Sentiment vs. Sainthood

The aftermath of the recent jihad murders in Orlando, like the aftermath of every other mass shooting (and for that matter every celebrity death) has been marked by a vast tide of undirected emotion and sentiment. In addition to the inevitable debates (over gun control, for example), the world of social media is awash in calls to one another to pray for Orlando and expressions of emotion over the shooting.

There are worse things than soppy sentimentalism. Cruelty and hard-heartedness, for example. But I want to be one voice stating that sentiment for the sake of sentiment has its drawbacks and that American culture is in grave danger of thinking just the opposite--namely, that sentiment for the sake of sentiment is inherently virtuous.

It's possible that part of the confusion arises from the fact that sentimentalism can be a counterfeit of saintliness. Here's what I mean: We know that Jesus took upon himself all the sins and sorrows of the world. Catholics, in particular, have a theological idea of sharing in the sufferings of Jesus. Protestants, too, often talk about bearing one another's burdens, which is fully biblical. One imagines the old monk or nun, or the prayer warrior, praying quietly and earnestly, for hours, for strangers, for the sins of the world, for evil-doers and victims, his prayers ranging over all the world, suffering with those people, offering up prayers for "all sorts and conditions of men." It is a legitimately attractive picture.

I think that people, Christians in particular, may have the false idea that, by calling upon their friends to "Pray for _____[fill in location of most recent tragedy]," and also by encouraging in themselves a lot of emotion about whatever tragedy is big in the news cycle right now, they are imitating that saint. The idea is to be selfless, to go beyond one's own concerns, to enter into the sufferings of others, yes, even others whom one doesn't know.

But in my opinion this is an illusion. Here are some thoughts on the distinction between sentimentalism and sainthood:

1) Sainthood is self-effacing. Sentimentalism is dramatic, public, and self-indulgent. The saint who prays in his cell doesn't tell the whole world that he's praying or what he's praying for. He doesn't advertise on his Facebook status that he broke down in tears while going about his daily task when the thought of _______ came to him. He doesn't pressure other people to join any prayer bandwagon. He just quietly gets on with it.

2) Sainthood is precise. Sentimentalism is vague. A saint knows exactly what he's praying for. He isn't "sending good thoughts." He doesn't send prayers (or thoughts) to a city. (Because we actually send prayers to God. Or, if you're a Catholic or high Anglican, to God via the saints. But not to places.) A saint prays for specific, holy things. Those things might include comfort or salvation for large numbers of people, even people whose names he doesn't know. But a saint's prayers cannot be captured by slogans. How many people out there saying, "Pray for Orlando" have little or no idea what, precisely, they are supposed to be asking for, and for whom? It's a catch-phrase, meant to express a feeling of solidarity.

3) Saints never willfully drum up emotion as an end in itself, in themselves or others. Sentimentalists make a habit of it.

4) Saints have their own priorities in prayer. Sentimentalists are at the beck and call of the news cycle. That's not to say a saint would never pray about something that is big in the news cycle. Maybe he would. If so, it would be as part of a disciplined prayer life with other priorities at least equal in importance. But maybe he wouldn't. Maybe instead that day he would be praying for a child dying of cancer, for Christians being tortured for their faith, for a man struggling with doubts, for children being raised in spiritual darkness, for women (or even a particular woman) being tempted to abortion, or for any of the infinite number of other matters of eternal importance.

A sentimentalist, in contrast, weeps when social media says, "Weep!" and prays when social media says, "Pray!" It's difficult to believe that, in so doing, he is obeying the Spirit of the Lord.

One might ask what harm is done by national sentimentalism. At least it draws people together. It springs from good intentions, from a natural desire to be kind and to care about others. To be sure, there are worse harms. But I think there is enough harm that it is worth speaking out about. Here are just a few of the harms:

--National sentimentalism is closely tied to virtue signaling, bandwagoning, and social bullying. I'm on a Facebook group consisting of professing Christians. One member posted to the group a day or two after the shooting complaining angrily that there had been no "statement" posted to that particular group about the shooting. Several people quickly assured him that they had expressed the proper sentiments on their personal pages. Nobody told him to go jump in the lake. Even I didn't, because I didn't need the drama in my life, and it wasn't worth my time. But the reason that kind of bullying gets off the ground is because of the sentimentalist assumption that everybody has to say somethingeverywhere. Everybody has to express a certain feeling. The whole nation is in mourning, don't you know, and we all have to make our gesture of joining in, and if you don't, you're a bad person. This is simply not a healthy state of affairs.

I want to emphasize that I think this sort of interpersonal pressure to say something is a bad thing regardless of how sympathetic the victims are. I think this about the Sandy Hook massacre, too, or the Paris massacre. I'm making no statement just here about homosexuality. What I am saying is that sentimentalism makes people ripe to be manipulated into talking in a certain way because that's what everybody else is doing, and that is bad in and of itself.

--Nationwide sentimentalism makes it difficult to be cool-headed in judging proposed policies. Note that I'm not talking, here, about which proposed policies. I mean this generalization to apply to any proposed policies. Policy should be discussed and enacted with cool heads, not in a rush of national emotion.

--Nationwide sentimentalism encourages people to force themselves to feel certain emotions. This is always bad. I cannot think of a single exception to the rule: Never try to force yourself to feel an emotion. Emotion is not inherently virtuous and should not be forced. By treating emotion as equivalent to virtue, sentimentalism tells people in the imperative mood to feel an emotion. This is not good for either the mind or the heart.

--National sentimentalism can make it harder to see the pain and suffering of those immediately around us whose sufferings aren't national news. We each only have so much time and emotional energy, and so much time spent in prayer. We need to spend it deliberately and wisely.

I won't go so far as to say, "Don't pray for Orlando!" Of course not. But if you do pray, pray for people, not for an abstract city. Pray for definite, holy things. Pray as part of a well-rounded prayer life and relationship with God. Don't gin up emotions. Don't tell everybody on Facebook about your feelings or about how intensely you are praying. Don't tell other people that they have to pray for Orlando. Maybe they have something else at least as urgent that they are called upon to pray for instead. And don't, for goodness' sake, pray just because someone says, "Pray for Orlando!"

Cross-posted

Being a blogger, being a scholar

Another jihad mass murder has happened recently, this time targeting a homosexual bar. What is one to say? It's all been said before. This is Muslim violence in the midst of blatant decadence. I'm not at all sure my further thoughts, politically incorrect though they be (in more than one direction), would be of much edifying value to anyone.

I sort of like being a pundit. Blogging gives one the opportunity for punditry without cost. One doesn't (usually) get paid, but one also doesn't have a boss to please, especially at a personal blog like this. That's all fine and dandy until and unless the desire for the status of Pundit becomes the master. Then one is at the beck and call of the news cycle. Latest atrocity demands comment.

Well, I'm actually resolving not to do that anymore. Though I might be a little more likely to do so on Facebook, where the audience is more restricted.

As it turns out, I'm a scholar with lots of other conservative opinions and an occasional yen to make pundit-like comments on news and culture. But that's pretty much it. The years when I had lengthy thoughts, thoughts that had to be expressed, on political and cultural topics seem to be tapering off. Call it fatigue, cynicism, or just laziness, the upshot is the same.

Our country certainly needs God's blessings, because we're in a bad place any way you slice it.

Straining to find a "genre"

I have raised a number of doubts about the facile use of "genre" as a response to allegations of discrepancies in the gospels. I am really almost a little shocked at the example of this represented in the long quotation below, which I read for the first time this morning. Notice that Dr. Licona expressly says that in his research he was unable to come up with any "literary conventions" from the Greco-Roman authors that would cover what he regards as problematic differences in the infancy stories about Jesus in Matthew and Luke. (I certainly do not regard these as troubling, though I think probably Luke just didn't know about the slaughter of the innocents and the flight to Egypt. Big deal.) Faced with this situation, Licona strains and reaches for "midrash" (which has now become an all-purpose word among some writers about the New Testament meaning "they made it up but I don't just want to say they made it up") to say that perhaps Luke and Matthew made stuff up about Jesus' birth. But that's okay because he has a word naming a "genre" (that is, "midrash"), so it's not a problem for reliability. Somehow. And they both affirm that Mary was a virgin, so we're not going to count that as part of the "midrash."

The trenchant discussion by N.T. Wright (no fundamentalist!) of the promiscuous invocation of midrash is relevant here. (Who Was Jesus, pp. 71ff.) "Midrash" just isn't the kind of thing that those who invoke it in this way imply. For example, says Wright,

Fourth, midrash never included the invention of stories which were clearly seen as non-literal in intent, and merely designed to evoke awe and wonder. It was no part of Jewish midrash, or any other Jewish writing-genre in the first century, to invent all kinds of new episodes about recent history in order to advance the claim that the Scriptures had been fulfilled. (p. 73)

Wright quotes P.S. Alexander as follows:

[L]abelling a piece of Bible exegesis 'midrash' appears to set it in a definite historical and cultural context, to hint at well-known, technical parallels. But all this may be entirely bogus. (Quoted in Wright, p. 73) 

Wright also points out that midrash was a technique for commenting on ancient scripture and states that it is "fantastically unlikely" that this is what Luke and Matthew were doing in the birth narratives. (p. 73) (HT to Esteemed Husband for the information on midrash from Wright.)
Now, this midrash idea is just a conjecture Licona brings forward as possible, but he seems quite open to it and seems to think it solves some kind of problem.

