Though we can never reach a consensus determining who was the “world’s smartest man,” a significant number of scholars would vote for St. Thomas Aquinas.  The “Angelic Doctor’s” genius lay not in his originality or creativity—both attributes he would have disdained—but in his unique ability to synthesize and persuasively explain the perennial truths of philosophy and theology, to effectively conjoin faith and reason.  Commending him to the Church as her finest theologian a century ago, Pope Leo XIII said:  “Because he had the utmost reverence for the Doctors of antiquity, he seems to have inherited in a way the intellect of all.”  Still more, wrote Jacques Maritain:  “St. Thomas cast his net upon the universe and carried off all things transformed into the life of the mind, towards the beatific vision.”  To make  accessible important aspects of Aquinas’ work, Kevin Vost recently published The One Minute Aquinas:  The Doctor’s Quick Answers to Fundamental Questions (Manhester, NH:  Sophia Institute Press, c. 2014).  Designed to address “the questions that matter most,” he explores some of Aquinas’ positions (primarily found in his Summa Theologica), treating the nature of human nature (as evident in man’s hunger for happiness), the nature of God, and the person of Christ.  

          We naturally desire happiness.  Exactly how to fully attain and enjoy it, however, perennially puzzles and eludes us!  Many (indeed most) of the things we pursue—wealth, pleasure, status—wrongly promise to make us happy, and even the best and brightest of mortals generally die a bit discontent.  To Aquinas this makes sense because we most deeply long for a joy impossible to attain on earth.  At best we can only partially discover (through God’s grace and a virtuous life) what we will fully attain only in heaven (the beautific vision).  Composed of body and soul, we are special creatures, unlike the rest of creation; so to attain our end (happiness) we must rightly order both our material and spiritual lives.  Preeminently spiritual beings, created to share God’s eternal life, we must rightly respond to His initiatives and commands.  

To do so requires that we comply with our divine design to live as free moral agents, to act responsibly, to do the things conducive to true happiness.  “As the intellect seeks to know the true, the will seeks to obtain the good” (#678 Kindle).  Thus we must be free, for as Thomas said, “‘Man has free will:  otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain’” (#686).  We choose to do right or wrong, to resist or surrender to sinful temptations, to demand instant gratifications or consider long-term goods—and in making such decisions we develop the habits that shape our character.  Good habits—whether playing the piano, building muscles or interpreting Scripture—come through sustained repetition.  “Good habits direct us toward good acts, and another word for a good habit is a virtue.  . . . .  As Aristotle wrote, ‘Virtue is that which makes its possessor good, and his work good likewise’” (#892).  Thus we need to practice the cardinal virtues (prudence; fortitude; temperance; justice—all nicely discussed by Voss in short sections) in order to live well.  Helping us do so is the Law.  To Aquinas, “‘The light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law’” (#1229).  This law is given specificity in Scripture and informs human laws insofar as they are truly good.  

Yet we need more than the Law to guide us to eternal goodness.  Thus the Grace of God grants those infused virtues (faith, hope, and love) that finally satisfy our hunger for happiness, enabling us to participate in the very life of God Himself.  Responding by faith to His invitation, we find the forgiveness of sins and are born again.  By faith we acknowledge the truth fully revealed to us in Christ and learn of Him as the Holy Spirit works within us, giving us understanding and strength to trust and follow God.  Hope grants us the assurance that our future good, our eternal happiness, has been provided by Christ’s atoning sacrifice on the Cross and Resurrection from the grave.  “Josef Pieper said hope captures ‘the very foundation of being in the world for the Christian:  the concept of the status viatoris.’  A viator is ‘one on the way,’ and is translated as ‘wayfarer’ in the Summa Theologica” (#1588).   The best of the infused virtues, of course, is charity—“the friendship of man for God” that “resides not in our passions, but in the will, and the will desires, seeks, and loves the good.  Love in the sense of charity seeks the highest good—the attainment of union with God” (#1655).  Amazingly, God has entered into our world and encourages us to establish a lasting friendship with Him.  Just as loving our neighbors means doing good for them, as well as wishing them well, so too loving God means doing what pleases him, not simply feeling certain things about Him.  

To please God we must first know Who He Is!  To this subject Aquinas devoted himself wholeheartedly.  While yet a six-year old child he is reputed to have asked “Who is God?” and for the next 42 years he constantly sought to answer his question.  By nature we have a vague awareness of a Supreme Being of some sort, though this innate awareness easily slides into denial or forgetfulness.  We can, however, by careful thinking come to certainty regarding His existence.  Thus Aquinas set forth, at the beginning of the Summa, five famous ways to “prove” or “argue for” God’s existence.  Beyond this simple fact, we need Him to reveal Himself (primarily in Scripture) regarding his attributes, though we can reason cogently when deciding various things regarding the Great I Am who is Three-in-One.  

Until quite recently, natural scientists and philosophers took the universe to be eternal.  By taking the Bible as his foundation, however, Aquinas declared it to be created.  Matter began to be as God spoke it into being.  Citing Dionysius, who said all things were divinely caused, Thomas said:  “God’s ability to create belongs to his being or essence, which is common to the three Persons of the Trinity.  God causes things by his intellect and will, as when a craftsman works through an idea or ‘word’ in his mind to craft something that he loves.  So too did God the Father make creatures through the Word, who is his Son, and through his Love, which is the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity, then, created creation” (#3054).  He created simply because He is Good and sought to share His goodness with His creatures.  So, as Augustine said, “the trace of the Trinity appears in creatures” and guides the studious mind toward the Creator.  

The Second Person of the Trinity, Christ Jesus, most fully revealed God to us, and Aquinas labored to fully grasp His nature and work.  With the memorable simplicity characteristic of him, he said of our Lord:  “Being born, He became our friend.  At supper, He became our food.  Dying, He was our ransom’s price.  And, reigning, is our eternal good” (#3432).    “God became incarnate as the most fitting way to restore our corrupted sinful human nature so that many good things would follow, including the building up of our faith, since we could hear God Himself speak; our hope, since Christ’s presence shows us God’s love for us; our charity, so that we would desire to love God in return for his presence among us; and our well-doing, since God himself served as our example; and indeed, ‘the full participation of the Divinity, which is the bliss of man and end of human life; and this is bestowed on us by Christ’s humanity; for Augustine says . . . God was made man that man might be made God’” (#3467).  

Summing up his commendation of Aquinas, Vost cites the 14^th century Pope John XXII, who  declared, in Doctoris Angelici:  “He enlightened the Church more than all the other Doctors together; a man can derive more profit from his books in one year than from a lifetime spent pondering the philosophy of others” (#4321).  Anyone desiring to do so will find in Kevin Vost a most helpful tutor.

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For many years Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, has published a stream of books designed to explain and defend the Christian Faith.  One of his most recent and best works is titled Practical Theology:  Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas—358 Ways Your Mind Can Help You Become a Saint (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2014).  Kreeft believes (as did C.S. Lewis) that the best devotional materials are written by the Church’s most serious and incisive theologians (who appeal to the mind) rather than entertaining communicators (who try to touch the emotions).  Thus an article from Aquinas’ Summa Theologica will be more valuable than the latest “spiritual” entry in Oprah Winfrey’s book club!   Though resembling Kevin Vost’s One Minute Aquinas in intent, Kreeft’s work differs in its organization and approach—citing the saint more extensively and giving greater depth to his presentation.  

