arguments. I think that’s why I could never actually be a “man of the left” even if I’m sympathetic to some of the arguments and positions from that worldview.

If you ask where my head’s at and how it’s changed in the last 24 months, I’d distil it to this: I have less confidence in the integrity of the media and less confidence in political leaders to successfully navigate complex problems sourced from several unrelated input streams. I think the fringes of the left and the right are increasingly indistinguishable in their lunacy and their nihilism and that social platforms make this problem several orders of magnitude worse. Enlightenment liberalism (aka “David Frenchism“) is a noble framework worth protecting from integralists, socialists, and all the ne’er-do-wells in between. I’m paying more attention to disciplines like evolutionary biology and econometrics than I used to, and I appreciate how those disciplines help to undermine the superstructure of Critical Theory. And I see that in the absence of a real God to worship, people build destructive religion-like cults out of squishy nonsense like Q-Anon or antiracism. 

Political Engagement. I ran for office again in 2020, for county commission. For the second time, I was persuaded to run in this D+1,000,000 district in the heart of south-central Kent County. The upside was that I returned as a statutory member to the Kent County Republican Executive Committee.

For the 2020 election, I was the sole GOP challenger for the Absentee Voter Counting Board for the City of Kentwood, Mich. I spent 20 hours on-site at Kentwood City Hall, watching the opening and tabulation of countless thousands of absentee ballots. Kentwood even used Dominion machines! And you know what? I saw zero evidence of voter fraud. The loudest voices proclaiming The Big Lie come from people with literally no understanding of how votes are counted and audited — a fact that the shitshow of a “forensic audit” in Arizona proved beyond all reasonable doubt. As I look to candidates for state and local government in Michigan, the first thing I look for are two disqualifiers. Are they invoking the “America First” dog whistle? Are they in favor of a “full forensic audit?” If yes to either, they’re automatically disqualified as far as I’m concerned. As the debacle of the Senate elections in Georgia and the success of the Virigina gubernatorial elections attest, competent-and-sane Republicans will win while voices undermining the legitimacy of the election process will not.

Frankly, I’d rather win than fraternize with the liars and grifters who can’t get past their loss in 2020.

Social Media. Those of you with eyes to see and ears to hear will likely know that I’ve been off social media for most of the last two years. That’s not an accident, and it’s probably not going to be meaningfully changed. I am now convinced that Facebook is a force for evil in the world, and that Twitter has done more to pollute the body politic than any single other factor. I am not in a “delete my accounts” mode because I have businesses to run; I will probably occasionally throw things out there, but also never bother to check feeds or notifications. Increasingly, I’m turning to tools like blogs and Discord for communication and community. 

Winnie_Bot. I’m one of three “core” members of a project team for an open-source Discord bot called Winnie. Winnie_Bot tracks word sprints, goals, and related activities. In addition to serving as the project PM, I was also the translator of Winnie_Bot into Latin and I helped shape the core model for the bot’s database. Our product owner — Dawn, from Melbourne — and lead developer — Katie, from Ohio — have been a delight, and the community has been a big part of our success. That said, our go-live goal of October was sorely missed, at first by a little, and then by a lot. We’re making a lot of changes to the bot to conform to some Discord-specific changes that will take effect in April. We suspect that come 4/1, we might be the only bot left standing in this space. So we’re taking the time to get it right. It’s been a fair amount of work, especially in October and November, but it’s been fun.

National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo 2021 came and went. I spent it as a Municipal Liaison for the OCGR region (Ottawa County-Grand Rapids). I was co-ML with my friend Mel. It was a virtual-only year again, and it showed. Participation and interest were significantly lower. I wrote hardly anything, but then again, I was focused more on Winnie than writing. 

GRWT. The Grand River Writing Tribe diversified at the beginning of 2020. We split into three groups. One, the oh-so-cleverly named “OG Tribe,” contains most of the original cast of characters. The new in-person group, informally named “Bob’s Bitch Lasagna” for Reasons, is also doing well. Then “Group V” — the virtual group — consists of folks from across eastern North America. It’s great to be part of these groups; I’ve learned a lot.

Committee on Professional Ethics. I’m beginning my third year as a member of the Committee on Professional Ethics of the American Statistical Association. Over 2021, CoPE engaged what amounted to a 10-full-month exercise in rewriting our ethical guidelines for the practice of statistics. The process required weekly two-hour Zoom meetings, interspersed with periods of more intense work on a person-by-person basis. I was a member of the Working Group for the revision and was accountable for leading discussion around the revisions of two of the existing principles. We collectively wrapped that work by Halloween, and we’ve since learned that the ASA Board of Directors was satisfied with the work with very little requests for subsequent revision. I have been tasked with leading a similar workgroup in 2022 related to a framework for the application of these guidelines on an institutional basis. It’s gratifying to put my ethics degree to practical use.

Relationships. I think I’ve done mostly OK in maintaining relationships during the pandemic. In some ways, my immediate family got a bit closer, even as the extended family became more — well, extended. I saw my grandmother for the first time in 20 months on Thursday. I see Tony and Jen occasionally and we did enjoy an overnight karaoke party at Dimondale Manor with PPQ and The Good Doctor over the summer. I don’t feel as if I’ve lost friends, although I do think that I’ve lost a degree of connection to the folks from the extended podcasting community.

Roux and I, fleeing the Mounties.

Travel. Since the beginning of the pandemic I’ve traveled twice and received an out-of-town visitor once. In late June 2021, I attended the 360 Vegas Vacation in Las Vegas, in that sweet spot between lockdown periods: Apart from the airports, you’d have forgotten that it was a pandemic, in those pre-Delta days when all the infection lines were crashing and vaccination rates were shooting up. Then this autumn, Roux from Denton flew to Michigan. He and I spent one night at an Airbnb in Windsor, Ontario, then he spent two nights in Grand Rapids. It was good to see Roux as well as the ol’ standbys from the podcast community.

Podcasting. All my grand plans for Vice Lounge and Diction Dude were skewered by the hell that was 2020. I had a great talk with some folks in Las Vegas about VLO, including Tim of The Bettor Life, and I am planning on bringing VLO back in 2022. The format will be a bit different and I’m making changes to a bunch of stuff (no Patreon, less social media, but more stuff like livestreams and community on Discord). It’s on the docket for January, although I reserve the right to bump it as things settle down at The L&G Center after our grand opening.

Kali d’Cat, looking up at me, wondering why I’m taking her photo.

Cats. Murphy and Fiona d’Cat are both doing well. As is Kali d’Cat, the outdoors-dwelling sweetie. I have since discovered that Kali was a TNR kitty (trap, neuter, release). She is super affectionate, a bit skittish, and clever as hell. She also picks-and-chooses when she gets violent with the other larger mammals that approach her food dish. Most of the time, she lets the raccoons and opossums eat away, but every now and then holds her ground. She doesn’t like being picked up, but she does enjoy belly rubs — right up until the second she doesn’t. (He says, with a scratched right hand.) She lives on my back porch and has no real interest in coming inside. I have given her a cardboard box with a heating pad that’s on all winter long. The pad quickly heats to something like 95F when pressure is applied to it. She figured out the box/pad thing in a hurry and spends most of her time there when it’s cold.

OK, all for now. I’ll work on getting back on a regular schedule for 2022. Until then, I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy nude new year.

Religion

A Thought About the Decline of Religious Participation

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In a story released two months ago, the Pew Research Center noted an acceleration in the trend of Americans declining to participate in any form of religion. Since 2009, the percent of people identifying as Protestant declined from 51 percent to 43 percent of the population, while Catholics declined from 23 percent to 20 percent. The “nones” — atheists, agnostics and the indifferent — rose from 17 percent to 26 percent.