I'm still in a bit of shock at how widely Licona is willing to cast his "literary devices" net while still claiming that the gospels are historically reliable. (In some sense or other.) What he writes here about the birth narratives bespeaks a positive determination to name something one calls a "genre" in order to shake off concerns about alleged discrepancies.

Here is the full quote.

Bart provides the example of the differences between the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. In my opinion, those narratives include the most difficult and profound differences in the Gospels. As my friend Jonathan Pennington writes,[5]

"Despite our conflation of all these events at the annual church Christmas pageant, these stories do not in fact overlap at all. If Jesus did not appear as the named figure in both of these accounts, one would never suspect they were stories about the same person." [LM: You can say the same thing about different facts in the life of Abraham Lincoln.]

Here I must acknowledge that I don’t know what’s going on and have no detailed explanations for these differences. [LM: The only actual difference between Luke and Matthew cited by Ehrman is the implication in Luke that they returned immediately to Nazareth after the purification of Mary. The rest of Ehrman's discussion consists of beating the dead horse of the census in Luke, which does not concern any apparent discrepancy with Matthew in any event. I don't know why Licona speaks as though there are extremely difficult, problematic discrepancies between Luke and Matthew. In fact, they simply record different details about Jesus' infancy. There is no reason to think there is something heavy "going on."] I think one can provide some plausible solutions. But I admit they are speculative. In my research pertaining to the most basic compositional devices in ancient historical/biographical literature, I did not observe any devices that readily shed light on the differences between the infancy narratives.

However — even though, as I say, I don’t know what’s going on here to cause the differences — let’s just speculate for a moment and consider the following scenario. Matthew and Luke both agree that a Jewish virgin named Mary who was engaged to a Jewish man named Joseph gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem. The early Christians all knew this much. However, little else was remembered about this event. So, Matthew and Luke added details to their account to create a more interesting narrative of Jesus’s birth, a type of midrash. I’m not saying this is what Matthew and Luke did. I don’t know what’s going on with the infancy narratives. However, if this occurred, we would have to take the matter of genre — midrash — into consideration and recognize that the historicity of the details outside of the story’s core would be questionable, while the core itself could stand. After all, with such differences between the accounts in Matthew and Luke, one could reasonably argue that the core is attested by multiple independent sources. [LM: So we refer to what Luke and Matthew both affirm as the "core," triumphantly state that this is multiply attested (!), and then attribute what we are saying they made up out of whole cloth as belonging to a "genre," to which we give a name, even though there is no evidence that they were using any well-established genre that would have these properties. This is highly unconvincing as any sort of defense of Matthew's and Luke's reliability!]

Why do bad doubts happen to good people?

I've been thinking lately about deconversion stories. If one hangs around on the Internet long enough, one certainly runs across them. A theme that sometimes crops up is that the person did not want to deconvert. Looking over the deconvert's shoulder at the flimsiness of the arguments that led him away from Christianity, one is permitted to wonder about that, but it is what a deconvert will sometimes say, and presumably he believes it when he says it: "I didn't want to deconvert. I struggled. I asked God to help me keep my faith, to speak to me, to reach out to me. God didn't help, or didn't help enough, and now here I am--I'm not a Christian anymore."

That's rather convenient, because it blames God for the deconversion. It's an insurance policy. You can see the wheels turning: "If I turn out to be wrong, and God exists after all, or Christianity is true after all, I will be able to say to God's face, in the immortal words of Bertrand Russell, 'Not enough evidence, God.'"

So you're covered. You asked God to help you not to deconvert, you tried hard not to, and after that it was up to God to come through. He had his chance.

All snark aside, I have to admit, as a person who tends to feel responsible for others who are struggling with doubts or on the cusp of deconverting, I find this sort of thing bothersome. I feel like tugging on God's sleeve to get his attention: "Uh, Lord, if you could spare a minute, there's someone over here who is doubting your existence or doubting that you sent Jesus to die for us, but it's not too late, because right now he still believes in you and loves you and is crying out to you, so, could you please do something about this? Just send him a sign or nudge him in the right direction or something. I would if I were you. Right about now would be a good time, Lord."

And sometimes, or so it seems to the person going through the crisis, God doesn't. The potential deconvert doesn't feel anything and doesn't even have any moment of great, shining, intellectual enlightenment. The things that bothered him about Christianity continue to bother him. Perhaps he finds answers that should be intellectually satisfying, but he doesn't find them emotionally satisfying, and those two things are very easy to conflate.

Why does God let this happen? It's one thing to acknowledge that God lets people who are indifferent to him go to hell, people who don't care, don't try, don't seek. But we're talking about someone who at least seems to himself to be seeking. This person is, at least to begin with, one of the good guys.

Well, I don't have all the answers. I believe that the evidence shows that God exists and is all-loving and all-just, but the precise how of the divine justice is something I don't claim to be able to follow through its infinite windings.

But I do have a thought to offer, and it is this: All of us who have been Christians for a while have major gaps in our understanding of God. That's inevitable, even for the most advanced saint, since God is beyond our comprehension. But it is especially true, I think, of two classes: First, those who have grown up Christians, and second, recent converts. For differing reasons, members of both of these groups are in danger of having a radically simplistic and insufficient view of the nature and character of God. This may take many forms. Perhaps the person thinks of God as harsh and vindictive, and it just takes a while for that to start to bother him. Or perhaps he demands that God must do things exactly as he would do them. One of the most common over-simplifications that I have run into is a misguided view of heaven. Heaven is seen as a kind of Happy Hunting Ground to which God (more or less arbitrarily) lets some people go while (more or less arbitrarily) blocking other people from going there, plopping them down in hell instead. Heaven is not intimately connected with the presence of God and with our own highest good through union with God. While they may mouth the idea that hell is separation from God, too many Christians don't really believe the corollary that heaven is union with God. Thus they will say things like, "I don't want to be in heaven with a God who would send my best friend to hell." As if they can have any good without God. As if they can casually pick and choose, shrugging off heaven and God while still holding onto truth, beauty, friendship, and human love. Or, "Why would we have a sense of perfect union with God in heaven, when we don't need it, rather than in the trials on earth, when we need it more?" Because "needing it" is entirely beside the point. Heaven is perfect union with God. You can't "be in heaven" without that perfect union with God.

Again and again, the angry things that deconverts say show just how shallow their concepts of God's character, of eternal life, and of Christianity really were and still are, because they never grew past them.

It's all very well to start out with sketchy ideas. But when you become a man, it is time to put away childish things. If you started out thinking that God owes you something, including a special revelation of himself in your time of doubt, you need to get over that. If you started out thinking that you can have any good thing without God, you need to learn what the beatific vision is.

God lets bad doubts happen to good people to give them a chance to move up, to deepen their understanding. C.S. Lewis portrays Tor and Tinidril, the characters in Perelandra who are like Adam and Eve, in much the same way. God allows a representative of Satan to come to their planet and tempt them in order for them to mature. One of the angelic characters says as much. "Today for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of [God] that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be."

In Perelandra, when the lady is being tempted, Maleldil (God) is silent. Previously she has always sensed him guiding her, but now she does not. If you know the book you may protest that God sends Ransom to (eventually) fight the un-Man after Tinidril has resisted temptation for a long time. That is true. But if I may say so, I never knew a former Christian deconvert yet who had no resources. Those resources may have been web sites, wise friends, or other people to whom he could take his questions. The resources might even have included very good answers, answers that were rejected. These "sendings," however, are rather mundane. We would prefer to have God zap people out of their doubts, not just send along some friend, perhaps some awkward or tactless friend, and then to leave the doubter to accept or reject the response given.

This all may sound rather harsh, but I think it is true nonetheless. God's intolerable love wants to make saints out of us while we would much prefer to be left alone to be happy, ordinary people. Happy, ordinary people are likely to have happy, ordinary ideas about God. Which is all very well and good for starters but isn't where God wants us to be in the long run. Any lover of detective fiction knows that the very fact that doesn't seem to fit in, the fact that gives you the most trouble, is a clue to the whole mystery. So it is in theology, and so it is inevitable that anyone given the opportunity to know God better will start to notice inconvenient facts that do not fit with his preconceived ideas.

So if you are that doubter, consider the possibility that God is deliberately not making this easy for you because there is something he wants you to understand, and you will learn it only by passing through this time without visible sign from him. Then ask what that something might be.

I would be remiss if I did not mention evidence again in closing out this post. I am not recommending fideism or even mysticism. On the contrary, I am always asking the doubter to examine the positive evidence for Christianity and take his stand on it. Indeed, one of the most curious things I find about recent deconverts is how difficult it is to get them to come back to the subject of the evidence for Christianity. A recent deconvert is like a man whose mind is always wandering from the point.

So my point is not to recommend that anyone believe against evidence or without evidence. Rather my point here is just this: If you are watching someone struggling, or you are struggling yourself, with questions and doubts about Christianity, and if you wonder why God lets this go on, take a hard look at the doubter's theological concepts (especially if the doubter is you) and ask where they need to be deepened and how such a deepening might serve to allay the doubts. If Christianity is true, then it is entirely possible that there is a step up that God wants you to take. You cannot stay comfortably where you were before. Whether or not you take that step is a matter of more than passing interest to us all.