Consequently, Kreeft explains:  “In a lifetime of browsing through Aquinas, my amazement has continually increased not only at his theoretical, philosophical brilliance and sanity but equally at his personal, practical wisdom, his ‘existential bite’.  Yet this second dimension of St. Thomas has usually been eclipsed by the other.  I wrote this book to help bring the sun out from its eclipse.”  So, he continues:  “Here are 358 pieces of wisdom from St. Thomas’ masterpiece the Summa, which are literally more valuable than all the kingdoms of this world because they will help you to attain ‘the one thing needful’, the summum bonum or ‘greatest good’, the ultimate end and purpose and meaning of life, which has many names but which is the same reality.  Three of its names are ‘being a saint’, ‘beatitude’ (supreme happiness) and ‘union with God’.  That was my principle for choosing which passages to use:  do they help you to attain your ultimate end, i.e., sanctity, happiness, union with God?” (#330).  

This book seeks to bring us into contact with Aquinas himself.  Kreeft provides some explanation and commentary, but it’s all designed to help us rightly understand St. Thomas.  The 358 selections follow the order of the Summa, but it’s easy to peruse the table of contents and go immediately to subjects that look interesting.  Thus I’ll just lift out a few of the entries to illustrate the worth of Kreeft’s compendium.  Given that life is a journey—and journeys must end somewhere—it’s important to realize that “Our end is to know God—not just to know about Him but to know Him.  ‘This is eternal life:  to know Thee, the one true God’ (Jn 17:3) (#397).  To know Him requires theology—studying God—the “queen of the sciences” to Medieval thinkers such as Aquinas.  

Theology means thinking about God, and Aquinas insists there is a very human as well as divine dimension to this process.  We have minds uniquely capable of reasoning.  Thus we can discern God’s presence in all things.  “God is in all things,” Aquinas insisted; “not indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works.  For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately, and touch it by its power; hence . . . the thing moved and the mover must be joined together.  Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect, as to ignite is the proper effect of fire.  Now God causes this effect (being, existence) in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being, as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated.  Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being.  But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things  . . .   Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly” (#737).  

The great Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson condensed Aquinas’ explication to a “great syllogism:  (1) Being is innermost in each thing.  (2) God is very being, by His own essence.  (3) Therefore God is in all things, and innermostly” (#782).  This highly important point leads Kreeft to rejoice, for if God is truly present in all things—and if sanctity comes through “practicing the presence of God—we may begin to experience a bit of heavenly joy, see a bit of the beatific vision when we will finally “see Him as He is.”  By delighting in the manifest presence of the Creator in His creation, we may experience some of the transcendent joy of beauty here and now.  If God is everywhere and we manage to clearly see creation’s splendor, “the whole world will light up like a stained glass window when the rising sun (the rising Son!) suddenly shines on it, all the colors bursting into life with one and the same light” (#756).  By carefully attending to all that is—the snowflakes on a pine bough, the ripples on a stream, the colors of a sunset—we learn to “love God in everything because you can find God in every thing” (#1093).  

By nature we humans seek answers to various “why” questions.  The greatest of “whys” focuses on the definitive, the final reason for things—what physicists today label a “grand theory of everything” that explains it all.  To Kreeft, our compulsion to know shows that God has planted, deep in our being, a “desire to know the ultimate explanation for everything, which is in the mind that designed everything, the Author of the story we are all in.  For we desire to know all that can be known about all that is.  (We also desire to attain and enjoy all the good that is and all the beauty that is, but we first have to know it in order to appreciate and enjoy it.) (#816).  Both Aristotle and Aquinas and C.S. Lewis took it for granted that “nature makes nothing in vain.”  So, Kreeft says, “All natural desires correspond to real beings that can satisfy them:  hunger, thirst, eros, tiredness, loneliness, boredom, ugliness, injustice, and pain point to food, drink, sex, rest, friends, interest, beauty, justice and pleasure” (#822).  Surely this desire we have to know the Ultimate Source of all validates its Reality!   What we know about God is much like knowing and artist through his works.  “God is an artist, not a scientist; he designed and created the world, which is first of all the product of his art and then becomes the object of our science.  Therefore all human science—in all senses of ‘science’, ancient (broad) and modern (narrow)—is really an appreciation of the divine art” (#989).  

Though many modern thinkers insist that “chance and necessity” explain all that happens, we often hear folks say (often in the face of some misfortune) that “everything has a reason.” In truth, according to Aquinas, everything does, indeed, have a purpose—and that gives real meaning to life.  In an ordered universe, where everything changes in accord with various causes, there are evident ends towards which things move.  Calves become cattle, not mountain goats.  Heated water dissolves into oxygen and hydrogen, not nitrogen and helium.  “Therefore our human lives, which include conscious purposes, fit into this purpose-filled universe” (#2034).  The world is intelligently designed and we can understand it.  Things move purposively.  We too, if we fit in to this designed order, move to our proper end if we accept God’s will.  “Being sane and being saintly are ultimately the same thing:  conforming our thoughts and our lives to the nature of reality, which is ultimately God, His nature and His designs” (#2040).  Thus “‘Life’s greatest secret is incredibly simple.  It is just repeating two magic syllables each day to God:  the same syllables you said in your wedding vow:  ‘I do’” (#2108).

By saying “I do” to God I commit to a loving relationship to be finally consummated in heaven, where we expect to experience the ultimate joy of the Beatific Vision.  Aquinas said:  “‘Our Lord said (Jn 17:3):  This is eternal life:  that they may know Thee, the only true God.  Now eternal life is the last end. . . .  Therefore man’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, which is an act of the intellect’” (#2404).  Still more:  “‘It is written (1 Jn 3:2):  When He shall appear we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is.  Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the divine essence’” (#2417).  Thankfully, we taste a bit of the joy and happiness we crave while still on earth.  But ultimately we can only be truly happy in Heaven.  If we look for a heaven-on-earth we’ll be forever depressed.  But if we think of this world as a training ground for what’s to come we can enjoy some of our trials in view of what’s awaiting us.  

Making our way to heaven involves making ethical decisions, and Aquinas gives us a nicely-nuanced understanding of how we should live well.  He explains, for example, why an act is good only if its intent, its means to the end, and its ends are good.  Unlike the Kantians, who focus only on intent (do your duty without concern for the consequences) and easily become legalists, or Utilitarians, who consider only the consequences (“the greatest good for the greatest number”) and easily become insensitive to motivations and individual differences, or the Relativists (who respond empathetically to each situation and easily dispense with self-evident norms), Thomas insisted we consider all relevant factors when making decisions.  His synoptic vision, insisting we patiently consider all that makes decisions wise and good, truly distinguishes him as a moral thinker.  

Day-by-day, hour-by-hour, we make decisions that help make us who we are.   Even small choices, in their composite, really matter.  Inasmuch as we choose to do good, properly in accord with reason, we become better persons.  There are no “neutral” acts to Thomas!  Fortunately, many of our choices to do what’s reasonable are quite simple—eating, resting, speaking to colleagues, waiting in line, dressing appropriately, speaking politely.  As long as we have the right end (the divinely appointed end) in view, fixing breakfast for children or driving to school or smiling at a sales clerk qualify as ethical acts.  This is true, Kreeft says, “Especially if you offered up all your prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of each day this morning.  God counts that.  You may forget the covenant you made with Him this morning, but He doesn’t” (#2873).  We certainly fail at times, and sin is undeniably evident in our world.  But “St. Thomas is a great optimist.  There is far, far more good than evil in life, just as there is far, far more joy than suffering.  The glass isn’t half full, it’s 95% full” (#2880).  Thus to him, “Ethics is about good and evil.  Everything human, if it’s not evil, is good.  Ethics is therefore not like an umbrella and boots; it’s like food.  It’s not about a checklist, a postscript; it’s about everything” (#2887).  