The arguments advanced by the “nones” are a commonplace: that religion offers them nothing, that science can’t prove the existence of a supreme supernatural being or an afterlife, that organized religion does more harm than good, that an all-loving God couldn’t allow this degree of evil into the world, that the species has evolved beyond the need to mythologize about an elderly, bearded sky-god who grows angry when you masturbate.

The “nones” arguments aren’t very interesting, mostly because they’re too superficial to stand up to serious intellectual scrutiny. More compelling, I think, is an inquiry into why organized religion has been losing ground; the “nones” don’t come from thin air, after all. I think the failure of organized religion to offer serious and intellectually rigorous counter-arguments to the modern moment — with its attendant solipsism and scientism — constitutes a huge chunk of the reason. It’s too facile to suggest the culture has moved away from the Church when the Church hasn’t bothered to track the culture and to adjust its catechesis accordingly.

I was struck recently by a handful of thoughts that, collectively, changed my thinking about the much-heralded New Evangelization by highlighting its fragility. These stress factors, I think, undermine the legitimacy of religion from within, because no matter how superficial the “nones” arguments remain, the leaders of U.S. faith communities seem hell-bent (so to speak) on not responding to them.

So let’s explore some meta-trends.

The State of Homiletics Is Weak Because of an Over-Emphasis on Pastoral Paradigms

Go into an average place of Christian worship on any given Sunday, and you’re almost surely going to hear a sermon that’s little more than warmed-over moralistic therapeutic deism. MTD offers a five-fold set of beliefs: That there’s a God; that God wants people to be nice and good and fair; that the point of life is to be happy and have good self-esteem; that God need not be involved in daily life until God is needed for something; and that good people go to heaven when they die.

When was the last time you heard a homily that challenged you? That taught you something about your faith tradition that was genuinely new to you? That asserted that if you just tried and were a “good steward” then you’re on the right track? In most Christian houses of worship, the central message is the same: “Smile, God loves you. So try just a little bit harder to be nice. And don’t forget to tithe and to come to the multicultural potluck in the church hall on Tuesday.”

The cry of the martyrs, it ain’t.

Most Christian ministers are pastoral in their vocation. That is, they view their work as being shepherds of souls, keeping the sheep together at all costs — even at the expense of hard-to-swallow doctrines. But there’s more than one way to tend a flock, and the pastoral paradigm is merely one of several:

Paradigm Description Pro Con Rainbow Flag
Moralistic Heavy on thou-shalt and thou-shalt-not constructs. Fire-and-brimstone sermons brimming with certitude. Very few shades of grey, and deep advocacy for the existence of a very specific instantiation of God. Rarely shies away from the tough parts of doctrine. Tends to challenge the congregation to think harder about sin and redemption. Sets a high bar for individual conduct and holds people accountable when the bar isn’t met. Little room for questioning — focus is compliance, not love, even when love is invoked to justify the compliance. Often, creates an environment where only people who are “saved” are truly welcome. High risk of clericalism and theological bullying. Burns it.
Mystical Literary approach that emphasizes pious sacramental practices and direct encounters with the divine. The most phenomenological of the paradigms. Emotive, charismatic style engages the true believer. Employs a variety of traditional cultural practices (like the rosary) to deepen the daily faith commitment. Emphasizes a direct, person-to-person encounter with God, Jesus, Mary, the saints and angels, etc. Prayers tend to feature praise and highly emotional/subjective language. Integrates sacramental practices into daily life, including activities like daily family prayers. Over-reliance on metaphor leads to circular reasoning and expressions of faith that cannot be meaningfully unpacked. (E.g., “cloak yourself in the righteousness of Christ” — meaning what, exactly?) Tends to fetishize the irrelevant, like tracking the latest alleged Marian apparitions on Facebook. Actually likes Taizé and the CEV Bible, or conversely, the “traditional Latin Mass” and the Douay-Rheims. Often holier-than-thou. Suffers it.
Pastoral Offers gentle exhortation toward incremental improvement along one’s faith journey. Welcoming approach that encourages community. Aims to help people where they are, and to keep them in the flock by reserving Judgment Day to God and not to the minister. Takes a one-day-at-a-time approach to becoming a better person, through small steps along a lifelong path. Generally affirming. Avoids old formalities that “get in the way.” Implicitly endorses cafeteria-style Christianity, even if explicitly condemning it. No meaningful challenges or sacrifices required. Preaching is uniformly insipid; MTD themes pervade and only the puns and personal anecdotes change. “All are welcome” even when individuals explicitly repudiate essential doctrines, for “who are we to judge?” Flies it.
Scholastic Focused on teaching the history and doctrines of the faith tradition, with an emphasis on applying those lessons to everyday life. Offers a rich banquet of history and doctrine, diving fearlessly into subjects like medieval heresies. Translates the history of the church into a great “why” through which today’s parishioners take active part. Holds to doctrine but accepts moral weakness and offers a reasonable but not-superficial pathway to redemption. Often, more intellectual than spiritual, leading to a sort of emotional dryness. Holds fast to doctrinal norms and proves welcomes people who don’t repudiate them. Endorses a grey-zone orthodoxy less stark than the moralists but tougher than the pastors, leading to a poor fit with people seeking MTD affirmation and superficial “community.” Ignores it.

In most churches I’ve visited — and thanks to my former volunteering with the diocesan worship office, I’ve had a lot of experience with very many Catholic priests in the Diocese of Grand Rapids — most priests take a primarily pastoral approach. Indeed, seminaries train as such. I’ve only encountered two mystics (Fr. J.R. at St. Anthony, many years ago, and Fr. Ron, now at Sacred Heart) and perhaps two or three scholastics (Fr. Peter at St. Anthony, and Frs. Ed and Robert at Sacred Heart). The closest moralist priest I’ve met may have been Fr. Ray at St. Anthony, although I never really knew him in his prime. All the other priests I’ve met or heard homilies from, at the cathedral or St. Mary in Marne or St. Robert of Newminster or St. Isidore or St. Anthony, were uniformly pastoral. The bishops I’ve served with — Bps. Rose and Hurley, primarily — evidenced strongly pastoral tendencies, too.

In the abstract, pastoral sensitivity isn’t a vice. But when most ministers speak with this voice, without countervailing voices to moderate it, weaknesses of this approach metastasize. So sermons by and large become exercises in navel-gazing, filled with jokes and gentle exhortations devoid of serious demands of sacrifice. You see an emphasis on “community” and “stewardship” that emphasizes inclusivity, non-judgmentalism and attainment of your spiritual goals by dropping your check into the collection basket each week. In short, a dominant pastoral approach almost necessarily leads to cafeteria-style Christianity that becomes more cultural and social than spiritual.

Is it any wonder that first the mainline Protestants, and now Evangelicals and Catholics, witness a flight from the pews? People who hunger for a meaningful spiritual challenge, or a deeper understanding of the faith tradition, or a more intimate encounter with the divine through deliberate liturgical orthopraxis, are left clawing in the shadows. So they either leave to find a church that meets these needs (in effect, following a weak form of the Benedict Option), or they leave organized Christianity altogether. I think a huge part of the story of the decline of organized religion draws from the sharp turn toward the pastoral since the 1960s, thus making the emptying of the pews something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But this trend is only part of the story.

The State of Dogma is Weak Because It Speaks to the Lowest Common Denominator

One of the best aspects of Christianity in the Western Tradition is that it speaks to literally everyone regardless of their intellect and education. This point cannot be under-stated, because alternative approaches to all-encompassing worldviews (e.g., Marxism-Leninism, modern scientism) gear themselves toward people at the higher end of the IQ distribution, such that when Stalin average-to-low-IQ people assume positions of absolute power within those worldviews, the blood tends to flow freely. 