Undesigned Coincidence in John 1

Up at W4: A post on a new undesigned coincidence in John 1.

New post on Licona, genre, reliability, and apologetics

I have a new post up at What's Wrong with the World on the theories of New Testament scholar Michael Licona. One of the things that surprised me as I went back through his older book on the resurrection was that there was so much controversy when that book came out about some things but not others. For example, though I don't claim to have read all of the back-and-forth about the book, I never saw anyone emphasize the fact that Licona states that it is unknown how much liberty the gospel authors took with the resurrection accounts and that this is part of why they are of "uncertain" historical value concerning the resurrection. Or the fact that he rates as merely "possible" the claim that the speeches in Acts represent apostolic teaching. I actually do understand why the claim that Matthew may have added the raising of the saints as a "poetical device" raised alarm bells, but that is of a piece with these other claims, which are much broader and fully bear out the concerns I have raised about the implications of these "poetical" theories for apologetics. In fact, in some ways the potential harm of the claim about Matthew was more limited, since it was said to be added "apocalyptic material," which perhaps we could recognize when we see it. But Licona admits forthrightly that, due to his ideas about the genre of the gospels, it is literally unknown how much liberty the gospel authors took with the details of their accounts! This means, just as I said before, that there are not supposed to be some sort of tip-offs or clues in the text in general when the authors are using these so-called literary devices. They might be making stuff up and changing things without leaving a trace. This is a very big deal, and I'm actually rather surprised that it wasn't noted about the book at the time, including by those who were very concerned about where Licona's approach was headed. But as I say, I wasn't reading such articles religiously, and perhaps it was noted and I just didn't hear about it.

Another matter that I consider very important to discuss is that of genre. It seems that Licona is making a big deal about the genre of the gospels as "being" that of "Greco-Roman bioi" and using this to defend his idea that the gospel authors would have thought they had freedom to invent speeches and dialogue, to make events happen when they didn't really happen, and the like. He is piggy-backing off of the fact that something of a bandwagon has gotten rolling in the last several years for saying that the gospels "are Greco-Roman bioi" and implying that every statement in scholarship to that effect supports his thesis about the gospel authors as using "literary devices." Now, this is particularly ironic, because originally it was thought that classicist Richard Burridge's work arguing that the gospels are Greco-Roman bioi actually supported the historicity of the gospels by showing that they aren't myth or some very tenuously historical, sui generis genre. This probably explains the haste with which evangelical scholars have accepted Burridge's thesis.

My response is two-fold: First, though I spend little time on this in the post, Burridge doesn't really argue convincingly in my view that the gospels are anything so specific as a Greco-Roman genre of "lives." He argues from a broad family resemblance, and the family resemblance can, I believe, be easily explained and more simply explained without invoking any specifically Greco-Roman influences on the gospels. It simply is a stronger thesis than required. But second, and perhaps more importantly (especially since as a sociological matter everybody seems to think "the scholarship is settled" on the former point), Burridge never (that I can see) supports Licona's idea that anyone who wrote "in" this genre would have automatically thought himself "licensed" to take liberties with the details of what he was writing. Rather, Burridge argues that the genre was very broad and could include books that took liberties. But that is not the same thing at all! Licona argues as though the genre wouldn't include books that took no liberties, whose authors would have been totally opposed to such liberties, and whose audiences would not have expected them. That is to turn Burridge's argument on its head: Instead of supporting the historicity of the gospels, this genre designation is then used to put a limit on the extent of their historical accuracy! That's just incorrect. It's a misuse of the scholarship surrounding genre, even if one accepts the conclusions of that scholarship.

This is extremely important, because at this point I see people starting to just follow Licona by implying that it's anachronistic to expect that the gospel authors didn't make stuff up! No, no, they will say, all the ancients thought it was fine to make these kinds of alterations. And these "are Greco-Roman bioi," so that "offered" license to do so, and you have to "take genre into account" in interpretation, etc. It needs to be said: That sort of conclusion is not supported by the claim that the gospels were "in" this genre. The genre as described could include both works that would never take liberties and those that included fictional elements. That's kinda the point of a broad and flexible genre!

There's an important confusion here, and people need to stop thinking that Licona or anybody else has supported the idea that we should just expect the so-called "literary devices" that Licona has claimed in the gospels to be there because genre. It isn't true. This is a confusion and a misuse of this whole genre concept. I challenge anybody to find in Burridge or anybody else good support for a claim such as, "Because the gospels were in the genre of Greco-Roman bioi, they would have been expected to transfer events to times when they didn't really happen, to make up speeches, or to change dialogue deliberately." And no, it doesn't count as good support for that thesis (which is simultaneously rigid and sweeping) if you believe that you've found some Greco-Roman author changing stuff. It doesn't follow that in general this was some kind of expectation or "standard" or even that these were recognized "devices." (Moreover, from what I've seen, sometimes when Licona thinks he's found Plutarch "using these devices" it could just be that Plutarch changed his mind about what happened--again, a much simpler hypothesis than the literary one.)

I also discuss the ways in which the so-called "literary devices" are over-interpretations of the passages in question--far more complex hypotheses than anything required.

So I want to stand athwart the course of evangelical history shouting, "Stop!" here, because people are just running after these ideas like they've been proven and are so wonderful because they enable us to sleep easy at night, knowing that we've been defended by "literary devices" from the Big Bad Wolf of alleged contradictions in the gospels. A) If true, these theories wouldn't be wonderful but rather fairly disastrous and B) They haven't been proved, nor even supported well.

See the post for more detail.

The one gleam of silver lining

The news last night that not only had D.T. won the Republican primary in Indiana but also that Ted Cruz had suspended his campaign came as a shock. That is to say, the latter part of that came as a shock. I can only assume that Cruz's backers told him they would no longer fund his campaign.

The whole thing is incredibly sad. This year's field of Republican primary runners, of course with the exception of the now-presumptive nominee, were so promising. There were so many for whom I could have happily voted in good conscience. Not all, but quite a few. Including, especially, Cruz the outsider who represented both the opposition to "business as usual" in the Republican party and principled, constitutional, knowledgeable conservatism. That this charlatan should have come along and poisoned and co-opted the process is sickening. That voters let him get away with it and even supported him enthusiastically is worse. That many of these voters think of themselves as conservative is the worst of all.

There is no way to make this out good. This is the death throes of the Republic, which I believed in and, in a real sense, still believe in. The destruction of a good thing is not a judgement on that good thing. Unlike some silly fools who think they are making a profound point against democracy by pointing out that democracy has been destroyed, I am (I trust) able to tell the difference between something that self-destructs because it is inherently wrong-headed and something that is destroyed by the malice and sin of man attacking it outright.

Yes, there are still good and beautiful things in the world, and we must now cling to those. But in the political world, the prospects are very bleak indeed.

There is one, and only one, gleam of silver lining in the dark, dark clouds that hover over us, and that is the NeverTrump movement itself. Matt Walsh has been a wonderfully articulate spokesman of it and remains defiant after last night, speaking for all of us. Last night on his public Facebook wall Walsh posted:

I will have more tomorrow, but let me assure you that when I said never Trump, I meant never Trump. That has not changed and never will. The disaster ahead will not be on my conscience. I wash my hands of it. I will not acquiesce to a tyrant. I do not care what letter he has beside his name. A lot of "Never Trump" people will surrender in the coming days, but I promise you I won't. I've chosen this path and I will stick to it.

Our country is headed to a dark place. Pray tonight, everyone.

Exactly. The idea that one would say "never" and then, like D.T. himself, blandly turn around and say the opposite, is deeply insulting. Never always meant never and was always set up in explicit anticipation of the possibility that he might be the Republican nominee.

Why do I call the NeverTrump movement the one gleam of a silver lining? Because for all of my adult politics-watching life two errors of thought have dominated conservative thinking: Error 1: It is an a priori truth that there is always a "lesser evil" in American politics. Error 2: It is an a priori truth that it is morally required that one vote for the lesser evil once one figures out what it is to the best of one's ability.

In the last two presidential elections I didn't vote for the candidate of either major political party. I had reasons for this. I thought that both McCain and (though to a lesser extent) Romney were too compromised on pro-life issues, and I also sensed strongly that Romney was no culture warrior and that his commitment to social conservatism was weak. I was able to articulate these reasons and discuss them, but Error 1 and Error 2 made it impossible to reason with most people. I would say again and again, "Look, maybe this candidate hasn't crossed your line, and I get that, but surely you realize that there must be a line, right? You wouldn't vote for just anybody just because he happened to have the Republican label and you think that that is always less bad than the person with the Democrat label, right?"

And again and again, they answered, in essence, "Wrong. There shouldn't be a line. There is no line. There is always a lesser evil. You always have to find out what it is and vote for that. Voting for the President of the United States for one of the candidates of the two major parties is a moral imperative."

I couldn't understand it. I would try reductios, but they were impervious. And some still are.