Doing what’s reasonable aligns us with the Natural Law embedded within our being.  Thus to “‘scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God’” (#2898).  Inasmuch as the Natural Law stands rooted in God’s Eternal Law, “‘the natural law of reason is a participation in the eternal law of God’.  That means more than ‘an image of’ or ‘an effect of’.  It means real sharing, real presence.  That is why to disobey reason is to disobey God.  Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls.  We call that prophet conscience.  (St. Thomas used two terms  for it:  ‘synderesis’ was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and ‘conscience was the application of it.  We use ‘conscience for both.)” (#2898).  

So our conscience is sacred!  Following our true nature, reasoning rightly, means we reject the “if it feels good do it” mantra.  “Feelings come and feelings go,” said Luther, “and feelings are deceiving.”  Making ethical decisions can never be a matter of following our feelings!  “Do you want to meet God,” Kreeft wonders?  “Do you want to touch Him?  Do you want to hear Him speaking to you?  Do you want to know His will for you?  Do you want to have a ‘religious experience’?  You do this every time your conscience speaks.  Seeking mystical experiences instead is a diversion and an excuse for neglecting this hourly, humdrum meeting with the divine will than confronts us, usually in an uncomfortable way.  That’s why we look for something else.  Do you want to be a mystic?  Conscience is mystical enough.  Do you want to meet Absolute Authority?  Listen to your conscience.  Do you want God to come closer to you?  No you don’t; He is already too close for comfort in your conscience.”  In sum:  Ordinary conscience is sacred because it is the very voice of God speaking in your moral reason” (#2952).  

Years ago Malcolm Muggeridge penned a book titled The Third Testament, providing biographical portraits of persons who, in their own distinctive and persuasive ways, came to know and love the Lord Jesus Christ.  Though lacking the authority of Scripture, the lives of the saints and martyrs of the Christian Church have ever provided an on-going affirmation of the abiding Truth revealed in the Gospel.  Several recent autobiographical works testify to the perennial power of the Holy Spirit working within the hearts of folks open to Him and also show how apologetics played a pivotal role in their conversions.  (Parenthetically, the numerous references to C.S. Lewis illustrate the enduring value of his writings.)

In Counting to God:  A Personal Journey Through Science to Belief (Attitude Media, c. 2014), Douglas Ell sets forth the reasons he came to (and continues to) believe in the existence of God.  Primarily it was to answer “the great question” regarding the cosmos.  This “great question” endures as perhaps the most ancient and abiding questions ever posed.   “Accident or design—that is the question.  What do you think?” (Kindle #52).  With an abiding interest in science—taking a double major in math and physics at MIT as an undergraduate, then adding a graduate degree in theoretical mathematics from the University of Maryland—Ell carefully considered (while busily practicing law for three decades) the evidence available.    He slowly came to believe that mounting scientific evidence fits easily into faith in the God revealed in Scripture.  Consequently he wants “to go right to the core of the new scientific evidence of design in the universe, and thus the existence of God.  To me, it is the most exciting issue of our age” (#86). 

In a chapter devoted to his “personal journey” Ell explains why science and mathematics have been so important to him and now form a solid part of his faith’s foundation.  As a child he found numbers magical, intriguing, something of a key to Reality.  So too he found all aspects of the universe simply fascinating.  Unfortunately,  he could not fit God into his understanding of what seemed so real and important to him.  What he garnered from his childhood Sunday school classes (with their stories of Noah et al.) seemed impossible to accept, so he “began to doubt God and the Bible” (#266).  Science appeared better grounded and  more cogent to him than Bible stories.   

Years later, prodded by his wife, he joined her in attending church services, where he was surprised above all by the inner peace enjoyed by many of the parishioners.  Since his legal work required considerable time on airplanes he began seriously reading in an effort to reconcile science (but not the Scientism which restricts all reality to the natural realm) and religion (but not the Fideism which denigrates the importance of reason).  “We believers,” he declares in ending his treatise, “need to wake up and see the world the way it is.  The most magnificent battle of our generation, and for our children and our children’s children, is not Islam versus Christianity; it is Scientism versus Belief” (#3451).  

Unfortunately, today’s Scientistic elites, ensconced in “most colleges and universities, newspapers, magazines, and television and movie producers—want you to believe that our universe is meaningless and pointless, a grand system where everything somehow arose by accident and with no purpose or design but somehow, miraculously, gives the appearance of design” (#763).  Countering this are the advocates of Intelligent Design.  Their pedigree includes some of the most lustrous scientists of all time—Copernicus, Kelvin, Newton et al.  Carefully following the scientific method—demanding evidence with which to craft reasonable hypotheses—Intelligent Design thinkers then and now argue that the sheer magnitude of “apparent” design virtually proves it’s real and points logically to a Designer.  This is particularly evident when one considers the mathematical probabilities involved in bringing our world into being.  

The natural world (our wondrous universe) clearly reveals the Creator.  It is, to the author, in its own way a Gospel—good news to inquiring thinkers.  At least seven “wonders” deserve our attention and celebration:  1) the universe began, abruptly, 14 billion years ago; 2) this universe is “fine tuned” for life as we know it; 3) life itself is an incredible miracle; 4) living things reveal an amazingly intricate technology, enabling them to function according to meticulous plans; 5) the origin of new species remains a mystery unexplained by Darwinians; 6) planet earth is uniquely suited for life; and 7) quantum physics enables us to transcend earlier ways of thinking about time and space and causality.  Providing the book’s structure, “Each of these wonders is scientific support for the hypothesis of God” (#165).   Discussing these points, Ell provides (in readable form for laymen) insight into the current state of knowledge regarding the cosmos.  These seven wonders provide data for the “logic of belief” that connects the dots and provides the worldview Ell embraces.  

For open-minded readers, for folks interested in finding God:  “You have a choice.  You can accept the dogma of Scientism as fact and believe the universe is an accident, without meaning and without purpose, and live your life that way.  Or you can use the gift of reason to consider new evidence, evidence that just might lead you to believe in the designed universe of absolute wonder and evidence that just might let you live your life with meaning, with purpose, and with a sense of a greater reality, in awe of life’s mysteries and designs.  Choose well; it’s your life” (#443).  

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Though less well-known than his late brother Christopher (one of the more belligerent “new atheists” who wrote God is Not Great), Peter Hitchens has also enjoyed a highly successful journalistic career.  In The Rage Against God:  how atheism led me to faith (Grand Rapids:  Zondervan, c. 2010) he charts his journey from youthful rebellion (a “carnival of adolescent petulance, ingratitude, cruelty, and insensitivity”) against everything associated with Christianity to a mature faith.  In many ways he represents his generation, and one learns much more from this treatise than one man’s story, for things were dramatically changing in England and he would live out much associated with the transformative ‘60s.   As a child, he “lived at the very end of an era that is now as distant and gone as the Lost City of Atlantis.  There were modern things about it, but in general it was a very old civilization” (p. 59).  

Born in 1951 and reared in a non-church-going family, he was exposed to the state-sponsored Anglican “religion” in school.  W hat he encountered was hardly the real thing—instead it was a “strange and vulnerable counterfeit of it” that could be rather easily tossed aside by questioning youngsters.  So at the age of 15 he melodramatically burned his Bible on a field near his Cambridge boarding school.  He fervently believed “it was the enemy’s book, the keystone of the arch I wished to bring down (p. 18).  In its place he embraced the evolutionary Naturalism and ideological Socialism favored by the educated elite of the day.  Thereby unshackled from any authority, he set out to “do his own thing” without fear of the consequences (at least of the eternal sort).  Above all he resisted any sort of  Authority—he would map his own course and set his own rules.  So his prodigal sins multiplied and metastasized, ultimately leaving him with a deep sense of shame and guilt.  