Consider:

  • Average IQ ranges from 85 to 115. Roughly 68 percent of all people fall into this bucket.
  • An additional 13.5 percent of all people have IQs between 85 and 70. For this cohort, comprising roughly three people out of every 22 picked at random, their cognitive ability is such that they generally require special/easy work and (at the lower end) intense supervision. Reading comprehension and ability to understand abstract ideas is significantly curtailed, and associated social isolation significantly increases the relative risk that this population will turn violent.
  • An additional 2 percent of the population — one person in 50! — has an IQ below 70, which significantly limits their independence and employment prospects. They can generally use appliances, fill out basic forms, read simplified bus schedules, and the like, but they’re incapable of more cognitively demanding tasks.

The genius of the Christian tradition is that even the people at the very low end of the IQ spectrum can understand the Ten Commandments. And think of the great medieval churches, whose stained glass and architecture spoke to illiterate peasants in a way that no book ever could. Many of the pious devotions that seem so simple-minded are simple because they include people who otherwise would struggle to understand more complex formulations. Thus, a lot of the language of liturgy and much of the current state of homilitics is premised on the notion that the best sermon cannot out-think the slowest congregant. For centuries, this formula worked. Farmers who had no formal schooling, and who — if they could read at all — read only the Bible, would never grasp, say, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas. Yet they can grasp “thou shalt not lie” without having to struggle with the Principle of the Double Effect, and they can pray the rosary and the Nicene Creed without having to understand the philosophical minutiae of transubstantiation or the mechanism of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. They can engage in days of fast and abstinence and “offer it up” as a personal sacrifice without a deep Christological understanding of the crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice.

So the tradition operates on many levels, in harmony: Ordinary people enjoyed a moral and cultural framework centered around their local church, with digestible practices that mirrored the concepts that most of them were not prepared to engage on a deep cognitive level. Even (or especially?) for people with low IQs and a propensity to violence, the strictures of the Church offered context and restraint that the local social order, on its own, could never engender. And there’s a lot to be said for this practice. Marx and others decried religion as the opiate of the masses, but would you rather have the masses on their knees in the church or with their pitchforks and torches on the town square? Religion is responsible for much bloodshed and suffering, but how much bloodshed and suffering has been avoided because the discipline of the Church kept the peace when no other institution could?

But the challenge of today is that the modern world cares much more about the why, so the pious practices of the past — structured to include people with little or no formal education and potentially limited cognitive ability — don’t cut it for people with college educations and high IQs. A framework for catechesis and apologetics that assumes a low degree of education and low-to-average cognitive ability will never look like a framework for catechesis and apologetics geared to a modern, highly educated professional. And, for reasons rooted in institutional inertia as much as anything, organized faith communities have proven vexingly slow to adapt. Thus, religion appears to be a den of superstitious moralizing justified by flowery metaphors that only resonate with people already on the inside.

This rhetorical misalignment is, in a nutshell, the problem with an overwhelmingly pastoral paradigm: Ministers cannot rebut the “nones” because they’re speaking different languages, and when people raised in a faith tradition begin to question that tradition in light of Enlightenment values, the ministers either adapt to the Enlightenment at the expense of the faith tradition (how many churches now fly the rainbow flag?) or face the widespread desertion of their pews because stock pastoral answers cannot rise to the level of Enlightenment thinking. These pastors cannot but do otherwise. The arguments, the language and the structures that worked for churches a century or two ago are wholly inadequate to the present moment.

Churches Rarely Perform Field Surgery on Broken People and Families

Relatedly: When “church” is what you do for an hour on Sunday, it’s by definition not a part of your daily life.

In a country presently bedeviled by opioid addiction, diseases of despair, racism, massive structural changes to the economy and the collapse of the traditional family, what’s your church doing about it? Thoughts and prayers are necessary, but not within a country mile of being sufficient. Does your church actively engage in ministry to the disaffected? Do you, personally, engage in such ministry? Have you ever visited hospitals or prisons? Have you counseled someone? Have you delivered meals to shut-ins, trained a displaced worker or counseled a family in distress?

Some churches do these things … occasionally, and with great self-congratulation. Some, obviously, excel at this work—but they’re depressingly uncommon.

It’s not obvious why people should care about a faith community, when the Most Holy and Sacred Trinity of Stewardship (time, talent and treasure) seem to flow in one direction only. Why should an average person, beset by spiritual crisis, care about an institution that mostly takes and rarely gives? And when it does give, it comes with uncomfortable and ill-timed strings attached, or a clear overtone of “look at us, we’re doing charity work” that simultaneously manages to humiliate the beneficiary while offering a false sense of moral superiority to the perpetrator?

Jolting the New Evangelization into Effectiveness

To arrest the decline in religious participation, I think churches must do something hard: They must reform from within, because from within is where the rot sources that drives this decline.

To wit:

  1. Mitigate the worst tendencies of pastoral sensitivity by training clerics in other ministerial paradigms. Despite the reduction in numbers of ordained ministers, the Church needs fewer pastors and more teachers and apologists who understand history and doctrine and preach it with vigor. An all-are-welcome logic has not been checked with appropriate bumper guards, such that the core of the faith has slowly eroded. Why pick from the church cafeteria when you could dine in sumptuous luxury at the secular steakhouse down the road? More time spent teaching and explaining where the boundary lines are (instead of apologizing for them!) will go a long way toward checking the MTD trend in contemporary homiletics that’s the root of so much of the present distress. Plus, people welcome a meaningful spiritual challenge every now and then. 
  2. Sharpen the message to speak to children of the Enlightenment. Too often, questions by high-IQ or highly educated people get dismissed with a 18th-century response to “pray about it.” Tough questions are met with appeals to authority or quasi-mystical metaphorical language that obscures more than it illuminates. Modern philosophy, anthropology and evolutionary psychology offer myriad justifications for religious faith — nothing definitively factual, but much that overlays with varying arguments and degrees of plausibility, like an argumentative tapestry that wins by the weight of the rope and not the strength of any strand within it. (See my Religion page for a lengthy essay about my journey back to the Church, for example.) You can’t use the inside-baseball language of catechisms and doctrines on people who don’t accept those catechisms and doctrines; first, you must get them to a spot where they’re willing to consider them. The New Atheist movement has done much to suggest that the game is irrelevant, to which various faith communities respond by citing the game’s rulebook. It’s the wrong approach; you cannot justify a game qua game merely by asserting its own rules. The New Evangelization must confront the charge of irrelevancy using the language of modern philosophy, psychology and science — not with the language of medieval mystics. Not since the Scholastics of the late Middle Ages has the Church spoken forcefully to intellectuals. That gap must heal, and fast.
  3. Get into the community in a big and not-splashy way. No one likes a hypocrite. If your faith emphasizes sacrifice and supporting the least of one’s brothers and sisters … shouldn’t there be some sort of non-trivial sign that you’re actually doing it?
  4. Rethink the Vatican II ecclesiology. I’ve lately been attending Mass in the Extraordinary Form at Sacred Heart. I’ve never had a theological or cultural bias for it; I was born long after Paul VI promulgated the revised Missal. But one thing that strikes me about the EF versus the Ordinary Form is that the EF doesn’t compel fake communitarianism. In the EF, you’re welcome to pray as you like, follow along in your hand Missal (or not), attend Confession, or pray the rosary. You aren’t expected to act like boot-camp recruits who respond snappily and in unison to every word coming out of the priest’s mouth. Although I’m a product of the OF, and I’m aware of the ways the OF improves upon the EF, the OF isn’t without its drawbacks, either. A rebalancing—more Latin, ad orientum, less congregational singing and rote responding, a sense of slower and more sacred movement, less flippancy in lay ministerial roles—would prove helpful.

Anyway, some thoughts. Merry Christmas.