Well, what I'm realizing in 2016 is that people talking politics don't do very well with abstract reductios. It works better when you have an actual, blatant, moral cretin, right in front of our eyes, who is the presumptive Republican nominee for the august office of the President of the United States of America. Then, thank God, at least some good people start to realize that Error 1 and Error 2 are errors. And thus the nevertrump movement was born.

To my mind, this is an important development. I have never considered the stranglehold of the two-party system in the United States to be a politically healthy thing. We need to mix it up a little. We need more options. And conscience can help a lot in that mixing up process. But not if conscience is misdirected by Error 1 and Error 2. Those errors co-opt conscience. They draft the power of conscience into perpetuating the two-party system and the Imperative To Vote as some kind of holy relics.

Now, I have no crystal ball about what is going to happen. It's not that I expect some viable third party to rise from the ashes of the Republican Party. I suspect we're not that lucky, and to be frank, third parties tend to be the breeding ground of precisely the kinds of kooks and conspiracy theorists who are now enthusiastically following D.T. over the edge of the abyss.

But for decades now I have realized that the final battle in this country is going to be the guerilla warfare for individual human minds, hearts, and ultimately, souls. And in that battle, the NeverTrump movement is an extremely positive and important development. Americans, conservatives, at least some of them, have at last found the place where they will stand, where they will say, "No, never, not gonna go there.That's a bridge too far."

If you don't have a "never" place, a place to stand, a place where you draw the line and will not move, you are constantly giving away pieces of yourself, and that's a dangerous thing to do. To quote Robert Bolt's Thomas More:

And what would you do with a water spaniel that was afraid of water? You'd hang it! Well, as a spaniel is to water, so is a man to his own self. I will not give in because I oppose it--I do--not my pride, not my spleen, nor any other of my appetites but I do--I....Is there no single sinew in the midst of this that serves no appetite of Norfolk's but is just Norfolk? There is! Give that some exercise, my lord...Because as you stand, you'll go before your Maker in a very ill condition! And he'll have to conclude that somewhere back along your pedigree--a bitch got over the wall!

And now, with NeverTrump, maybe some people are discovering that they have something within themselves that is not just a voter, not just an agonized political pawn, but a man, a person, with real moral limits, and they are ready to say, "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me." Now there will be, we may hope, some who will bow neither to the image of Baal nor to the Golden Calf.

For that, we may always hope. There are always these individual victories to be won, whatever happens to the nation. For the probing and testing of God does not cease until the end of time, when history is truly ended and the books are opened.

May He find us faithful.

Infinitely costly

A few weeks ago, on Passion Sunday, it came to me in a flash that all of God's generosity, his gift of the "blessings of this life," is infinitely costly. It seemed to me somehow that even the beauty of a sunrise or the goodness of food comes to me through the death of Jesus Christ. Although God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, nonetheless there seems to be a sense in which these natural blessings have had to be "bought back" for us by the death of Christ. Hence, while in one sense it costs God nothing to pour out the rain upon the just and the unjust, to give us every good gift and every perfect gift, because God is the creator of all these good things, yet in another sense, due to the sin of mankind and the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, we now enjoy these things only as a gift for which Jesus had to give everything. So it is not only the forgiveness of our sins--the "means of grace and the hope of glory"--that we have through the blood of Christ, but literally everything. Every good thing. 

Though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be made rich. (II Corinthians 8:9)

In a more analytical state of mind, I asked myself to justify this apparent insight. I am still not sure that I have gotten to the bottom of it, and it's probably the sort of thing one can never get to the bottom of. However, I think I have gotten this far: If Jesus had not died, mankind could not have been redeemed. If men are not redeemed, they ultimately lose everything--that is, in the long run. The damned in hell no longer experience the goodness of God at all as goodness, only as fire and judgement. No light, no beauty of nature, no cups of cold water, no kindness of friends. C.S. Lewis hypothesized that in a sense the damnation of the damned works retroactively to take away from them (in a sense) the goodness that they enjoyed on earth. It is not as though they can stay themselves, in hell, upon the memories of better times and beauties, as people in this world who are going through trials and persecution can do. So therefore, it seems, in order for me to appreciate and truly have the blessings of this life, in the long run (which is to say, in eternity) I must be reconciled to God. And I can be reconciled to God only through the death of Christ. Perhaps this is what underlies the sense that even the goodness of a cup of cold water, as finally affirmed in the ultimate beatitude of a human being, comes to him through the death of Christ.

But why, one might ask, is it not enough to think of Christ's death as giving us the forgiveness of sins? Why all this other jiggery-pokery trying to relate the death of Christ to cups of cold water and beautiful sunsets?

My best shot at an answer is just this: We ourselves don't really understand well enough the significance of sin, especially our own. We compartmentalize it. We say, "Yes, I did that sin, but that was a long time ago, and it's over now, and I don't have to think about it anymore." Don't misunderstand me: The Bible encourages us to confess our sins and then to stop beating ourselves up over them. But there is a shallower idea that sin is this isolated thing, that it has no cosmic repercussions. Yet the very doctrine of the fall of man falsifies that idea. The sin in the Garden of Eden caused human physical death. That's a pretty cosmic repercussion. It changed the very relationship of man to nature, so that man now has to fear the beasts rather than having dominion over them. St. Paul says that the whole creation groans and travails in pain waiting for our redemption. So Scripture supports a very cosmic view of the effects of sin. What I'm reaching for here is a connection between our own, personal sin and our "losing" the natural goods. If there is such a connection, then we might be able to see the theological effects of the death of Christ as in some sense standing outside of time (though of course Christ's death occurred at a particular point in space and time) and being one of the means by which the blessings and beauties come to us. God makes all things, today, because he makes all things new, in the end. And he makes all things new only because Jesus died. No cross, no redemption.

Of course, no doubt much of this is muddled, because whenever one deals with such matters of time and eternity one is bound to be somewhat muddled. But I don't think it's completely muddled. The beauty of the spring outside my window right now cost Jesus his life.

That could be a sad reflection, but somehow, it isn't. It gives new meaning to the gratitude we should have toward Our Lord. His love is infinite, and he gives us all things. Through his poverty we are made rich.

He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32)

The courage of Ken Miller

I am not up to expressing eloquently how much Pastor Ken Miller should humble us, his fellow Christians. Here is his first update from federal prison. He is there for helping a woman and her little girl to escape the country when the little girl was going to be turned over, full custody, to an unrelated lesbian who used to be in a sexual relationship with the girl's repentant mother. The U.S. federal government has pursued him and finally has him in federal prison for two years. He is in the deepest sense a prisoner of conscience. I would go so far as to call him a political prisoner in the U.S.

His gentleness and holiness through this ordeal are deeply moving.

By the way, there is a "donate" button at the site for helping Pastor Miller's church to support his large family while he is in prison. Consider clicking on it.

Abortion and punishing women

Consider the following scenarios:

--A man kills his wife in a hunting “accident.” The police are convinced that it was deliberate but know that they will not be able to prove mens rea, so they don’t even consider prosecuting.

--A thirteen-year-old girl cold-bloodedly poisons her grandfather and two other people in her house for “being mean” to her. She keeps a diary bragging about how clever she is. She is prosecuted but will never face the death penalty, because her state does not have the death penalty for minors as young as she is.

--A young man forcibly rapes his girlfriend, who had willingly gone to his apartment for dinner but had no intention of having sex with him and gave him no indication that she was willing. In her mental turmoil afterwards, she foolishly waits to report the rape until two weeks later, when the bruising on her wrists and arms has disappeared, so the evidence is he-said, she-said, and no prosecution is possible because due process will protect her rapist.

--A mafia hit-man meticulously plans an assassination, but his gun jams at the last minute. Due to the circumstances, he doesn’t have time to fix it and drops that particular assassination attempt. The police get evidence of the attempt but can try him only for, at most, attempted murder, even though his guilt is identical to that of a successful hit-man. He was “saved” from actually committing the murder only by a morally lucky accident.

--A woman commits a heinous murder, but the police gather the evidence (for some reason) by way of a blatantly warrantless search, so it is inadmissible in court, and she goes free.

--A man urges his wife to kill someone against whom he has a grudge, believing that a jury will go easier on her because she is a woman. She eventually complies and is duly tried, convicted, and punished. He can be tried only for incitement or as an accessory and cannot be subject to the death penalty, though the whole idea was his.

--A young woman kills her five-year-old child and pretends that it was done by someone else. She is tried and acquitted and afterwards goes on a talk show bragging about how she committed the murder and got away with it. She can now never be convicted of that murder because a retrial would violate double jeopardy.

What do all of these cases have in common? They are all similar in that someone gets away with doing something evil that, it seems natural to think, the law ought to punish. Or someone gets a lesser legal penalty in a situation where, logically, it seems that his guilt is equal to that of someone who gets a greater penalty. In each case, however, there is a completely explicable legal reason for the lesser punishment or even the impossibility of prosecution altogether (as in the rape case). I would argue moreover that in each case the legal reason is a good legal reason and that abandoning the legal principle involved--allowing young minors to get the death penalty, prosecuting men for rape in cases where the evidence is scanty, abandoning the prohibition on double jeopardy--would be a bad idea. Yes, that means that some guilty escape, but our common law legal tradition has always held, rightly in my view, that the law should err, when it must err, on the side of false negatives rather than false positives. Also, the legal tradition of the west has been (again, rightly) that invasive legal or police procedures that are likely to harm the innocent should be eschewed, even if this allows some of the guilty to get away. That is why our Constitution emphasizes the rights of the accused. That is why mens rea is such an important legal principle. That is why the fourth amendment principle of no unreasonable search and seizure makes it impossible to use illegally obtained evidence, even if irrefutable evidence of a heinous crime, in court.