Hitchens’ atheism easily sanctioned his “moral positions,” which were “fierce opposites of what I had always been taught.  I regarded marriage as something to be avoided, abortion as a sensible necessity and safeguard, homosexuality as very nearly admirable.  I renounced patriotism, too—so completely that I would one day shock myself and my fellow revolutionaries with the chilly logical conclusions of this decision.  I began by embracing the silly pro-Soviet pacifism of nuclear disarmament, with its bogus claims of moral superiority over the conventional warmongers” (p. 52).   But in time he would be stationed for two years as a journalist in Moscow, where the absurdity of his adolescent Leftism was made manifest.  The “Soviet Paradise” in reality was an abysmal prison, for the “Communist state had made a serious effort to replace and supplant such forces as conscience and self-control.  It had taken onto itself the responsibilities of God and of believers in God.  But its commandments were very different from those of God” (p. 85).  Inevitably:  “Utopia can only ever be approached across a sea of blood” (p. 153).  

Other assignments around the globe led Hitchens to conclude that “civilization” is a rare and precious thing.  Back home, observing and “writing about the inner workings of Britain’s socialist Labour movement and the increasingly unhinged strikes it kept calling, combined to destroy what remained of my teenage socialism, though I was slow to admit it to myself” (p. 99).  The secularism he had embraced was “a fundamentally political movement, which seeks to remove the remaining Christian restraints on power and the remaining traces of Christian moral law in the civil and criminal codes of the Western nations” (p. 161).  What he had known as a child in England, he finally decided, was far better than what he found in totalitarian and non-Christian lands.  He could not but conclude that something about Christianity made the world a better place.  And he sensed, deep in his heart, that the loss of Christianity in England could not but dissolve civilization.  As his “secular faiths” failed him he began to open his mind to the truth evident in artistic works on display in chapels and cathedrals.  Then he married his wife—and the words of the Church of England’s traditional “marriage service awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed.  I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being.  It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done” (p. 105).  

So as a prodigal so he returned to the Church.  But the Church found was not the Church he’d known as a schoolboy!  Innovations abounded; neither the majestic words of Authorized (King James) Version Bible nor Cranmer’s Prayer Book suited the trendy reformers.  Within a few decades, “400 years of almost unbroken tradition had been wiped out” (p. 108).  “The new, denatured, committee-designed prayers and services were not just ugly, but contained a different message, which was not strong enough or hard enough to satisfy my need to atone” (p. 111).  The secularism he’d found finally inadequate was making powerful inroads into the established Church, threatening to inwardly raze it.  Thus he finds and takes comfort in islands of sanity within the Church of England—small chapels still using the old Book of Common Prayer and fellow believers determined to uphold traditional orthodoxy.  

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David Skeel is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who sets forth, in True Paradox:  How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World (Downers Grove, IL:  InterVarsity Press, c. 2014), some beguiling reasons for faith in Christ.  Unlike some, who seek to dumb-down the intellectual content of traditional theology in order to appeal to the masses who have little interest in such things, he rejoices in the many ways a more “complex” Christianity fits the manifestly “complex” world we live in!  Clearly there is an evident simplicity to Christian belief.  “The feature that makes Christianity different from any other religion or system of thought is Christian’s belief that Jesus, the God who became man, suffered, died and was raised from the dead to reconcile humans with God” (p. 12).  That said, however, applying its truth to our world leads to considerable complexity!  

We must inevitably try to make sense of the world within God’s Son revealed Himself, and “the capacity to provide explanations for some of the complexities of life as we actually experience it is a key test of any religion or system of thought that claims to offer a comprehensive account of our place in the universe” (p. 18).  To Skeel, the place to begin this endeavor is with human consciousness, that subjective self-awareness of one’s being that “is the single most complex and mysterious feature of our existence” (p. 33).  He defines our “ability to devise and assess theories about the nature of reality our idea-making capacity” (p. 38).  Whereas materialists can make no sense of this trait—either denying its existence or considering it a strange effusion of matter-in-motion—Christians understand it as an aspect of being created in the image of a supremely self-aware and creative God who calls us to join Him, eternally.  Additionally, Christians understand and uphold a timeless, universal moral standard, whereas unbelievers easily slide into various forms of relativism, making ethical ideals mere local products of history and culture.  The dignity of the person, the equality of the sexes, the importance of just legal codes, the importance of the traditional family are all tenaciously held by traditional, orthodox Christians.  

“Beauty and the Arts” provide a second “paradox” eliciting Skeel’s attention, for:     “Our sense of beauty is thus connected with our idea-making capacity” (p. 65).  He finds Wordsworth’s declaration definitive:  “I have felt /  A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air.”  Materialists vainly endeavor to provide explanations for this unique human attribute.  How do we explain our delight in sunsets or symphonies that apparently diverts us from the “struggle for existence” Darwinists declare explains everything?  To Christians, man’s interest in created beauty points him to an ultimate Beauty, an ultimate Creator who delights in it.  Thus, though an atheist himself, “Leonard Bernstein once said that when he listened to the music of, he thought for a moment that there must be a God” (p. 77).   “‘It was when I was happiest that I longed most,’ the central character in C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces says as she reflects on her encounters with beauty.  ‘And because it was beautiful, it set me longing, always longing.  Somewhere else, there must be more of it’” (p. 87).  

On a personal level, Skeel notes he was reared without any religious perspective.  While in college, however, he read texts in some of his literature classes which contained biblical references.  So he decided to read the Bible and was simply “blown away,” for he “hadn’t expected the profusion of genres or the power and elegance of the overarching narrative that we repeatedly go astray yet God loves us and longs to take us back.”  Though other things certainly contributed to his spiritual journey, “the sheer beauty of the Bible is what first drew me in, and it’s still what I go back to when I’m asked over a beer late at night why I believe that Christianity is true” (p. 86).  

Addressing the problem of evil—so often the main plank in atheists’ arguments against God’s existence—Skeel finds the Christian perspective paradoxically satisfying.  To understand that God made a good world that is now marred by freely chosen human sinfulness, and that He entered into our world and suffered on the Cross to save us from sin, provides a key to dealing with pain and suffering.  It’s not an easy answer—but it is, for many of us, a satisfying one.  “The fact that the Son of God suffered an ignominious death means that God fully understands suffering.  Although the Bible doesn’t explain why suffering exists, it teaches that the Son of God—the second of God’s three persons—has experienced suffering firsthand.  Pain and suffering are still ugly, but Jesus having suffered put the ordeal of suffering in a different light” (p. 105).  Importantly, he refuses to say “that God causes suffering, as many Christians do,” preferring to believe “that God allows and eventually transforms suffering.”  This is more than a “semantic” distinction.  “I don’t think it is, and [Bill] Stuntz [one of the author’s close friends, an eminent criminal justice scholar who died of cancer] certainly didn’t.  He called ‘the principle of taking the sourest lemons and making the sweetest lemonade . . . the most beautiful I’ve ever encountered’” (p. 104).  

As a lawyer Skeel takes seriously “The Justice Paradox.”  “Nearly every system of thought gives rise to a theory of justice.  If the proof is in the pudding, a nation’s or civilization’s legal system is the pudding.  The legal system and its effects show us the real-world implications of the system of thought that underlies it” (p. 110).  Surveying world history, it becomes evident how rarely dictated legal codes (from Hammurabi to Napoleon) establish good societies.  A glance at the utopian aspirations of various Marxists, from Russia to China to Cuba, reveals how glowing promises descend into barbarian brutality.  Even the American Republic has failed to fully realize the aspirations of the Founders!  Christians need not be surprised at this.  “The dream of a perfectly just social order is, Christians believe, a dangerous lie that we tell ourselves” (p. 121).  As an old country song declares:  “Ain’t no livin’ in a perfect world.”  