Religion

In Search of the Holy Grail of Catholic Bible Translations

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A shelf of bibles

In February, I wrote a lengthy post about Bible translations. Herewith a recapitulation and follow-up, because (a) I have more, different Bible translations than the six I referenced a few months ago, (b) I’m procrastinating about a different writing project and (c) a bunny-hole search about one of them that started with that aforementioned different writing project revealed that there’s really not a good general-purpose guide for Catholics about the mighty — and mighty contentious — question of which Bible a person ought to use.

First, I’m in agreement with the wag who said that the best Bible is the one you’ll actually open. That said, for Catholics, the “where we rate” question for U.S. sales totals proves illuminating in a depressing way. The top seller of 2017 was the King James Version at 31 percent of the market, followed by the New International Version at 13 percent and the English Standard Version at 9 percent. The first specifically Catholic version to hit the list was the New American Bible, at an anemic 2 percent market share.

Catholics do enjoy many “authorized” choices, although the KJV and the NIV aren’t among them. Before the 1983 revision to the Code of Canon Law, translations just had to be approved by either the Holy See or by any local bishop. After 1983, either the Holy See or an episcopal conference (in the U.S., it’s the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) can approve a new translation. Thus, anything receiving at least one bishop’s approval before ’83, or anything receiving USCCB or Vatican approval after ’83, is permitted for personal, private prayer and study. There are, quite literally, dozens of translations that therefore make the cut, ranging from the USCCB’s own “official” Bible to the beloved Jerusalem Bible that Mother Angelica favored. Just check the copyright page. If it’s got an imprimatur from a local ordinary from before 1983 or by a bishop under color of the USCCB after 1983, then it’s valid.

The major Bibles explicitly approved by the USCCB since 1983 include the Contemporary English Version, the New American Bible (Revised Edition) and the Good News Translation (Today’s English Version, second Catholic edition). Older versions, like Knox and the Revised Standard Version and the Douay-Rheims and the Confraternity Bible, were grandfathered under Canon 825. Interestingly, the USCCB endorses a handful of partial translations, as well, such as the inclusive-language Grail Psalter from G.I.A.

In the United States, a hodge-podge of translations percolate into the current Lectionary used at Mass. There’s technically no Bible on the market that perfectly matches the current FrankenLectionary. So don’t bother looking. If alignment with Mass readings matters to you, your closest option is the New American Bible; the Lectionary is based on the NAB subject to one-off revisions prompted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and subsequently adopted by the USCCB. (Adding to the fun: Much of the Scriptural quoting in the English-language version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church sources from the Revised Standard Version, not the NAB. But not all the CCC quotes originate from the RSV. Isn’t that special?)

Finding a “good” Catholic Bible, therefore, is a matter of considerable consternation, and websites ranging from general-interest Catholic Lite forums to the fevered underbelly of the Catholic Traditionalist movement all offer opinions with varying degrees of coherence. In general, three attributes seem to matter to people:

  • Upon what was the translation based — the Vulgate or ancient source material?
  • How literally does the translation hew to the idioms of the source material?
  • How does the translation deal with horizontal and vertical inclusive language?

Spend a few minutes in that Catholic Bible Bunny Hole and you’ll find much wailing and gnashing of teeth among people looking for the “best” translation, and they usually identify “best” as being the most word-for-word faithful to ancient sources. Yet it matters whether “ancient sources” do or don’t begin with Jerome’s Vulgate. Plus, (ahem!) literalness is not a synonym for Godliness. An idiom in Latin or Hebrew or Aramaic may or may not pass into comprehensible contemporary English; whether you want to needle over idioms that make no sense or just let the translators craft them to make sense for you is therefore a matter of preference — one that, in theory, should be theologically moot. The only reason it’s not moot is because the First Aggiornamento Armored Assault Brigade bulldozing through the 1970s deliberately mistranslated parts of the Bible and the Roman Missal to satisfy particular Wonder-Bread-and-granola ecclesiological and Christological biases, in a manner not dissimilar to the way the Protestants chucked the parts of the Bible that proved inconvenient to their, um, particular set of protestations. Had the translators been more faithful and less partisan stewards of their task, today no one would really give a whit about the difference between formal and dynamic equivalence. Vigilance is high because the shenanigans were shameless.

Where those shenanigans clamored most intensely — the subject of vertical inclusive language — the Catholic Bible-buying population remains most hyper-vigilant. Vertical inclusive language was the practice of translating terms about the Supernatural Supreme Being in deliberately gender-neutral ways, including belaboring the term God so as to avoid pronouns. (You see this phenomenon at work in the ethos of some Red Habit nunneries where bretheren become comrades and “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit” transmogrifies into “the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sanctifier.”) This practice sowed confusion about well-established Catholic doctrines to the point that the Vatican policed English translations of the Lectionary and the Missal, wrestling a degree of control away from the USCCB and the largely autonomous boards of experts that shaped the translation process. The base of the Lectionary is the New American Bible, but Rome found some NAB passages so theologically deficient that several rounds of additional revision and even explicit approval by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith proved necessary. Thus, some very new Catholic Bibles proclaim fidelity to Liturgiam Authenticam, the Vatican’s 2001 instruction about how to translate stuff. That the CDF found it necessary to release this document is a sign of just how far politicized the liturgical-translation process had become; that in 2017 Pope Francis unwound bits of Liturgiam Authenticam with his Magnum Principium reveals that the fight isn’t over.

The Vatican also took issue with horizontal inclusive language, or the practice of rendering in gender-neutral terms a text’s references to humans. For example, the ancient brethren might be translated as brothers and sisters. In many cases: So what? What’s wrong with recognizing that them there womenfolk are people too? For the most part horizontal inclusive language provoked merely literary disagreement, given that in some cases, the translated text effected all the sublime grace of a memorandum composed by the Diversity & Inclusion committee at UC-Berkeley. Yet some theological problems arise here, too. For example, consider the opening verse of Psalm 1, where the traditional phrase Happy the man is rendered in the RNAB as Happy those — although NABRE under the Vatican’s prodding revised it to Blessed is the man. This kind of language that pervaded the RNAB (the two transitional versions between the original NAB and the current NABRE) is considered problematic by some insofar as rendering man as person or those affirmatively precludes the possibility of interpreting the psalm in overtly Christological terms. In other words, even horizontal inclusive language sparked occasional theological disagreement.

So, yeah. On one hand, it’s a silly thing to get worked up over, except that the guardians of scriptural scholarship gave people something legitimate and substantive to get worked up over.

Thus the situation complexifies, alas.

A Tale of Nine Texts

Let’s compare the language of these nine translations of mine against a verse — Hebrews 12:1-2. We’ll start with me listing specifically which versions I possess, along with my subjective assessment of where they fall on a grid comparing both the nature of the translation as well as the inclusion of additional supplemental material (concordances, maps, extensive footnoting, etc.) within that specific version on my shelf.

  1. Vsc — The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (1592, Latin). Minimal footnoting.
  2. DRC — Challoner Douay-Rheims (1752, English). Minimal footnoting.
  3. KJV — King James Version (1769 revision); not approved for Catholic use. Minimal footnoting.
  4. Knox — Msgr. Ronald Knox’s one-man translation (1949). Minimal footnoting.
  5. RSV-2CE — “The Didache Bible,” Ignatius Press (2015), the Revised Standard Version (Second Catholic Edition) revised in light of Liturgiam Authenticam but governed under the RSV’s original 1960s-era imprimatur. Extensive supplementary material including doctrinal lessons and exhaustive footnotes.
  6. NASB — New American Standard Bible (1971); not approved for Catholic use. Minimal footnoting, but with a concordance at the back.
  7. NIV — New International Version (1984); not approved for Catholic use, despite that it was provided to me by the diocesan prison ministry for use when I made prison visits as a lay chaplain. Minimal footnoting.
  8. GNT/TEV — Good News Translation, Today’s English Version, Second Catholic edition (1992). Some glossary and reading-table info at the back. Many line-art drawings within the text.
  9. NABRE — the closest thing to an official Bible in the U.S., given that copyright to “The New American Bible, Revised Edition” is owned by USCCB (2011). Heavy footnotes, chapter intros and maps. NABRE is an update to the 1970 NAB, although two intermediary versions — both titled Revised NAB — appeared in 1996 and 2001.