One might say that all of this means that the law is not perfectly logical, if we require for “perfectly logical” that the law should always track moral guilt and mete out to every man his just deserts, letting none get away without their just deserts, at least for publicly accessible crimes (like murder and rape) that would in the general legal run of things be legitimately punishable by law. That is, in fact, not how law works in many cases, and not even just because of prosecutorial discretion. Nor would it really make sense to say that “ideally” the law would always do so, if the only way for such alleged ideals to come about would be to abandon principles like no double jeopardy, the fourth amendment, the requirement to prove mens rea, the requirement for conviction beyond reasonable doubt, and so forth. These, in fact, are parts of an extremely carefully balanced legal set-up, and we shouldn’t even be aiming to abolish them incrementally.

Notice that all of this introduces an ambiguity on a word like “should” as in the following statements: “Morally cognizant thirteen-year-olds who cold-bloodedly commit murder should be punished equally with adults.” “All men who commit rape should be punished.”

In one sense, one could say that such statements are true. They may even seem uncontroversially true. That is, in the sense of “just deserts.” The thirteen-year-old poisoner deserves to die. The rapist who didn’t get reported in time deserves to be punished. But in another sense it is quite arguable that such statements are false. That is, in the sense that “should” refers to how we are obligated to attempt to structure the legal system. We are not obligated to attempt to structure our legal system so that all cold-blooded, thirteen-year-old murderers are punished equally with adults or so that we insure that all rapists are punished without exception. There can be countervailing considerations (such as the danger of punishing the innocent or those who are not fully morally responsible for their acts) that would make it imprudent and hence actually wrong deliberately to structure a legal system with that goal.

All of this brings me to the question of punishing women who procure abortion. This question has arisen recently apropos of the candidacy of a completely insincere and disgusting candidate who means nothing and whose words should not be allowed to cause reasonable people to go running to their computers to have a big debate, as though he really had made some meaningful and sincere pronouncement.

However, I suppose the question is interesting enough in itself, and some of those who just love to accuse pro-lifers of being inconsistent (on the left and on the right) have taken it as their opportunity to make extreme claims.

In general, what these claims (“You’re an inconsistent pro-lifer if you don’t aim to have women punished for procuring abortions”) have in common is a failure to recognize this: Even in a situation where abortion was treated, as far as the abortionist is concerned, as first-degree murder (with the death penalty in relevant states), all of the general messiness of law in the real world would apply to the situation and in particular to the woman involved. Nobody except foolish feminists thinks that the requirement in law for evidence beyond reasonable doubt in cases of rape means that “we don’t really think women are human beings.” Nobody except a fool thinks that we don’t think human beings are human beings because we apply the principle of double jeopardy to a bragging murderer who has been acquitted. Nobody thinks that the victims of the plotting thirteen-year-old “must not really be believed to be human” if the law fails to punish the thirteen-year-old as harshly as an adult. And so on through a million places where law makes distinctions, yes, even distinctions that tend to favor describable groups of people, such as those who incite someone else to murder rather than committing it, those of a younger age, those whose crimes are committed in cases where intent or state of knowledge is difficult to prove, etc. In none of these cases is the humanity of the victim being impugned. Rather, the general idea is that the common good is not served by always trying to give every wrongdoer his just deserts. Again, this is not only a matter of prosecutorial discretion. Sometimes these matters are set up in statutory law ahead of time.

A legal situation with harsh penalties for abortionists and zero penalties for the procuring woman would be just another such rough-cut distinction made by law, based on considerations like the difficulty of proving the woman’s state of knowledge or intent, information about the prevalence of mitigating pressure and even coercion on the woman, the widespread deception practiced upon pregnant women, the fact that the woman is not confronted with the humanity of the victim in the same way that the abortionist is, and so forth. (Abortion is unique in that the victim is physically hidden, and can remain hidden, from one of the people who is complicit in the victim’s destruction.) All of these could well make it both impractical and imprudent for the law to get involved in trying to exact legal penalties upon the woman. Moreover, the pro-life goal that every child should be recognized as a human victim and protected in law would be accomplished by harsh penalties for the abortionist as a murderer, who sees the humanity of the child in the very act of killing. And, just as the reality and humanity of the victims is not denied in any of the above scenarios where someone who is morally guilty doesn’t get his just deserts, so it would be here. Such a legal set-up does not deny the humanity of the unborn child but is based on the intrinsically messy nature of the real world in which law operates and on the difficulty of the necessary task of proving mens rea.

Perhaps the tweaked and slightly more “perfect” legal situation would be one in which the woman could in theory be charged as an accessory before the fact but in which the law expressly provided for what is known as an “affirmative defense” which would block the prosecution. Such affirmative defenses could include lack of knowledge, having been lied to about the nature of the unborn child within her, or outside pressure from other people urging her to have the abortion. Often when a law expressly allows a fairly broad affirmative defense, prosecutors don’t even bother to prosecute that person at all. It would also be possible to offer complete immunity from prosecution in return for testimony against the abortionist. However, in some utterly blatant cases of heartlessness and knowledge on the part of the woman, where this can be proven, prosecution as an accessory would still be possible in theory. Certainly nothing I have said here means that it would be per se unjust for the law ever to punish any woman to any extent for procuring an abortion. Indeed, legal punishment might be well-deserved in some cases.

But even this latter scenario is not one that I think pro-lifers should pursue, for prudential reasons. I do not consider that it is necessary to our cause, and I think that treating it as a goal of our cause merely creates additional and unnecessary odium. Our goal should be the prosecution of the abortionist with, in that prosecution, the full recognition of the humanity of the unborn child. That is a far-away enough goal that we shouldn’t have much energy left over for grousing about how allegedly stupid and inconsistent our fellow pro-lifers are for not loudly pursuing the prosecution of the mother. Again, statements like, “The woman should be punished” or “The woman shouldn’t be punished” are ambiguous concerning what sort of “should” is in view--whether referring to what a person might deserve or to what policies ought to be pursued.

I don’t use the catch phrase that the “woman is always the second victim in an abortion,” because I think it is too sweeping and sometimes untrue, perhaps even more often untrue than one would like, in charity, to believe. I don’t like catch phrases anyway and avoid them whenever possible.

Sometimes, however, it is true that the woman is to some extent or other a second victim, and the new misogyny that has become prevalent in some unpleasant corners of the “right” is ideally placed to blind people to just how widespread such situations are--situations of coercion, pressure, lying, etc.

There are indeed heartless women who have abortions; there are also deceived and pressured women who have abortions. It’s not a failure to “really believe” in the humanity of the unborn child or even in the general moral agency of women to sketch out, as a legal goal, going after the abortionist instead. And contrary to the impression you might get, what I’ve said here is not unique. It is not the case that all pro-lifers are out there saying that it would be wrong per se under any circumstances for a woman to be punished at all in law. Scott Klusendorf, for instance (about as mainstream pro-life as it gets) emphasizes the prudential issues and the issue of mens rea in a public Facebook post.

Doug Wilson emphasizes similar issues.

However disappointing this conclusion might be to those who want to find and crow over “wimpy, feminist conservatives letting women off the hook” around every corner, the approach to policy that I am recommending in this post is the type of thing that is common and legitimate in the western legal tradition and in political action and is entirely compatible with full recognition of the humanity of the unborn child.

"Political Correctness"

The followers (many of them very unpleasant indeed) of a certain political candidate (who should be a joke but unfortunately isn't) whose name rhymes with Ronald Thump have a ridiculous tendency to use the phrase "political correctness" and its cognates for what the rest of us call "being a normal person," "not using vile profanity," "not being an immature, insulting jerk," etc.

There is a great irony in this given the way that the phrase "political correctness" first came to be widely used in American discourse. I am old enough to remember when that phrase was new.  I was in graduate school at the time. As the term was intended to be used, its meaning was rather specific. It did not refer in general to refraining from doing something that could offend someone. Rather, it referred specifically to the relatively new sets of rules that were being put in place by the left that went beyond mere good manners and that were specifically designed to serve as a kind of hat-tip to left-wing political norms. Hence, as the phrase was first used, nobody would have said that it was political correctness to be told that one should not use the n-word for black people. However, it was political correctness to be subjected to ever-changing terminology that one was told one had to use for black people. E.g. This year you must say "African-American," and so forth.

It would never have been called political correctness to refrain from using a crude or lewd word to describe a woman. But it was political correctness to be told that one had to avoid using the generic "man" or "he."