Christians understand justice to be rooted in the understanding and conviction that every person is made in the image of God.  So every person must be treated well.  But materialists, believing man to be nothing more than a higher animal, have no reason to respect “human rights.”  Thus the cruelties of Hitler and Stalin and Mao flowed easily from their deep commitment to evolutionary materialism.  Revering every person, Christians realize how easily socio-political regimes violate human dignity, generally arguing that individuals must be sacrificed for the common good.  So Christians need to understand the inability of the law to fully and finally establish a good society.  Committed to promoting “the flourishing of others,” believers need to embrace “a vision of justice I call ‘law with a light touch’” (p. 129).  Consequently, Social Gospel advocates, whether Walter Rauschenbush promoting Prohibition a century ago or Jim Wallis championing Pacifism today, gravely err.  Determined “to usher in the kingdom of God through law, they are denying Christianity’s teachings, not promoting them” (p. 134).  We need less perfectionistic laws and more reconciliation between a holy God and sinful man!  

“Life and Afterlife” is the final paradox Skeel considers.  Christians, throughout the centuries, have boldly declared their faith in life everlasting.  Beyond the grave there’s Heaven to gain.  Materialists, naturally, disbelieve in anything beyond the physical world.  They have no hope for anything better than physical satisfactions.  Yet they struggle to explain man’s strange awareness of something beyond our time-space world.  C.S. Lewis repeatedly stressed (following an insight of Aristotle) that natural desires unfailingly point to realities which fulfill them.  Thus our hunger indicates there is something real called food.  “All of the longings we have considered in this book may be a foreshadowing of heaven.  Lewis himself experienced those longings with unusual intensity—he referred to the sensation as joy.  ‘If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it,’ Lewis wrote, ‘that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing’” (p. 145).  

History records few things more clearly than man’s hope for some kind of afterlife.  Exactly what’s entailed therein certainly varies (as multitudinous artistic works reveal) but surely it’s a continuation of some sort of the life we now enjoy.  Christians believe we will not be disembodied spirits but resurrected bodies blessed to inhabit a “new” heaven and earth.  Inspired music—classical works such as Bach Brandenburg concertos and the “spirituals” composed by slaves in the antebellum South—offers hints of what lies ahead.  Skeel also finds the scholarly work of N.T. Wright most helpful.  “Wright argues that heaven and earth are neither ‘poles apart, needing to be separated forever,’ nor are they ‘simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism.’  He concludes, ‘No, they are radically different, but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female’” (p. 155).   

Philosophers and educators routinely refer to the importance of one’s Weltanschauung—the philosophy of life or worldview that provides meaning for life.  To be fully human means addressing the “big questions,” wrestling with “ultimate concerns,” finding a unifying belief system.  (Such was the argument of Victor Frankl’s classic Man’s Search for Meaning.)  Though often assumed rather than embraced and frequently absorbed from dubious “authorities” or misperceptions, one’s worldview significantly directs (and at times dictates) much that orders his days.  Thus Paul Gosselin’s two volume set—Flight from the Absolute:  Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West (Samizdat, V. I, c. 2006, 2013; V. II, c. 2014)—provides much to ponder when evaluating current intellectual currents.  While he makes no personal professions, his frequent citations of C.S. Lewis and other Christian scholars indicate his ties to the Christian tradition, and his critique of naturalistic evolution carries with it a defense of  Intelligent Design or Creationism (though not necessarily of the young earth variety).  

Written originally in French by a Canadian scholar with a strong interest in anthropology, literature, music, science, popular culture and philosophy—who apparently works independently rather than within a university—these two volumes are more a series of tantalizing explorations (laced with interesting insights and quotations, reflecting considerable learning) than a systematic treatise.  Thus there are diversions and digressions, repetitions and ruminations that might have been screened out by careful editorial work.  Even the tables of contents (e.g. “vivisecting the Patient,” The Phantom Creed,” “Cannibals”) reveal the impressionistic rather than systematic nature of the books.  But if read patiently—and with serious attention to the lengthy quotations and extensive footnotes—much can be learned from them.    

Gosselin particularly stresses the significant changes, during the past century, wrought by the loss of Christianity’s intellectual clout.  A materialistic secularism has come to dominate schools and media in the West.  This worldview emerged in the Enlightenment and (though kept at bay for a century or more) has gained control of the modern mind.  Portentously, several European countries recently refused to even recognize Christianity’s historical role in shaping Europe!  More particularly, the materialist cosmology decreed by scientists now provides the underlying structure for most every intellectual pursuit.  Though rarely acknowledged as such, this materialist worldview (best understood as an “ideology” of some sort) is as fully religious or mythical as the Christian faith it displaced.  (Importantly, “myth” to Gosselin means a story which may very well be absolutely true.)  Anthropologists generally define “religion” as the effort to answer questions regarding:  1) origins (“where do we come from?”); 2) anthropology (“who am I”); 3) law (“why obey certain authorities, whether human or divine?”); and 4) purposes (“why live?”  “what are man’s proper ends?”).  Once the magisterial authority of Science was established and revered as the source of truth, a series of 18^th and 19^th century thinkers, culminating in Charles Darwin, discarded the Judeo-Christian cosmology which had shaped the West.  

              Consequently, by assuming and insisting that evolution is true, thinkers such as Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins confidently reduce human beings to sophisticated animals interacting with an ever-changing physical world.  “Man is, at most, a garbage bag-full of pompous molecules interacting in a universe totally indifferent to his existence” (V. I, Kindle #302).  As one of the characters in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles said:  “‘That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up.  We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles.  And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix.  Or at least we didn’t think they did.  We were fools.  We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud.  They wouldn’t move very well.  So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion.  We succeeded pretty well.  We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for.  If art was no more than a frustrated outfling of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life?  Faith had always given us answers to all things.  But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin.  We were and still are a lost people’” (#314).  So we find distinguished scientists, such as Steven Weinberg, declaring:  “‘The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless’” (#1325).  To which Alfred North Whitehead wisely decreed:    “‘Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study’” (#4898). 

                  Then quite quickly, at the close of the 20^th century, a repudiation of many key tenets of the Enlightenment project sallied forth under the banner of Postmodernism, which may be best understood as yet another religious endeavor (or, perhaps more correctly, a variety of religious expressions) best evident in popular culture and public education.    Turning away from collective social structures, Postmoderns focus on individuals “and ask:  ‘What’s in it for me?’  Political parties have become self-serve institutions.  Postmodern religion is custom-fitted to the client’s preferences” (#1363).  “The twentieth-century buried the grand collective political projects.  All that remains is the individual and his sexual, artistic, ideological and professional impulses and ambitions.  His salvation is found in self-fulfillment.  Anything that constrains the individual finds itself opposed to the postmodern perspective.  This is the perfect worldview for eternal teenagers” (#2522).  But despite the clear differences between Postmodernism and Modernism one thing remains constant:  a dogmatic allegiance to Darwinian Evolution.  Postmoderns regularly “deconstruct” ethical and aesthetic standards, patriarchy and colonialism; they proudly dismiss all “truths” as mere opinions and weigh in regularly against all forms of “intolerance”; they reject all prescribed principles or traditional authorities; they consider male/female sexual distinctions “out-dated” and celebrate self-fulfilling same-sex unions; but they remain totally committed to “the West’s own dominant metanarrative, the theory of evolution, as it constitutes the logical  basis for postmodern relativism” (#2446).  