The Story of Hebrews 12:1-2

So how do each of the nine translations — six of which are approved for U.S. Catholics — stack up, comparatively?

Sixto-Clementine Vulgate

Ideoque et nos tantam habentes impositam nubem testium, deponentes omne pondus, et circumstans nos peccatum, per patientiam curramus ad propositum nobis certamen: Aspicientes in auctorem fidei, et consummatorem Jesum, qui proposito sibi gaudio sustinuit crucem, confusione contempta, atque in dextera sedis Dei sedet.

Challoner Douay-Rheims

And therefore we also having so great a cloud of witnesses over our head, laying aside every weight and sin which surrounds us, let us run by patience to the fight proposed to us: Looking on Jesus, the author and finisher of faith, who, having joy set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and now sitteth on the right hand of the throne of God.

King James Version (1769)

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking onto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Knox Version

Why then, since we are watched from above by such a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of all that weighs us down, of the sinful habit that clings so closely, and run, with all endurance, the race for which we are entered. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the origin and crown of all faith, who, to win his prize of blessedness, endured the cross and made light of its shame, Jesus, who now sits on the right of God’s throne.

Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

New American Standard Bible

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

New International Version

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Good News Translation, Today’s English Version, Second Edition

As for us, we have this large crowd of witnesses around us. So then, let us rid ourselves of everything that gets in the way, and of the sin which holds on to us so tightly, and let us run with determination the race that lies before us. Let us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from beginning to end. He did not give up because of the cross! On the contrary, because of the joy that was waiting for him, he thought nothing of the disgrace of dying on the cross, and he is now seated at the right side of God’s throne.

New American Bible, Revised Edition

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God.

… all of which to say is that any authorized Catholic Bible should suffice. Nevertheless, the NABRE is closest to Mass readings and is a well-balanced edition that, in full-sized versions, offers plenty of useful study materials. More conservative Catholics favor the RSV-2CE for its comparative lack of pronoun confusion. The Douay-Rheims was the “ancestral Bible” for Catholics for centuries, plus it’s beautiful and a close translation of the Vulgate.

Just pick the one you’ll actually open. You’ll be fine. Lectio divina and all that.

Religion

Translation Standards and the Quest for Biblical Meaning

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Having been tempted by my friend Patrick, I purchased — it arrived today! — a side-by-side copy of Challoner’s revision of the Douay-Rheims Bible opposite the Clementine Vulgate. It’s a beautiful, hefty volume prepared with obvious care by Baronius Press. I flipped through it and immediately got sidetracked by textual comparisons.

Myriad copies of the Bible, in English, grace the market. There’s a smaller, but no less robust, market for Catholic versions. The major difference between Catholic and Protestant Bibles is that the Protestants removed the good parts that prove their heresy Protestant versions decline to include some “deuterocanonical” books accepted by Catholic and Orthodox authorities. So Catholic versions tend to include a bit more in the Old Testament.

Even in the Catholic-specific Bible market, you can choose from several dozen different editions, each offering slightly different translation standards and supplemental materials. Technically, the Catholic version is the Vulgate, originally prepared by St. Jerome in the fourth century A.D. The Vulgata Sixto-Clementina — the Clementine Vulgate revised, most recently, in 1598 under the leadership of Rev. Franciscus Toletus SJ during the pontificate of Clement VIII — governed until 1979, when the Nova Vulgata promulgated by Pope St. John Paul the Great became the textual basis for the Missal, the Lectionary and related liturgical texts issued in Latin after 1979. No English-language version is mandated by Roman ecclesiastical authorities as being authoritative, however.

That said, although Calvinist some people look to the King James Version as being the authoritative English-language Bible, for Catholics the pride-of-place probably goes to the Douay-Rheims version, published in phases between 1582 and 1610 by the English College at Rheims and Douay. This version translated the Vulgate, not the underlying source texts. The most recent revision to the Douay-Rheims, accomplished in the middle of the eighteenth century by bishop Richard Challoner, was approved for use in English-speaking countries and remained the dominant version until well into the twentieth century.
I presently own six different Bible versions across five physical volumes:

  • The St. Joseph Edition of the New American Bible (1970) [NAB] — this volume was given to me in elementary school as part of a multi-year preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation. I’ve treasured it for nearly 30 years. It was explicitly approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops for use in the United States and contains extensive footnotes, cross-references and brief introductory essays for each book. The NAB is still the version used in the English-language Lectionary in the United States. To the extent that there’s an “official” Catholic Bible in the U.S., it’s the NAB.
  • The New American Bible, Revised Edition (2010) [NABRE] — the USCCB’s second-edition official version, approved by Francis Cardinal George. It retains much of the extra contextual material of the NAB, like the maps and extensive footnotes, but updates the language based on new scholarship including access to the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s a bit more literal than the NAB but hasn’t yet made its way into the Lectionary. If you’ve never owned a Bible before and want one that’s easy to access with rich additional supplementary material, this one’s your best bet.
  • The side-by-side Sixto-Clementina Vulgata [Vsc] and Challoner’s Douay-Rheims [DRC], acquired this week. The Vsc is still an authoritative text of the Latin Church despite the recent release of the Nova Vulgata. DRC, beyond its historical value in the English-speaking world, is given pride-of-place by traditionalist Catholics. This one-volume compilation is probably a must-have resource for theologically aware Catholics with a rich sense of history and, ideally, some background in Latin.
  • Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition (2006) [RSV-2CE] — a revision undertaken in light of 2001’s Liturgicam Authenticam, this lovely volume by Ignatius Press doesn’t include much contextual material. It’s considered a solid, mainstream Catholic edition (it’s personally recommended by folks like Scott Hahn and Jimmy Akin). The RSV bridges the Douay-Rheims and the Authorized (King James) versions; it’s considered the first ecumenical English Bible, plus the original RSV is the source of the scriptural quotations in the English-language version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Edition of the RSV includes the deuterocanonical books and the “second edition” references the adjustments after LA.
  • New International Version (1984) [NIV] — I received a cheap NIV many years ago when I began prison ministry. This volume, published by the International Bible Society, was approved by the Michigan Department of Corrections and the Kent County Sheriff’s Department. Not theologically, of course, but because the volume is made of newsprint with a glued spine and a soft cover, it can’t readily conceal contraband into a secured facility or be used as a weapon if seized by an inmate. The NIV is a mainstream Protestant version, issued by academics rather than clerics and governed by a dynamic equivalence of the language. It’s meant to be accessible to the widest possible reading audience.

So funny thing. There’s been a long-running war in the Catholic Church — which might be close to sputtering out, Deo volente — regarding the logic of liturgical translations. One school of thought, formal equivalence, suggests that the most literal translation of the original source is the best. The other perspective, dynamic equivalence, suggests that ancient formations should be rendered in ways intelligible to modern readers. Many Bible translations fall somewhere in the middle. On top of that, you’ve got the question of what’s being translated. Original source material? The Greek Septuagint? The Vulgate? The KJV?

So in the spirit of “well, that’s interesting,” I present a table of two different verses with the resulting translation by version:

Scriptural Translations

VersionGenesis 1:1-2John 1:1-5Matthew 16:18
VscIn principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae errant super faciem abyssi: et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas.In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Hoc erat in principio apud Deum. Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est. In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominium: et lux in tenebris lucet, et Tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.Et ego dico tibi, quia tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam, et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus eam.
DRCIn the beginning God created heaven, and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved over the waters.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
NABIn the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
NABREIn the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth — and the earth was without form or shape, with darkness over the abyss and a mighty wind sweeping over the waters —In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.
RSV-2CEIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.
NIVIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood.And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
Two passages, six translations, one Bible.