And so forth. The whole point was that we who used the new phrase "political correctness" to describe what we wouldn't submit to were calling out the people making the demands. We were telling them that we were onto them. They were pretending that all of this was "mere politeness," and "not being unnecessarily offensive," but we knew full-well that these demands were actually nothing of the kind. They were rather a demand for a specific political loyalty oath to ideologies that we didn't want to be constantly tipping our hats to. This particularly came up in the area of the pronoun "he." I remember being incredulous and scornful at being told that I should change my entire use of pronouns because suddenly all the women in my writing or speaking audience would be "needlessly offended" if I used the generic "he." It was patently obvious that the eradication of generic "man" and "he" were attempts to insinuate feminism into all discourse whatsoever. "The scientist...he or she," so that we couldn't talk about science without notifying our readers or hearers that women can be scientists just as well as men, that there should be just as many female scientists as male scientists, and so forth. It was ridiculous.

Even when the term broadened (and I resisted and still resist this broadening) in usage to refer in addition to norms put in place from the right of the political spectrum, it still referred to an attempt at or a demand for political signaling through language use or behavior. So, for example, if one said that on the right it would be "politically incorrect" to use the term "anti-abortion" and that one was supposed to use the term "pro-life," the point was still that on that end of the political spectrum one was being asked to signal allegiance to the pro-life cause by using a more positive term.

The phrase never, ever, ever referred simply to all societal norms as such. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the Thumpites' use of it in that way, and rejection of it as such, is something quite neologistic, though perhaps this has been (unbeknownst to me) fermenting on the alt-right for several years. But in society at large that was not originally the intent of the phrase. Indeed, the fact that the phrase was usually used as a tacit criticism of such arm-twisting meant that it did not refer simply to refraining from being a foul-mouthed jerk.

Again: Those who were demanding political signaling (hence demanding political correctness) were the ones who tried to characterize their own demands as merely those of common politeness, but the whole point of using the phrase "political correctness" was supposed to be that one saw through this and that one was therefore capable of making distinctions between real demands of common politeness, real requirements that one refrain from actions that are understandably wrong and offensive, and the faux demands of politeness made by political correctness.

Ironically, the Thumpites themselves in glorifying crudity and rudeness as such and contemptuously rejecting all objections to pure nastiness on the grounds that "we don't accept political correctness" are eliding that distinction as much as the leftists who gave us political correctness in the first place! The leftists told us that being politically correct (using all their careful terms, never suggesting anything that differed from their ideology, etc.) was "just politeness." The tom-fool Thumpites agree and yell at the top of their lungs, "We hate good, mature behavior!" and then proceed to prove it with disgusting behavior.

All of this just reminds us that Ronald Thump is not a conservative at all but rather a bubble-bound rich liberal foisting a left-wing caricature of conservatism, including bare hatefulness and nastiness, on the country, pretending that he exemplifies it. The sickening thing is that some people who think of themselves as conservative are falling for it and emulating him.

That, of course, has been said before, multiple times (often by Matt Walsh, who is very good on this subject). But I thought it would be useful to rehearse the history of the phrase "political correctness" in American discourse to show how it fits into the pattern.

Don't fall for it. Political correctness isn't "the idea that people should be careful to not use language or behave in a way that could offend a particular group." That definition is far too broad, and though it includes actual political correctness, it could also include normal behavior, since genuinely wicked and offensive behaviors and speech would be forbidden by it. If I say that you should not advocate killing all people with Down Syndrome, that would be "political correctness" on this overbroad definition, yet obviously you shouldn't advocate killing all people with Down Syndrome, because it's an evil thing to advocate, and parents and friends of people with Down Syndrome would be right to be angered and offended by such a proposal. If one says that you shouldn't use vile, anti-semitic epithets, that would be "political correctness" on this overbroad definition. And so forth.

Political correctness is the demand for political signaling in speech and behavior on legitimately controverted points and issues. It is intrinsically unreasonable and Orwellian. The demand for normal, human, grown-up behavior is not.

Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts--a sample

Here is a recording of a talk I gave on March 29 about undesigned coincidences in the gospels and Acts.

Only connect the prose and the passion III: For Easter

I first wrote the post that I am, to some extent, recycling back in 2011. It's here. And the second post by the same name is here. And an accessible version of the music video with Vestal Goodman in that second post, which has now become unavailable from the U.S., is here.

If you had been there on that first Easter morn, you could have photographed the risen Jesus of Nazareth. He didn't live within people's hearts then. He was walking around. His resurrected feet printed the sod. If you had been with the disciples when he came to them in the upper room, you could have touched his hands and his feet; you could have seen the scar from the spear in his side. You could have handed him a piece of fish and felt his hand touch yours as he took it.

There is only one religion that connects the prose and the passion, and that is Christianity. Christianity offers mankind all the scope the imagination and the heart could desire--God become man as a baby with a virgin mother, sin taken away mysteriously by means of the God-man's shameful death, His vindication by a glorious resurrection, the possibility of new life for each of us and the remission of sin, the final promise that all shall be made new.

For this very reason, too many Christians have played into the hands of the skeptics, fearful that the prose might cancel the poetry, separating the "Christ of history" from the "Christ of faith" and assuring the faithful that they can have the latter in whom to rest their hearts and on whom to feed their imaginations even if the former is...a bit lacking.

But this is not Christianity. For Christianity affirms, "He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into hell, and the third day He rose again from the dead." There is no separation between the great truths of the Gospel and the prosaic truths of history, between the massive miracle of Jesus risen and the all-too-human, bureaucratic hand-washing of a harassed Roman official two thousand years ago.

Some writers are offended by the "physicality" of the resurrection accounts and attribute them to later additions. But there is nothing in the accounts themselves that suggests that. Indeed, the confidence of Peter on the day of Pentecost is best explained by precisely such physically grounded appearances as those recounted in the gospels--a resurrected Lord who eats and even cooks on a fire of coals for others to eat, who is tangible and invites his disciples to touch him and who, says the first chapter of Acts, shows himself to them repeatedly over forty days by many infallible proofs.

John 21, one of the longest accounts of Jesus' interactions with his disciples after his resurrection, throws in the irrelevant detail that the disciples caught 153 fish that morning. Attempts to give this detail heavy theological or allegorical meaning are laughable. The detail is there because that's how fishermen think. In this particular case, John was also struck by the fact that the net didn't break.

Here, in these truths, you can indeed rest, and upon them you can stake your lives, because they are not cloudy truths. Christianity has its mysticism and its mystics. Indeed, St. John may well have been one of them. Yet it is in John that we see most of all that mysticism and empirical hard-headedness are not at odds but rather go hand in hand. John who tells us, "He that feareth is not made perfect in love," which I, for one, feel is far beyond me, who tells us, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," is the same author who tells us that there were 153 fish and that the net didn't break, that the fire on which Jesus cooked was made of coals (not wood?), and, oh, by the way, the servant whose ear Peter cut off was named Malchus. John the mystic is John the man of detail, the man with something akin to a photographic memory, the man who remembers, when Judas opened the door and went out to betray the Lord, "And it was night."

Well might he say, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested, and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us." 

It is all one to John. The Logos who was from the beginning and the man who cooked and ate the fish. In the mind of John there is no division between the prose and the passion.

So, on this basis, I invite you to rejoice and be glad, for our Lord is risen indeed!

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure

In the novel Theophilus, Michael O'Brien portrays the main character, a physician like Luke but not initially a Christian believer, as sickened by the cruelty of crucifixions. He is therefore horrified when he finds one of his servants praying with a crucifix in his hands. He cannot understand why the Christians have made a symbol of worship out of this horrible instrument of torment. O'Brien captures very well the surprising nature of the Christians' veneration of the cross. And indeed, the oddity--either for Jews or Gentiles--of the early glorification of the cross is one of many pieces of evidence that they had strong reason to believe that Jesus was not just another victim of the evil of man, that God had vindicated him.

I was struck by this conflict between the cross as symbol and as reality this evening while singing "In the Cross of Christ I Glory." The title is taken from St. Paul's avowal in Galatians, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ." The last verse goes

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure
By the cross are sanctified.
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.

And I began thinking of Fr. Tom Uzhunnalil (though I couldn't then remember his name) who has been captured by ISIS in Yemen. The nuns of his order fear that he will be or has been crucified by ISIS today, Good Friday. Others have argued that the fear is unfounded, but in any event, Fr. Tom is certainly in danger if not already dead, and ISIS has been known to crucify people.

How, I wondered, could I glorify the cross as a symbol of my salvation while Christians are literally being killed on crosses by the most evil of men who glory in torturing and mocking Christians by this means of death? When the notion of crucifixion ceases to be a notion and becomes all too real, it becomes difficult to sing about how "peace is there that knows no measure."

Yet the Apostle Paul was not a comfortable, 21st-century, American Christian. He lived in a time when men were crucified. He personally knew Peter who, according to tradition, was later crucified upside down. Paul escaped a similar fate only because he was a Roman citizen. And it is the Apostle Paul who first teaches us in Scripture to glory in the cross. "For I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified." "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world."

Somehow it was possible for those early Christians to hold the cross in their minds as both a symbol and a reality and to embrace that reality because, as Paul quotes a "faithful saying," "If we die with him, we shall also live with him. If we suffer, we shall also reign with him." "Buried with him by baptism into the likeness of his death, raised in his likeness to walk in newness of life. For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection."