Thus Gosselin regularly returns to his central theme:  evolution through natural selection lacks bona fide scientific standing and, as a worldview, has gravely harmed the world.  Rightly defined, “science deals with observable and reproducible processes.  The rest is outside the domain of science (or should be)” (#1524). When dealing with past events (and especially the origins of the universe or life or human consciousness) we “have left the field of empirical science and have begun to navigate the world and wonderful world of myth and cosmology” (#1533).   Without empirical evidence, we have “little more than nice ‘scientific’ stories framed in the context of the dominant materialistic origins myth.  This is the best we can expect” (1543).  Though Darwinists are determined to maintain their status as “scientists” and insist evolution through natural selection is a “fact” rather than a theory, they do so only by denying the proper constraints of their discipline.  

Even more egregiously, they often don the mantles of religious prophets or wise men, as is evident in the works of Carl Sagan, Jacques Monod, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, who provide reasons and recipes—worldviews and philosophies of life—allegedly rooted in their scientific knowledge.  Cornell University biology professor William Provine recently summed up the stark components of this evolutionary view:  “‘Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear—and these are basically Darwin’s views.  There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal directed forces of any kind.  There is no life after death.  When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead.  That’s the end of me.  There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.  What an unintelligible idea’” (#5166).  Nota bene:  none of Provine’s assertions are empirically evident—all are barefaced assertions of a biologist pontificating on philosophical ideas.  

Yet such efforts have generated a host of problem for their devotees, in part because “those who accept the materialist worldview must also accept that all their cultural and intellectual production is just as rigidly predetermined as the trajectory of a ball falling from the tower of Pisa.  And if that is the case, why should such works be considered significantly or taken seriously?” (#1918).  Necessarily, materialists such as Professor Provine must insist that everything comes into being as a result of natural causes, there is no such thing as free will (whereby man, particularly insofar as he thinks, stands apart from the purely material chain of events).  As C.S. Lewis pointed out quite clearly decades ago:  “‘We do not need . . . to refute naturalism.  It refutes itself’” (#1928).  In more detail, Lewis further explained (in “They Asked for a Paper,” a powerful passage I wish I had successfully instilled in every one of my students):  “‘Long before I believed Theology to be true I had already decided that the popular scientific picture at any rate was false.  One absolutely central inconsistency ruins it; . . . .  The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts.  Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears.  Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought-laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins.  Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.  Here is flat contradiction.  They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based.  The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to may scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not to even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.  The man who has once understood the situation is compelled henceforth to regard the scientific cosmology as being, in principle, a myth; thought no doubt a great many true particulars have been worked into it’” (#7956).

Equally impossible is the discovery of any moral code since “Evolutionary cosmology tells modern man:  ‘You are the culmination of processes that have taken place for billions of years.  Chance is your Father.  Chaos is your mother.  You are alone in the universe.  Your destiny is to establish order as you see fit” (#3958).  Moral values cannot be scientifically proven, so following ones feelings (emotivism) is the only rationale for behavior.  If it feels good, do it!  Most materialistic secularists evade the nihilistic moral message embedded in their worldview, but the Marquis de Sade saw it clearly.  “‘What is man and what difference is there between him and other plants, between him and all the other animals of the world?  None, obviously’” (#4009). So it logically follows that killing a man is no worse than killing any other animal!  Whatever pleases you, whatever gives you pleasure, is allowed.  De Sade himself found pleasure in abusing women since men, the stronger sex, have the natural right to “‘indiscriminately express our wishes to all women, . . . to compel their submission’” and force any available “‘woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right’s effects, he can employ it lawfully  Indeed!  Has Nature not proven that we have the right by bestowing upon us the strength needed to bend women to our will?’” (#5001).  

Though more mild-mannered and restrained in his rhetoric, Charles Darwin said much the same, lauding the triumph of Caucasians over “lower races” around the world, eliminating them in the “struggle for existence” (#4021).  We must never forget that the subtitle to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species reads:  By means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.  A contemporary of Darwin, Dostoyevsky discerned the “difficulties involved with developing ethics in the context of a materialistic cosmology” (#4387), for empirical science inevitably proposes solutions “based on brute force” (e.g. the survival of the fittest).  So within decades of the publication of Darwin’s On the Evolution of Species through Natural Selection (1859) an elite corps of scholars had proposed ways to purify the race (eugenics) and justify ruthless behaviors (Social Darwinism).  Particularly in Germany distinguished evolutionary scientists were proposing, by the turn of the century, ways to eliminate criminals and handicapped persons.  The path from Darwin’s devotees (such as Ernst Haeckel) to the Nazis is well-marked and inescapable.  

Darwinists such as Haeckel and Adolph Hitler denied any meaningful difference between human beings and other animals.  “Hitler was not crazy, a ‘deranged’ individual, but was rather the logical progeny of a dysfunctional civilization developed on the basis of a flawed cosmology” (#7327).  He simply worked out his most compelling conviction, recorded in his Tishegesprache/Table-Talks:  “If I can accept a divine commandment, it’s this one:  ‘Thou shalt preserve the species.”  Haeckel and Hitler discarded the traditional Christian beliefs that man is a spiritual being, made in the image of God, possessing an immortal soul, free to embrace or reject personal responsibilities, to live choose between good and evil.  “These men represented the theoretical, logical culmination of mankind’s humanist rebellion against God.  They declared ‘our innate moral consciousness’ to be self-deception, noxious illusion, fiction—as demanded by a rationally ordered consciousness.  This century’s totalitarianism, trampling the human personality and all its rights, rhinocerouoslike, underfoot, is only the application of this theory to life, or humanism put into practice” (#6511).  

From a strictly materialistic perspective, ethical and moral nihilism (denying there are any values) inevitably results.  As he does recurrently, Gosselin cites C.S. Lewis, who wrote, in The Abolition of Man:  “We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways; to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it.  It is impossible.  Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new  shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own ‘natural impulses.  Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-reach rulers and ruled alike.  A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”  

Absent such an Absolute—the Natural Law or what Lewis calls the Tao—“ultimately the only real moral absolute left is mere survival” (V. II, #541).  Disciples of Darwinism, such as Steven J. Gould, try to evade the ethical implications of their cosmology—Gould simply posited two utterly separate realms of reality, the tough-hewed materialistic world revealed to scientists and the tender-hearted ethical world indwelt by kindly biologists such as himself who support the basic moral standards of Western Christian Culture.  But other biologists and philosophers (notably Peter Singer) are not quite so tender-hearted and scour for evidence of purely material bases for ethical instincts.  Animals, including man they say, have an altruistic urge (as well as a sexual urge) simply because it enables them to survive.  They animalized humans and humanized animals—energetically defending animal rights (PETA spokesmen) or denying human dignity (pro-abortion or active euthanasia activists) as the moment required, without pausing to consider to the incoherence of their position.  

Though deeply problematic as a basis for ethics, the theory of evolution enjoys an exalted status within the 21^st century intelligentsia.  Both politicians and professors soon discover that opposing it can easily cost one his career.  Yet unlike the theory of gravity, which can be routinely demonstrated through observations and experiments, the theory of evolution, when applied to critical events such as the origin of life requires considerable faith and imagination.  Properly understood, “science” deals only with the observable natural world.  Events in the distant past, whether the “Big Bang” or the origin of life on planet earth can never be observed or tested in a laboratory.  Incoherently, evolutionary theorists insist the process they revere is both unobservable and empirical!  It’s like saying something is both invisible and visible!  And, indeed, lauded Nobel Prize winners and Harvard professors such as George Wald baldly declare “that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet, here we are—as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation’” (#1923).  Faith in spontaneous generation is endorsed while faith in any Designing Intelligence is rejected as unacceptable!  