To a casual reader, these differences might seem minor. Mere wording. But much mischief flows from creative translation, particularly when the translator’s politics aren’t irrelevant. Consider, most notoriously, the translation of Credo in unum Deum — the first line of the Creed — in the English version of the 1970 Missal. Credo was translated as “we believe,” despite that the only logical translation is “I believe.” (For the folks at home: “We believe,” in Latin, is credimus; this error is so basic that, quite literally, a Latin 101 student should catch it.) It took a stern rebuke by Rome to prompt the U.S. bishops to tighten the translation standards.

Of course, if a blog post about Biblical translations seems obscure, think of it this way: History has a way of leaving the interpretation of events to the chroniclers of the day. In this age of “fake news” and gross political hypocrisy and what-about-ism, whose translation of History do you trust, and why?

Religion, Writing, Editing & Journalism

The Ghosts of Easters Past, Present and Future

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As I write this reflection, it’s late morning on April 15. A fresh pour of coffee sits to my left — as does Queen Fiona, comfortably napping on her pillow — and to my right, an open window admits the hums and chirps of a serene spring Saturday on a quiet side street in the heart of Grand Rapids, Michigan. As if by the product of elven magic, the trees have budded seemingly overnight; in fact, several trees across the street already appear to be mostly leafed. It’s peaceful, which means it’s a good time to write.
Last night was not peaceful. I just couldn’t get comfortable, so I kept waking up and at one point, I even decamped to the couch. Right around 4 a.m., when the thunderstorm rolled past. During the stretches of wakefulness last night, a few thoughts about life, Easter and everything bubbled within the soft grey goo betwixt my earholes.
Allow me to share.

Easter Past

At some point, the “Easter” of my childhood transformed from a family-themed chocolate festival into a religious duty. This ghost of memory asserted itself for the first time about a week ago, after I had mentioned to my friend Patrick that I had written a short essay that will be included in the forthcoming book provisionally titled Staying Catholic When You’ve Been Hurt in the Church, edited by Eve Tushnet and published through Wipf+Stock’s Cascade Press. A central motif in that essay, which addressed my experience in the diocesan vocations program in the early 2000s, focused on one central event: A brief moment of spiritual clarity obtained, interestingly, around noon on Good Friday, 2000, at the Legion of Christ novitiate in Cheshire, Connecticut.
That experience proved to be a pivot point of sorts. Before it, Easter was more of a family event: There’d be a luscious feast and chocolate bunnies and happy memories. And, yes, Easter Mass — but a church service was a small price to pay for all the fun and food.
After Cheshire, and as I got more deeply involved in the religious discipline of the Church, the “family stuff” yielded to spiritual renewal. I actually looked forward to Lent and its period of reflection and rejuvenation. I did retreats. I went to penance services. I prayed the Stations of the Cross. The Triduum presented a busy yet fulfilling experience: Although as chief sacristan and parochial master of ceremonies for my parish I was constantly on the go, I found my centering moments in the little places. Like the period of Eucharistic adoration on Thursday night, or the chance to take a pew with my breviary while the decorators planned where they were going to place the lilies. Or just sitting by the tabernacle after the 11:30 Mass on Easter Sunday, the church empty and everyone gone, to just be.

Easter Present

Yet it barely registered that this week was Holy Week.
The ghost of Easter Present whispers — barely audibly — that a lot of stuff changed in 2008, and over that year, religious discipline took a mighty fall. The nine-year anniversary of that transition draws nigh.
Divide 2008 into thirds. Late winter and early spring saw me twitchy. I wanted a change. That’s the period when I first started thinking about long-term life goals, and even achieved some by earning my open-water dive certification. But it wasn’t enough, so I began to think more actively about my social network. The late-spring-to-late-summer period witnessed a veritable explosion of new friends, new experiences and a wildly chaotic summer-long encounter with love, sex and dating.
The allure of hedonism, the restlessness of my early 30s and a changing portfolio of habits and goals pulled me away from the Church and toward a radically different lifestyle. By the end of the year, I had stopped regular religious observation. It wasn’t deliberate, and it wasn’t even so much a loss of faith — more like a paradigm shifting without a clutch. I drew more and more comfort from the (admittedly misguided) belief that I could have my cake and eat it, too, by simply invoking St. Augustine’s logic of “Lord, make me holy … but not yet.”
So this is the world I currently inhabit: Not faithless, not anti-Church, but largely absent from the public celebrations of the Church. Untethered, perhaps.

Easter Future

The ghost of Easter Future asks: What path may a person take to remain faithful, if that path isn’t perfectly consistent with the disciplinary norms of the Church? I suspect I’m being presented with a trick question, because the orthodox answer is delightfully concise.
It’s partially the Augustine factor, and partially a function of asserting a quasi-gnostic, quasi-individualistic ethos to justify one’s disengagement from the ordinary discipline of the Church. You know the drill: “I’m smarter than the average bear, therefore the rituals that guide the rubes are beneath me; after all, I have access to a higher understanding of Truth.”
The funny thing is, I love ritual. Yet in all of my travels across the diocese, I have yet to find a priest who (a) does ritual well, and (b) offers homilies that aren’t either solipsistic or trite or both. So an essential part of the Mass is missing, and I must supply it for myself. The temptation is to say that I can supply it on my own time.
So the ghost challenges me to think about Easter Future:

  • By putting aside a smarmy over-reliance on Augustinian thinking.
  • By putting aside the arrogance that cleaves a person from the daily life of the Church.
  • By re-orienting life’s burdens to ensure adequate time for spiritual growth.

I will consider this challenge.

Sundry Updates

Enough about Easter. Here are other things of note:

  1. Next weekend I’ll speak at the Get Published! conference in Holland. Attendance is free; the event is coordinated by MiFiWriters. Should be a ton of fun; I’m sitting on one panel and leading another (on query letters). Last year’s event was great.
  2. I’m also privileged to speak at the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival in Green Bay, Wisconsin in a few weeks. I’ll be leading a discussion about how aspiring authors should get started with small presses and literary journals. Lots of fabulous speakers lined up for the three-day event, including Margaret Atwood.
  3. And twice in the next month I’ll be off to the Chicagoland area, once for our quarterly NAHQ board meetings and once to speak about health data analytics to the Illinois Association for Healthcare Quality at that group’s annual educational conference.
  4. Lots going on at the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters, not least of which is a massive renovation to our website. As board treasurer, I’ve been focused on that piece of the adjustment, although many more exciting changes will be announced very soon.
  5. I’ve been plugging away at Caffeinated Press. Working through a handful of manuscripts, which is great, but sweet mother of potatoes it’s been a slog. Partially because my attention has been divided a thousand ways from Sunday.
  6. Looks like another Vegas trip is on the horizon.
  7. I’m pleased to report that Ziggy the Cat — one of the two neighborhood felines who frequent Jason’s outdoor Café de Meowmix — appears to be doing much better. She’s gaining weight and her fur loss has reversed. I think she was abandoned last summer. I’ve been looking out for her. Sweet kitty, although a bit of a bully to the other café patrons.
  8. Got to enjoy a wonderful “day off” a few weeks ago. My friend AmyJo hosted an all-day marathon of the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. After 11.5 hours, several cocktails and a revolving-door of guests … it was great.

All for now.