And so, they were willing to die, like Christians facing the evil of ISIS. Like Fr. Tom. It wasn't that they did not know, that they did not understand. It was, and is, that they understand better. They go past the easy thoughts of the cross, mind half-wandering, heart unmoved by what has become old hat. But so, too, they go beyond the sheer, stark, horror, a horror to darken the mind, of the thing itself. For on the other side of the horror that Our Lord suffered, and that all Christians are called in some measure to suffer with him, and that some suffer literally, there is a deeper meaning yet again, which is neither easy symbol nor mind-paralyzing evil and torture. And that meaning is the reversal of evil, accomplished by that death. If it had not been accomplished by that crucifixion, then every crucifixion would be nothing more than, at most, a tale of gross evil nobly born by an innocent victim. And at worst we should suspect that perhaps even nobility itself had no meaning at all.

But now, we see through a glass darkly that death need not be just death, that crucifixion, yes, even real crucifixion, need not be just crucifixion, because Jesus died and, by death, defeated death, and lives again.

An invitation to peace

Through the invaluable Screwtape, telling his nephew demon how to tempt, we get the following words of wisdom from C.S. Lewis:

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy's will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him--the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say "Thy will be done," and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only of the things he is afraid of. Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier, and is usually helped by this direct action. The Screwtape Letters, p. 29

Every person who is naturally a worrier, as I am, needs to read this passage so often as nearly to have it memorized. The only part with which I might quibble is the assumption that the worrying human will always work out a set of future fears about which he can reassure himself that they can't all happen to him. Those of us who are really good at anxiety are also good at developing a list of highly varied things to fear in the future, all of which actually can happen to us.

Aside from that, however, Screwtape is completely right. (Very insightful, those demons have to be sometimes.)

When I was younger, I used to hear a lot of talk in the churches about "surrendering to God's will." That's good, and I don't want to tear it down. Anti-piety is much more corrosive than slightly over-enthusiastic piety. But unfortunately, some of us devout young ones got the idea that surrendering to the will of God meant something like this: Think of something that you really, really don't want to happen to you, or think of something's not happening to you, that you really, really don't want not to happen to you. For example, imagine that it's God's will that you never get married. (I don't know if the young men worried about this. But we girls did.) Or imagine having to give up some activity you really enjoy. Or having to move to some unpleasant location, or just having to move somewhere you don't want to move to. Or getting a terrible disease. Then ask yourself, "Would I be willing to accept that, if it were God's will?" If you feel hesitant about your spiritual ability to submit to this fate, especially if you feel inclined to grumble or chafe at the prospect, then you have failed the test of submissiveness to God's will, and you should start wondering if whatever-it-is has become an idol to you. In fact, you should maybe start wrestling in prayer over this hypothetical loss until you have reached the proper mindset of acceptance and submission.

That is precisely what Screwtape is talking about. It is not actual submission to the will of God. It's psychological gymnastics. It's a kind of emotional self-test, and there's no reason to think that it is reliable, either. For one thing, you don't know what spiritual resources will be given to you if that feared outcome really presents itself to you. Nor can you predict those resources from your own present feelings, including your present feeling of your own submissiveness to God. There is a reason why Jesus said "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," and that applies to things you think you need to submit to in prospect.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not advocating sitting around in an attitude of defiance toward God. "God, I'm just serving you notice that if you let me fail that class, or lose my job, or if I ever come down with a terrible, painful disease, or if you don't bring me a good husband within a reasonable time frame, then it's sayonara. I'm outta here. My submission to you and faithfulness to you is only on the condition that you not let any of these things I'm worried about happen to me. I'm getting geared up to fight this out with you, Lord." Of course not. But the person trying to submit to a host of hypotheticals is, in practice if not in intent, trying to call up such internal defiant feelings by imagining an event that hasn't happened and that may not happen, and then chiding himself for the fact that he now feels somewhat angry at God because of the hypothetical prospect he has deliberately, mentally entertained! This is folly. It's a waste of emotional strength.

It is also an attempt to gain spiritual strength in the wrong way. As Lewis/Screwtape says, there isn't really a reason to think that God will grant you today the strength to "face" a prospect that you don't really need to face, a prospect that is merely possible. Instead, if for some reason you are filled with fear about some particular future possibility, then pray about that. Pray to be delivered from that present feeling of fear or, if the fear is the will of God for you to bear as your present cross, to be given the grace to bear it well and not to be a burden to others. Then, after thus praying, resolutely attempt, with God's help, to turn your mind to something else about which you can actually do something positive.

Digression: The chronic worrier always thinks that maybe he actually can do something about the future thing feared by worrying about it now. The Internet encourages this. Maybe I can look up something that I can "bear in mind" if such-and-such ever happens. Maybe I can think of an idea that I can do now that will fend off such-and-such. And so forth. This is also a snare, by and large.

Maybe nobody nowadays goes around trying to "submit to God's will" in the way described above anymore. Nobody else, that is. But I still occasionally do it, and I need to learn not to. At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, I will say that the chronic worrier needs to learn that it's okay to be happy right now. But I can do better than a motivational poster, simply by quoting more from Uncle Screwtape, who lets us into the aims of hell. "The Enemy," of course, as Screwtape uses the term, is God:

[The Enemy's] ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hagridden by the Future--haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth--ready to break the Enemy's commands in the Present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other...We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future every real gift which is offered them in the Present. pp. 69-70

What Lewis seems chiefly to have in mind in this passage is a kind of utopianism rather than a tendency to fear for one's personal future happiness or for the personal happiness of those one loves. Nonetheless, the comments apply to the latter as well as the former. I note, too, that the technology we now live with has made it much harder to "wash one's mind of the whole thing" and to "commit the issue to heaven," much less to regard such "washing of one's mind" as returning to the reactions that are demanded of us at the moment. In a time of 24-hour Internet, we are likely to feel that at all waking moments of the day we are required to be beating our brains or harrowing our own emotions with whatever debates, stories, or concerns come across the screen. Lewis's whole picture of a division of life into different compartments and of taking one's mind off of one thing and putting it onto another is one we would do well to ponder and perhaps to try to recreate.

Beyond that, the point for the worrier is that the Devil wants a man to be hag-ridden by the future, and all the better (from the devil's perspective) if he is a Christian. If what the devil wants is that we should never be kind or happy now, then perhaps one of our first items of business should be to try to be both kind and happy (and honest) now, let the future bring what it will.

The idea of a duty to try to be happy is rather shocking in a way. Certainly it isn't, especially not to the worrier, an invitation to hedonism. Rather, it is an invitation to peace. I suggest that those of us tempted too much to "take thought for the morrow" accept that invitation wholeheartedly.

A civics lesson

I've been getting a civics lesson lately in what is meant by a "brokered convention." I've done some googling, and asked a poli sci expert, and you can check out what I say for yourself and correct me if I'm wrong. With that caveat, here's what I believe I've learned.

Contrary to popular impressions fostered by vague headlines, vague articles, and vague talk, a contested or brokered convention (say, the Republican convention in July) is not a convention in which "the establishment" simply picks a political candidate out of nowhere, whom no one wants, and by fiat makes him the party nominee.

All the talk about "stealing" the convention or "taking" the nomination from a candidate who has a bare plurality (but doesn't meet pre-existing party rules for number of delegates for the nomination) is sheer rhetoric, and misleading, and I will no longer be a party (pun intended) to it.

In the end, the delegates choose the nominee. It's like voting for the pope. If no one has the required number of delegate votes on the first ballot, where they are all bound to vote for the candidate they came there to represent, they are freed from their original pledge, and the delegates vote over and over again until someone gets the requisite number of delegate votes. So the nomination is still made by the delegates. Any wheeling and dealing, any "brokering," any influence, must ultimately cash out in terms of delegate votes on some subsequent ballot. The delegates must be persuaded.

Now, certainly, illegitimate things could be done there. People could be outright bribed with $10k apiece. People could be outright threatened with physical harm. There is plenty of room for corruption as there is, unfortunately, in any political process, including votes of Congress.

But the process is not intrinsically wrong, corrupt, or even "undemocratic," anymore than are votes in Congress. People have this weird idea that democracy isn't democracy unless representatives are automata. In this case, the delegates should be thought of as representatives. They get sent to the convention in the first place according to all the Byzantine rules by which the popular primary (and caucus) votes select them. Once there, they vote. First according to their pledge, and, if that doesn't garner any one candidate the required total on the first ballot, according to however they are persuaded to vote. This isn't intrinsically bad any more than any representative democratic process is bad.

I am sorry to see that even some sensible people (including my favorite candidate, Ted Cruz, himself) are getting into this talk about "stealing" the nomination and the "illegitimacy" of a brokered convention. At this point, if D.T. cannot get enough delegate votes ahead of the convention, then guess what? The real "fix" would be just saying, "Ha, we didn't mean it. We'll give you the nomination even though you never won enough delegate votes." That would be illegitimate. He, just like anyone else, has to win enough delegate votes on some ballot or other. And if he can't win it on the first ballot, then he has to try to win it on subsequent ballots. Requiring that is just fair play. Indeed if anyone is likely to cheat at that point and use outright illegitimate tactics, perhaps threatening delegates with personal harm if they don't support him on subsequent votes, I fear that it is D.T.--the very man whose followers are most likely to yell about "letting the will of the people be heard" and "not stealing the nomination."

