That being said

That last post on Fr. Neuhaus' homily was laudatory, but it should be taken with the proverbial grain.

I've been wondering, for a while, why the folk at FT are so interested in playing the raisonneur, as though the rest of us comprise a sort of Savanarola torch bevy, quoting St. Falwell and white-hooded. It's been fatiguing, reading Barr and Collins trotted out and defended (against the ID mob, arrayed like the villagers in Mrs. Shelley's book) as the canonical interpreters of our Creation "myths."

I like First Things. Their occasional publication of Hart and Bottum is enough to warrant a subscription. Neuhaus' crab digest in the back is usually good for a literate caffeination of a late afternoon doldrum. But the mission of the magazine -- I've been thinking -- is getting a tad conventional.

Enter Gabriel's post at "Going Along." Here is a nice quote toward the end of the post (you should read the whole thing):

Combined, both articles demonstrate the usual state of the Christian intellectual in these times. He may be very sophisticated in his knowledge of the Faith, but he is “wise” enough to realize that such knowledge is better put to use at private cocktail parties than in—to use a favorite term from First Things—“the public square.” Whether Novak, Pannenberg, or other Christian intellectuals want to admit it not, intellectual discussion is still governed by the rules of the Enlightenment: reason first, intuition second, mad speculation third, and religion if—and only if!—it can made to fit in with the other three.

I've long thought that Neuhaus is too sanguine about the Public Square. I am much more pessimistic, since I think that natural law is not so lucid since reprobation is now so ascendant. The collegiality that may have existed in modernity (i.e., "the Great Conversation") no longer exists ... the college, or public square, that made that Conversation possible has been teetered by Nietzschean prophecies and the post-modern critique.

Reprobation (how's that for a scatological term?) is the obfuscation of God's image in man, and the heretical adoption of a passion (or two or three) as the replacement destiny of man: theosis has been overthrown in favor of ganymedean hubris.

And Fr. Neuhaus still thinks we can dialectize the colleges into Christ? Those who have ears to hear, still, are precisely those who still have ears (i.e., the subscribers to First Things, and other things). Perhaps the former Lutheran is holding out for the good old days mainly because of his Roman predilections.

I think, crank that I am, that what remains is only the rhetoric of peace. It is better we work on that, than make accommodations in the style of Pannenburg, Novak and Barr.

Thanks, as usual, to the Ochlophobist for his watchman-like ways.

Comments

[Caryl Johnston]

I used to subscribe to FT but I became very disaffected with their neoconservative "Israel-First" attitude. First Things has become a Trojan Horse in the Catholic Church, I believe. I also agree with you as to the "conventional" nature of their writings. Where's the fire?

[Gabriel Sanchez]

Thank you for your comments. I confess a bit of embarrassment over the typing errors in the post. Life affords me few moments to proofread for a web-log, so please forgive my carelessness.

I should be clear that I don't have a "problem" with First Things anymore than I have a problem with, say, Touchstone. What I do have a problem with is the publication of authors in Christian journals who retreat to some degree of conventionalism. I'm suspicious that "natural law" means much of anything anymore to conservative Catholics except, perhaps, as a useful rhetorical tool to employ when the outcomes of contemporary historicist-positivist (read: nihilistic) thinking come to the forefront. Also, it sounds "less dumb" than resorting to the instructions of the Catholic Church, even though that is where the final marching orders are (or ought to be) coming from for that crowd. They're much more in the mold of a Maistre or a Cortes than they let on, though I really wish they would.