Politics & Culture, Religion

On Bakeries, Pizza Shops, Florists and Same-Sex Nuptials

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Dismay.
I can’t think of any other word to describe my impression of the brouhaha sweeping the country about the collision of same-sex marriage and the religious beliefs of small-business owners.
Off the bat, I’ll declaim what I believe to be self-evidently true: The radical monoculture of the Totalitarian Left tears at our shared social fabric. I could go on at length about the subject, but there’s not much I can add to what’s already been published by conservative commentators the last few weeks. Even for conservatives like me, who are supportive of gay rights, it’s difficult to be allies when the most prominent spokespeople of the Left have gone Full Alinsky on us, adopting hate-filled rhetoric and violent intimidation along the You Will Be Made To Care axis of “argumentation.”
That said, I am skeptical that a plain and faithful reading of Scripture justifies a small-business owner refusing to supply a same-sex wedding. There’s plenty in both Scripture and Tradition to bar a faithful Christian from being one of the spouses in a same-sex marriage … but serving as a contractor? One could, I suppose, elucidate a fairly subtle theological argument to justify non-engagement with a same-sex wedding in any capacity, including as a vendor, but it’s an argument — an interpretation of religious norms, not a plain-text reading of one. And the nature of many of these arguments I’ve encountered recently suggest that there’s not much theological nuance there; the arguments have all the superficiality of a post-hoc rationalization, a thin veneer disguising overt discrimination.
In other words: I throw the bullshit card on the idea that there’s a specifically religious reason compelling enough to justify the denial of service to same-sex clients. Especially when the very folks who argue their religious rights are violated by acting as vendors for a same-sex wedding also argue that those weddings are invalid in the eyes of God. So what’s the religious problem, then, in catering a make-believe wedding? The only way the religious-exemption logic holds is if the objector conceded that same-sex marriage (even civil marriage) is divinely sanctioned — but then, divine sanction erases the claim for a religious exemption. The mind boggles at the irrationality of it all.
To be sure, many Christians profess significant problems with homosexuality and the expansion of marriage to same-sex partners. Those problems are rooted in valid readings of Christian theology. I believe very strongly that Christians should not be targeted or persecuted for adhering to those beliefs. I also believe very strongly that gays and lesbians should not be ostentatiously refused public accommodation by businesses, through the self-serving and open-ended assertion of religious liberty.
These Christians are also Americans. The civil law has recently opened a gulf between what’s legally permissible and what many Christians view as being morally permissible, regarding the institution of marriage. Squaring the circle between private faith and the public Constitutional order isn’t easy, but there are ways beyond public foot-stomping to remain true to your faith while fully participating in even today’s more permissible social climate.
In fact, the real problem here is the perfect storm of a brand of Evangelical conservative Christians who want to make a stand, and be seen making a stand, for their disapprobation of gay rights — in opposition to far-Left ideologues eager to pick a fight with the “bitter clingers.” So we’re left with the rank idiocy of the Indiana and Arkansas RFRA bills but also uncharitable lawsuits against bakers and florists who prefer not to celebrate that which they morally oppose. The veiled threats of the far-right blogosphere contributes, too, with its denunciations of the “caving” by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, while far-left activists delight in vitriolic denunciations of alleged intolerance that are untethered to reality. All of this drama constitutes a self-inflicted injury for Christian conservatives.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of a devoutly Christian baker, caterer, florist or wedding planner. You’re behind the counter, conducting your trade in peace. You go to church on Sunday, you tithe, you pray. And then Adam and Steve sashay into your storefront, ready to place an order for a sheet cake for their upcoming wedding. What do you do?
When you walk the Path of Martyrs, eager to be seen as making a stand for Jesus, you tell Adam and Steve that you can’t support them because you’re a Christian and won’t be a party to their sin. Cue the raging public shitstorm. (And, in a sense, the religious hypocrisy — viz Matthew 6:5.)
In a more reasonable world, when Adam and Steve cross your threshold, you smile at them, congratulate them on their engagement, ask friendly questions about their color choices, and enquire about the date of their ceremony. Then you appear crestfallen when you say that you can’t accommodate that date because you’re already booked solid that weekend, but you’d be happy to refer Adam and Steve to Jane’s Bakery across the street. And wouldn’t you know it, Jane just came back from a confectioner’s conference and she has some really great designs for contemporary his-and-his cakes!
Better yet, you mark that date on your calendar and genuinely take it off as a day of prayer, thus protecting you from the accusation of lying while deepening your relationship with Jesus. Sure, you’ll lose some revenue, but consider it as an investment in your treasure in Heaven. Net result: Happy customers, happy proprietors. You have rendered on to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and onto God that which is God’s.
The cynic view, of which I’m increasingly persuaded, is that all of this drama has very little to do with gay marriage. If Adam and Steve want to get married, fine; you’d think they’d find vendors who support them, instead of compelling vendors who don’t. Human decency, and all that. And you’d also think that small-business owners would recognize that baking a cake isn’t a sin, even if you don’t like your customer.
What we’re seeing is, I think, less a genuine question of gay rights or religious freedom, and more a paradigmatic question of whose orthodoxy will govern the terms of engagement in the naked public square. So in a sense, all of this drama is small-small potatoes skirmishing in a much larger and more significant cultural war, a conflict wherein certain modes of thinking that contradict the Authoritarian Left must be rooted out, suppressed, denounced — while certain practices that conservative activists despise must be de-legitimized in the name of “freedom.”
Don’t be distracted. None of this is really about a nuanced view of Christianity, or about gay marriage. Rather, it’s about competing claims to the power to coerce normative values on the larger body politic.
Hence, dismay.

Religion

The Nature of Faith

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Last Sunday, we had a closing four-hour retreat for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults at St. Robert of Newminster. The session was pleasant and the people at that parish are really quite delightful. The experience, at the time when Palm Sunday opens Holy Week, reinforced for me a concept I don’t take seriously enough — that is, the role of religiosity in the lives of ordinary people.
The social scientists tell us that formal religious profession is on the wane. Only one in five Americans visits a place of worship in any given week. Although three-quarters of us confess Christianity, demographers project that Christianity will be a minority faith tradition by 2030 given that one-third of people under age 30 claim no religious affiliation whatsoever.
Yet the religious impulse, as a human phenomenon, is quite different from religious practice. For the unchurched or the atheistic, their religious impulses tend to find expression in other pursuits — sexual licentiousness, radical environmentalism, unfocused spiritualism, unfettered egoism, etc.
Look at the pseudo-messianic undertones of the climate-change True Believers. Some of them suggest that people who disagree with their interpretation of climate models aren’t just mistaken — they’re morally defective and ought to be silenced — or even put in jail. Look, too, at the furor over the departure of newly appointed Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. Some representative supporters of same-sex marriage have argued, loudly, that one man’s private donation six years ago is a public matter because he’s a public face of a company. Think what you will about climate change and same-sex marriage: The zeal to persecute non-believers is a religious impulse that goes beyond mere disagreement about facts, theories or policies.
The phenomenon is simple, really. Human nature is what it is, and that nature prompts us to seek to belong to a tribe. The evolutionary biology and developmental psychology of humankind is fairly well understood on the matter, thanks to pioneering work by researchers like Jared Diamond. Our tribes both fuel and channel our passions and inspire emotional bonds that transcend abstract, dispassionate reason.
Tribes are funny things. In simplest form, they’re society’s little platoons, the places where we discern meaning and level-set sociocultural expectations and find refuge in a like-minded community. In years past, tribes in the United States looked like ethnic bars, churches, fraternal clubs and neighborhood associations. Yet these mediating institutions, across the board, are failing. Gentrification is leading to the erosion ethnic identity for most white Americans; church attendance is on the wane; fraternal organizations are a shell of their former glory; neighborhood civic groups have been superseded by online communities.
So how do we find our tribe? How do we belong? We do it the same way we always have — we find people who “look like us” and share our worldview. Except now, we’re not finding communal solace in religion or civic virtue but rather in political and public-policy forums, and our potential fellow travelers don’t need to hail from our neighborhood but rather can come from anywhere there’s broadband access. Hence the polarization of the electorate: We’re sorting ideologically across party lines because we have fewer purely local social ties to bind us.
Religiosity, when channeled through institutions that have had millennia to develop, is mostly benign. Religiosity, divorced of anchor institutions and self-directed through political channels, is harder to manage. Harder to mediate. Without a diversity of those “little platoons” to provide a broad-based context, we fall into the solipsism of a single-issue messiah. Political activism sourced from a wholly self-contained belief system cannot be reasoned with; it can only be confronted or accommodated.
Hebrews 11:1 reminds us that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Faith compels us; even people who profess atheism nevertheless need faith in something. It’s hard-wired into us as humans. As the rich tapestry of competing loyalties — a diversity that helped to check the excesses of any single constituent part — fades for many of our fellow citizens into a single-issue monochromatic print, our faith loses its grounding.
Some may argue that religious conservatives are ignorant. Or superstitious. Some probably are. But their faith in something bigger than themselves offers their religiosity a more humble, more humane path. Those whose faith hails from their own privileged beliefs, answerable to no higher authority than their own egos, have a tougher struggle to maintain a similar humble, humane demeanor. And, in this poisoned climate, it shows.
As a Catholic, then, I must confess: I have not really appreciated the gift of faith until I finally understood people whose faith is little more than a megaphone for their own psyches.