Cruz himself should hope to be the unity candidate in case of a contested convention (that's certainly what I hope), and unfortunately he's leaving himself only the tiniest inch of wiggle room, if that, in the above linked interview to do that without being accused of hypocrisy.

I think we conservatives, of all people, ought to be here to educate ourselves and others about how these processes actually work, not just to repeat talking points and empty rhetoric. I offer this post as a small step in that direction.

Ben Shapiro on nationalism and the nasty right, with a few tweaks

Ben Shapiro has been excellent in his criticisms of a certain dreadful political candidate, D.T., whose last name rhymes with "Dump." Here he skewers his lack of character and his lies. And here and here he calls him out for deliberately appealing to the nasty right.

I would like to talk about this article, with which I have many agreements, and to see if I can "tweak" Shapiro's views, particularly on the issue of nationalism. The result, I would say, will be very similar to what Shapiro says, but a little bit different.

To begin with, Shapiro is importantly right (and I'll probably say this more than once in this post) that conservatives need to recognize and reject the despicable, self-styled "right," whether it goes under the name of the alt-right, the racialist right, or any other title. These groups have been growing on the Internet and the Dump candidacy has brought them out of the woodwork. We should, quite simply, have no truck with them whatsoever and condemn them repeatedly. Why? Well, certainly not to ingratiate ourselves with the left, which will never work anyway. No, for the sake of our own clarity of mind and that of any with whom we have influence.

To my mind this is all the more important for someone who has ever written anything politically incorrect on an issue such as race or immigration. I was calling for a ban on Muslim immigration years before anyone ever thought that D.T. would be a candidate for the presidency, of all things. It's an idea that deserves a much better, more careful advocate. I argued for it in a series of posts co-written with my then-co-blogger, Jeff Culbreath. Mine are here and here. I am also generally an immigration hawk. In general, I think there's just too much immigration going on from all locations and that this is causing all kinds of problems. In Europe, the mass influx of Syrian "refugees" has been an unmitigated disaster. The reports of crime, cities taken over, medical systems overloaded, unspeakably bad behavior by immigrant gangs, and the like, all utterly predictable, should make all the bleeding heart Christians who chided the so-called "xenophobes" repent in dust and ashes and apologize personally to the German women who can't walk in safety on their own streets.

So given that some of my ideas resemble some of theirs, I have all the more reason to make it excessively clear that I loathe the self-consciously racist, often anti-semitic, ideology of the following that has erupted around D.T. And I've suffered from it right here at Extra Thoughts, having to change my comment policy to block vile comments.

Interestingly, I think that Shapiro's comments could actually sustain a fairly hawkish immigration policy. For example, Shapiro seems to endorse the propositions

that Muslim refugees to the United States must be treated with more care than non-Muslim refugees thanks to the influence of radical Islam, for example, or that illegal immigration brings with it elevated levels of criminality. 

I would quibble that "radical Islam" isn't really so radical but is basically just Islam and also that legal immigration sometimes also brings with it elevated levels of criminality. But the point is that Shapiro and I could no doubt work out together a set of principles that would place a lot more limitations on immigration, including Muslim immigration, than the moderates would ever be comfortable with, and vastly more than we have right now.

Shapiro also says, "It’s one thing to object to an influx of people who disagree with basic constitutional values."

Right, well, look at the ways in which Muslim enclaves behave and their treatment of, say, Christian missionaries, and you will find out quickly that those who want to set up such enclaves disagree with basic constitutional values.

I think, too, that it would be possible to get Shapiro to recognize the importance of negative cultural values--forced marriage, female genital mutilation, child marriage, honor killings, and the like. Other cultural communities may take bribery and cheating for granted--"values" they have brought to the U.S. from their own countries.

Once we start taking such cultural values into account, there is no doubt that immigration policy would become "discriminatory" and would have "disparate impact" upon groups of various national origins. That is not racial per se--indeed, a careful immigration policy might rationally prefer an African Christian from Mombasa over a light-skinned Bosnian (think of the Tsarnaev brothers). But there is no doubt that taking cultural background into account would end up having ethnic implications in the broad sense of "ethnic."

Again, I would like to think that Shapiro's interest in the "content of our character" would lead him to recognize that possibility without flinching.

But there is one place where I think what he says does need to be tweaked.

According to Trump, we ought to operate off of the assumption that Americans deserve better lives not because they live out better principles or represent a better system, but because they’re here.

Setting aside the question of whether that candidate actually has any worked-out opinion or principle on any subject whatever, including that one, I would submit the following proposition for Shapiro's consideration:

It is legitimate for the American government and American employers to have special concern and loyalty toward American citizens over the citizens of other countries.

This seems like a very mild version of the principle. Suppose that you are an American employer and can hire an American worker who can do the job that you need done, and do it well, for a wage you can easily afford. Is it legitimate for you to have some preference, any at all, for that arrangement as opposed to hiring a non-American from abroad, bringing him here, and giving him the job? To put the matter no higher, it is a good deal more efficient for everyone involved to hire the person who is already here. It can also increase community cohesion by keeping people who already live here employed rather than leaving them to become a burden on the surrounding community. And, if your business is located in America, you have a stake in having stable, law-abiding, employed communities surrounding your businesses.

Or consider governments. It doesn't seem like a terribly radical form of nationalism to say something like this:

The government of the State of Michigan has more of a duty to consider the well-being of an unemployed former auto worker in Detroit than of a Syrian in a refugee camp in Greece.

Having a strong libertarian streak in me, I'm inclined to think that the attention of government is more often a curse than a blessing, but it is possible to think of some concrete circumstances to which this principle might apply. For example, it would seem to follow from this principle that the State of Michigan should be quicker to spend its scarce tax dollars to retrain the former auto worker than to relocate the Syrian refugee to the United States!

When it comes to employment policy, all of this gets very murky. What if the American would-be employee is entitlement-minded and demanding while the would-be (but legal) foreign employee is well-mannered and willing to take a lower (but still legal) wage? All else is rarely equal, and I am not advocating the mindless idea that any employer who prefers to hire a hard-working, mannerly Mexican over a mouthy, difficult American citizen is automatically a greedy, exploitative capitalist. I also tend to think (which makes the Buchananites foam at the mouth) that American unions are to blame for a lot of American unemployment and that carrots are better than sticks at bringing jobs back to America. What if government rewarded employers for certifiably employing American workers rather than punishing (with tariffs, etc.,) those who flee over-regulation for off-shore manufacturing? What about bringing American jobs back by weakening the power of unions and the NRLB?

So I'm by no means a rah-rah America Firster. But at the same time, I'm concerned that one could extrapolate Shapiro's remarks to the conclusion that it is inherently wrong for American government to give any special consideration to American citizens' problems or for American employers to give any preference whatsoever to American workers "just because they are here." This seems extreme and incorrect. Not to mention impractical. In the very nature of the case, American government exists for the purpose of governing Americans and worrying about American problems, not for the purpose of making more and more people into Americans by way of immigration. And some degree of preference for American workers by American employers seems to be a laudable form of loyalty to one's own community, not a blameworthy xenophobia. Again, if one brings in large numbers of foreign workers and leaves unemployed the workers that live right around one's own factory, who would otherwise be suitable for employment there, isn't this a recipe for civil unrest and dependency within the community?

It's worth noting that both the nasty right and the racially hypersensitive left often confuse any sort of "just because they are here" nationalism (if "nationalism" is the word) with racism. The former embrace it and the latter deplore it, but both are wrong. Black, low-skilled American workers have been disproportionately harmed by high levels of Mexican immigration, both legal and illegal. The almost intractable problems of the black community are, for good or ill, our American problems in a way that the problems of Syrians fleeing from ISIS or Mexicans wanting a better life are not. The hypothetical unemployed auto worker in the example above about the government of Michigan could easily be much darker-skinned than the immigrant in the same hypothetical example. In an already multiracial society like America's, the idea of loyalty to Americans qua Americans is hardly inherently racial.

It would be fun to have the opportunity to talk with Ben Shapiro about these proposed tweaks. He seems like a reasonable guy. I think we could have a profitable conversation. Though honestly, if I had the great privilege to meet Ben Shapiro, there are probably a lot of other things I'd rather talk about instead, like the various ways in which America is going to hell, the transgender agenda, and my great admiration for his courage in confronting all of this.

Meanwhile, the imperative remains in place to reject completely what the "alt-right" stands for, the darkness that was already in existence but that has been brought to national attention by the D.T. candidacy. I will not say that we on the right need to "own" the nasties who identify as "right." We don't own them. Many of us didn't even know they existed until five minutes ago! But I do say that now that we know they do exist, we must take them into account. We can't go back to saying, "Nobody thinks that. Nobody is saying that," as perhaps we would have ten years ago. Or saying, "Only the loony fringe, whom nobody listens to, is actually racist." The loony fringe is growing all the time, and too many people are listening. No longer can we leave the loony fringe out of our own calculations or accuse the left of manufacturing them as a bogeyman when, in fact, the left is pointing to a phenomenon that is sadly all too real. And if we do say something (as I myself sometimes do) that happens to agree with some of the ideas that the loony fringe also promotes (e.g., that Muslim immigration is a bad idea or that there are serious cultural pathologies in the black community), we must be especially careful to stiff-arm them as fellow travelers.

Some fellow travelers I'm happy to do without.