Interestingly enough, the evolutionary myth also invokes the “Peter Pan Effect.”  Asked how he could fly so easily, Peter Pan declared:  “You just think wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.”  When the fossil record remains filled with “gaps,” you simply invoke “Chance” (the materialistic deus ex machina that takes on the role of the theistic God who intervenes and intelligently fills in the gaps).  Or you insist that in time Science will explain everything (precisely as do theists when relying on an Omniscient Mind to unveil creation’s inexplicable mysteries).  Acknowledging “the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record” as the “trade secret of paleontology,” a discipline relying on data “so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study,” Steven J. Gould momentarily wondered if an indiscerrnable “punctuated equilibrium” evolutionary process theory was better than orthodox Darwinism.  And so it goes—endless “scientific” proposals designed to finally explain why Evolution is the “theory of everything” we long for.  

Surely, Gosselin insists, there’s a better way to conceptualize our cosmos.  Challenging and departing from the entrenched evolutionary paradigm demands courage and a willingness to suffer for the truth—but such has ever been the lot of dissidents and pathfinders.  Thus a distinguished American geneticist, Richard Sternberg, was demoted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History because he published an article questioning some evolutionary dogma in a journal he edited.  “Never forget, Malcolm Muggeridge said, that only dead fish swim with the stream.”  What’s needed is thinkers such as George Orwell, whose prophetic 1984 warned against the “Newspeak” and “Crimestop” designed by “Big Brother” to stifle freedom of thought and speech.    

Now there’s ample reason to begin seriously questioning the claims of naturalistic evolution if we begin to think rigorously and understand all the available evidence.  Much Darwinism is obviously ideological rather than scientific, mythical rather than empirical.  Many (if not most) scientists simply accept the theory of evolution because it’s what they’re taught rather than seriously thinking through its presuppositions and ramifications.   But in truth they are enraptured by a modern origins myth—providing the story primeval history that provides a raison d’être for all that is, telling them why we’re here, who we are, where we’re headed.   When compared with various other origins myths—carefully chronicled by astute anthropologists cited by Gosselin—Darwinism (or Evolution, personified and portrayed as an Agent working its will everywhere) certainly seems to be more mythical than scientific.  That’s because it:  “necessarily involves events in the past; . . . involves a story, a narrative; . . . provides modern man with an answer to the ‘why’ question; . . . deals with metamorphosis theme; . . . providing meaning for society and its activities at diverse levels” (#3209).  But just maybe there’s a better myth!  Just maybe the ancient Judeo-Christian cosmology is really true—and should re reestablished as our culture’s guiding light.

# # #

For its first half-century the Church of the Nazarene’s theology was significantly shaped and masterfully explained by H. Orton Wiley, a close friend and associate of the denomination’s founder, Phineas F. Bresee.  Wiley’s three-volume Systematic Theology was published in the early ‘40s and defined the church’s teaching.   He relied on 19^th century Methodist theologians, as well as the holiness prescriptions of Pheobe Palmer to set forth the church’s “cardinal doctrine,” the call to “Christian perfection.”  Wiley frequently cited Methodists who endorsed Palmer’s insistence on a “crisis experience” wherein believers consecrate themselves completely to God, “place their all upon the altar,” and take God at His Word by believing that the “altar sanctifies the gift.”  Wiley especially emphasized the instantaneous nature of the “second work of grace” and tried to make sure that Nazarenes (unlike 19^th century Methodists) would tenaciously proclaim it.  In 1928 he helped draft and fully endorsed the article on entire sanctification as set forth (in 1928) in the “Articles of Faith” specifying it to be an “act of God subsequent to regeneration, by which believers are made free from original sin, or depravity, and brought into a state of entire devotement to God, and the holy obedience of love made perfect.”  This language still stands in the church’s most recent Manual.  

Wiley died in 1961, and within a decade younger Nazarene theologians began to overhaul the church’s “cardinal doctrine.”  In 1973 Mildred Bangs Wynkoop’s treatise, A Theology of Love, sparked a turning point in the denomination’s history, if not in its official declarations.  Nazarene Theological Seminary professor Paul Orjala labeled it “one of the most important books ever published” by the denomination, tagging it “the first modern theology of holiness.”  Wynkoop emphasized the “credibility gap” between what preachers said and people experienced and demanded a comprehensive “restructuring of the conceptual framework within which holiness theologians had worked.”  Quietly turning aside from Wiley and the American holiness tradition, she cited John Wesley to craft a “Wesleyan hermeneutic” with a different definition of human nature and sin.  A person is not, she suggested, by nature sinful, so sin is not a thing to be removed.  Rather, sin results from a fractured, dysfunctional relationship with God.  Restoring that relationship, therefore, solves the sin problem.  Nothing essential within one’s soul is changed, bringing about a “state of grace,” but a healthy relationship with God develops.  Holiness is interpersonal love—nothing more, nothing less.  So she minimized the need for a second, instantaneous work of grace.  

Wynkoop’s position clearly informs Relational Holiness:  Responding to the Call of Love, (Kansas City:  Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, c. 2005) by Thomas Jay Oord and Michael Lodahl, two of the denomination’s best and brightest theologians—who are winsome both in person and as authors.  Though written for the general public rather than the academy, it is endorsed by some of the church’s most distinguished theologians (H. Ray Dunning) and influential leaders (Charles Zink; Ron Benefiel; William Greathouse).  It thus may be taken to represent the current position of the Church of the Nazarene.  

Oord and Lodahl assert the church, in its presentation of holiness, faces more than the “credibility gap” noted by Wynkoop 40 years ago.  Indeed, unless it is explained in ways plausible to 21^st century worldviews, the “doctrine” will simply vanish as an artifact of an ancient religious subculture.  To recast the doctrine in relational terms, however, will suit our “postmodern” world, with its sensitivity to environmental realities and to “individuals-in-relation” or “community-created-persons.”  Within this postmodern consciousness, God may be seen as the One who “acts as an ever-present, divine influence—a necessary cause—in everyone’s relational environment.  Just as people affect others through relations, God as the Maker and Sustainer of all things also affects all things, all people, all the time, everywhere.  There is no environment in which God is not related to others as a present, active, and loving agent” (Kindle #332).  God too “is open to and affected by others, because the Creator and the creatures enjoy mutual relations” (#359).  Interacting with the God Who Is Love, we engage in loving relationships with Him and His world, and consequently are, moment-by-moment, more-or-less holy. 

Amidst the variety of views regarding holiness set forth both in scripture and theological traditions Oord and Lodahl seek to find identify one absolutely essential “core” position.  While various alternatives, have value, only love can be the “core” of holiness.  In the authors’ words:  “To love is to act intentionally, in response to God and others, to promote well-being.  To say the same thing in other words, to love is to respond to the inspiration of others—especially God—and by that response effect genuine flourishing” (#862).  Embracing this understanding, life can become an adventure, following Jesus as Guide, responding rightly to the challenges and opportunities we encounter in life’s journey.   Doing so enables us to actively participate in the loving fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit—the Divine Trinity.  “The Spirit is the Breath in whose life and presence we actually share in the mutual life and love of the Father and Son.”  Still more:  “Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that because the Father and the Son ‘make room’ for us in their common life of the Spirit, our common life together really makes a difference in God’s own life and experience of the world” (#1149).  By “our common life together” they mean mainly the “visible, touchable, experiential” activities that ought to characterize “any and every congregation” (#1360).  Working within a loving relationship with God we rightly interact with others.  “God’s love, then, is perceptible to our senses:  visible, touchable—or at least ought to be—in church communions where the word which you have heard from the beginning is heard and acted upon faithfully, boldly, and bodily” (#1366).  