Personal, Politics & Culture, Religion

Blessings, Old and New

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Today is Christmas. Ho3.
Once upon a yesteryear, the last six weeks of the calendar marked a magical period of fun, family and festivity. The season kicked off with the trek up the hill to my grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving Day. We’d enjoy a feast that would put any Edwardian glutton to shame –assembling in the White Dining Room, a twice-a-year event, with non-casual attire and rare delicacies stretching as far as the eye could see — then cap it off with the thrill of defeat known as the “Lions’ game.” Heaven help us when it was Detroit v. Green Bay; battle lines formed ’round the TV, with the Michigan Delegation duly singing Nearer My God to Thee as the defense sunk beneath the waves while the Indiana Delegation surged with a wild-eyed ferocity that would make Mel Gibson look as sedate as Ben Stein.
Then, we’d embark upon that Great Interregnum known as Advent, when the spiritual side of Christmas received its due accord. The ancient Christian fathers knew what they were doing when they introduced seasonality into the liturgical calendar; moreso, when they pushed the cycle of readings to three years on Sundays and two years on weekdays. Advent became a period both familiar and yet ever new; in my youth, at a Franciscan parish, by the time a new three-year Gospel cycle began we’d have new friars and thus new perspectives on that year’s narrative.
Times change. My parents divorced, my grandfather died, everyone’s moved to different domiciles, schedules swapped as in-laws proliferated, food lines slimmed down from “extravagant fare on china with silver” to “grab a paper plate for appetizers,” sweaters and ties gave way to pajama pants … and I’m in my mid-30s living with a pair of cats. Over the last few years, the holiday season has crumbled a bit. It became a duty to buy gifts. It became rote to do the same things at church. It felt odd that “family” occurred twice per year, in the Snowy Season.
The last few years haven’t been especially merry. Acedia set in, I suppose. Christmas became just one more thing to plan around, like a doctor’s appointment or annual performance review.  One more thing to spend money on. One more reason to sit down with family you see almost never and pretend like things are a happy, healthy whole. Indeed, my favorite part of the last six weeks of the year is the anticipation over my annual two-week vacation, a time spent not on others but rather myself.
Yet. Yet. Yet. It’s tempting to catch yourself judging today by the impossible standard of yesterday. It’s the fate of mankind — graced, as we are, by mortality; cursed, however, by relentless novelty — to never step in the same stream twice. The things that used to excite us eventually lose their wonder. The things we used to tire of, now bring delight. The challenge of Christmas, then, is to resist treating the holiday like a repeat, but instead to find new meaning every single time, even when there’s no lodestar to compare against.
This year, I kicked off the holiday season with Thanksgiving with my mom and brother. Then I had a second feast with friends at Brittany and Steve’s. We’ve had snow consistently in December, and little things — a gift here, a card there, a party with friends somewhere else — made a huge difference. We had a fun party at my grandmother’s condo last Saturday, and last night at my mom’s was great — especially chucking indoor snowballs at my young nephew. Today I’m drinking coffee with Bailey’s, writing, while the cats sit peacefully on their pillows. I think tonight I’ll make a fire and watch the Doctor Who special.
Christmas isn’t about gifts, or decorations, or cookies or anything else. More than anything, it’s a state of mind that says two things simultaneously. First, in that ancient Christian tradition, we are invited to reflect on the miracle of life and the saving power of innocence in the face of worldly adversity. Second, we are called to impose our own meaning on the world around us, to choose to find reasons for joy … or not. Our call.
Choose wisely. For myself, this year, I choose to enjoy the blessings of Christmas, and I pray that you do, too.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Wisdom and The Law

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Many moons ago, I half-justified to a friend a particular deviation from Catholic moral theology by arguing that as long as he understood the rationale behind the Church’s prohibition, he could live according to the real moral truth (imperfectly encapsulated by a behavioral norm) despite his superficial non-conformance with the letter of the law. The subtext of that somewhat Gnostic argument? That much of the thou-shalt-not discipline of Scripture and Tradition was intended to provide concrete guidance to the great unwashed masses who lack the intellectual wherewithal to properly adjudicate complex ethical problems.

We, the wise, however, ought not to labor under such crude restrictions, better suited to toddlers than adults. Ergo, as long as we could tease out a logical superstructure of principle beneath those crusty old rubrics, we could live as enlightened souls who didn’t obsess over compliance with rules intended to shepherd the children around us.

Interesting, then, to read Aaron Rothstein’s review of Steven Weitzman’s Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom published in the current issue of The Weekly Standard. Rothstein — a medical student at Wake Forest — offers a refreshing insight into the interplay of wisdom and spiritual humility:

The rabbis conceived of gezeirah, alternatively known as building a fence around the Torah. One places certain restrictions on lifestyle in order to (in Rabban Gamliel’s words) “keep a man far from transgression.” … In other words, if we understand the secrets of why we do certain things or why certain laws exist, we remove the barriers that prevent us from breaking more serious laws. Solomon’s downfall, then, demonstrates the danger of too much understanding — a biblical version of the Faustian tale.

Put differently: Laws, both secular and religious, serve as markers that delimit acceptable behavior. In many cases, those markers sit very far away from grey zones, in order to protect people from the confusion reigning at morality’s twilight. When we, the wise, treat those markers as rules for the unenlightened — when we decide that our own wisdom is sufficient to light our way through that twilight — we risk missing the next set of markers, hidden in the darkness, roping off the point of no return. Ethics becomes tautology: A given act is acceptable because I believe it’s acceptable. QED. And the wisdom inherent in the original placement of those universal markers fades from public consciousness.

Having decided that I have ascertained the real lesson of the rules that govern everyone else, I can then presume to know when those rules may safely be broken. And what’s true of one’s private life — e.g., out-thinking biblical dietary norms — works in one’s public life, too. Anyone want to wager whether all the best and brightest at the National Security Agency will always elect to follow domestic-surveillance laws, enacted in messy and haphazard fashion by a dysfunctional Congress, when the intelligence analysts think they’ve got a compelling case to skirt them in service to their version of the public good?

We break laws with impunity when we think we understand the law’s purpose and decide that some other, higher, purpose ought to trump.

Therein lies the risk. Humility — a trait that often comes easier to men of intellectually modest means — helps us to acknowledge that the law’s markers serve a valuable purpose and were erected with foresight. When we lack that humility, we treat those markers as speed bumps, yet we rarely acknowledge that some wisdom superior to our own may have played a part in setting them.

Solomon fell because he out-thought the Torah and God decided to remind him that mere wisdom isn’t a license to disobedience. Today, we see case after case after case of men out-thinking both statutory and natural law, and we must ask: Are we really that wise, after all?