In the book’s final chapter, Oord and Lodahl call us to be “dancers, not dinosaurs.”  All of the Bible’s definitions of holiness—e.g. following the commandments, being pure, committed, set apart, Christlike and perfect—can be subsumed to and expressed by the “core” value of love.  Led by the “Master Dancer,” Christ Jesus, we can dance beautifully as long as we keep step with Him.  And so, they conclude:  “Let the dance begin!” (#1649).  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Thomas J. Oord, a professor at Northwest Nazarene University, has long pondered and written about the importance of love.  In The Nature of Love:  A Theology (St. Louis:  Chalice Press, c. 2010)—a book dedicated to three Nazarene theologians (H. Ray Dunning, William Greathouse, and Mildred Wynkoop)—he explores the ultimate, greatest virtue of the Christian life.   With John Wesley, he thinks “‘Love is the end of the commandments of God.  Love is the end, the sole end, of every dispensation of God, from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things’” (#204).  In light of the fact that the Bible repeatedly celebrates the importance of love and the best of Christian theologians for 20 centuries have stressed its import, it should certainly “be the orienting concern and continual focus for speaking systematically about theology.  We should discard ideas or theories that undermine love” (Kindle #191).  

Unfortunately, secondary concerns have often distracted Christians from their main message.  Hugely influential 20^th century thinkers such as Paul Tillich and Karl Barth failed to give love its due.  In the past, thinkers such as Martin Luther five centuries ago (and R.C. Sproul today) elevated faith alone to the pride of place.  Calvin in the 16^th century (and Millard Erickson in the 20^th) developed an intensely logical system celebrating the sovereignty of God.  As Oord explores various theologians’ failures to rightly stress love’s importance, he admits that the word is notoriously hard to define.  So he offers this definition:  “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic/empathetic response to God and others, to promote overall well-being” (#489).  Carefully spelling out this definition, he grants that there are many valuable aspects to other (e.g. romantic or friendly) loves.  But when thinking theologically, he insists we abide by this definition.  

Consequently he devotes appreciative sections to—and respectfully rejects the positions of—Anders Nygren, Augustine, and Clark Pinnock.  Anders Nygren wrote Agape and Eros and was “the most influential love theologian in the twentieth century” (#758).  To him only God’s agape qualifies as Christian love.  Following Luther, Nygren “rejected every idea of human merit” and located agape solely in God.  Totally depraved, we bask in God’s love but contribute nothing to our relationship with Him.  Augustine focused on love as desiring (benevolence), but not necessarily doing (benefaction) what is good.  Inasmuch as he insisted on God’s impassibility and timelessness, Augustine did not think He would interact with us in a give-and-take relationship.  Oord lauds Clark Pinnock’s “Open Theism,” which portrays God as a relational Being and grants the importance of love and of the freedom of both human and other kinds of beings to freely respond to Him.  Though sharing many of Pinnock’s positions, Oord faults him for failing to resolve the tension between love and power, especially when explaining the actuality of evil.  A major reason for this is Pinnock’s affirmation, in accord with the vast majority of Christian thinkers, of creatio ex nihilo—creation actually came to be without material antecedents.   Oord argues this notion is neither biblical nor suitable for a theology of love.   Rather than ex nihilo, he thinks God created by transforming the eternal “primordial chaos” into the world that now exists.  Neither time nor matter came into being—they were transformed by the creative act described in Genesis.  Thus evil may be attributed to a residue of the “primordial chaos” that ever abides alongside (and beyond the control of) the God who is absolutely loving.  Since “creatio ex nihilo undermines a coherent doctrine of divine love” we “should reject this nonbiblical idea to affirm consistently the biblical claim ‘God is love’” (#2232).  

Oord’s own position, deeply influenced, in my judgment, by process philosophy, is termed “Essential Kenosis.”  Oord calls it a “biblical theology of love” and believes it overcomes the problem of evil by depicting God as essentially—almost exclusively—love.  It affirms “miracles, the resurrection of Jesus, hope for a final victory at the end of history, and a biblically supported doctrine of creation” (#2098).  And it finds its final illustration on the Cross, where Jesus shows us the true nature of God—“one who experiences pain and joy, sorrow and happiness, life and death” (#2242).  Rightly understood, God does not voluntarily limit himself—He was (and is) involuntarily limited by the nature of His relationship with both the primordial chaos and creaturely freedom.  God loves because He cannot help loving; that is what He is.  He cannot destroy evil because a loving being cannot coerce anything.  But this loving God can court and woo His creatures and draw them into an ever-more holy relationship with Himself.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 

Thomas A. Noble, a distinguished professor of theology at Nazarene Theological Seminary, recently delivered the Didsbury Lectures in Manchester, England.  The lectures, in print, are titled Holy Trinity:  Holy People:  The Historic Doctrine of Christian Perfecting (Eugene, OR:  Cascade Books, c. 2013).   Targeting a scholarly audience, Noble endeavors to rightly follow his calling as a theologian, “not to perpetuate a Wesleyan ‘distinctive” . . . but to persuade all Christians that this is the heritage of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” (#188).  “Holiness,” he says, “is one of the core concepts of the Christian faith” and deserves the serious, sustained reflection that only comes when one scours the Scripture and consults the long tradition of the Christian Church as well as those “holiness” churches that have more specifically stressed it.  His thoughtful, discriminating discussions of both Catholic and Protestant thinkers, rooting his presentation in the long conversation of great exegetes and theologians, makes this work persuasive and helpful, one of the best expositions I’ve read.    

Importantly, Noble insists, holiness is a perfecting process, not a perfect state of being.  Thus his subtitle urges a perfecting rather than a perfection of the soul.  None of the Church’s greatest theologians “ever taught ‘sinless perfection’—the idea that within this life, Christians could reach that final, absolute state of perfection where they were sinless and perfectly holy” (#804).  They taught, instead, a perfecting process whereby, above all, Christians more fully love as they ought.  At this point St Augustine, one of greatest theologians of love,” famously said, in The City of God:  “Two loves built two cities.  Love of self to the contempt of God built the earthly city:  love of God to the contempt of self, the heavenly.”  We cannot but love, said Augustine—the question is what we will love!  The love of self (concupiscentia) must be tethered while love of God and others (caritas) needs stirring up!   In his wake, great thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and John Wesley repeated and refined Augustine’s insight.  

Wesley, of course, gave considerable attention to holy living—“faith working by love.”  Indeed, “as Mildred Bangs Wynkoop saw clearly,” bona fide “Christian holiness was a ‘theology of love’” (2411).  In the 18^th century renewal movement he led within the Church of England Wesley urged believers (initially sanctified at their new birth) to seek ever-deeper experiential realities available through the gracious workings of God:  the “‘gradual work’ of sanctification that follows regeneration” (#2361).  Though at times he may have erroneously slipped into perfectionistic language, he typically acknowledged “the paradox of this ‘imperfect perfection’” and would even have given guarded assent to Luther’s dictum that the Christian is simul justus et pecccator, at once a sinner and justified” (#2563).  “As in Clement, Origen, the later Greek Fathers, and in Bernard and Aquinas (to name only some of those we selected from the great tradition), there is no thought here of easy, instant holiness.  Rather there is a concept of different levels of stages or ‘degrees’ of perfection’—rungs on the ladder” (#2608).  

After devoting considerable attention to an account of past developments, Noble turns to the task of “reformulating Wesley’s doctrine today.”  Simply repeating an 18^th century evangelist will not suffice!  But by carefully considering motivation and relationship we can construct a viable understanding of Christian holiness as “an inner revolution in our motivation as a consequence of a new relationship” (#3013).  Freedom from the bondage of sin—consistently defined as “the self-centered mindset”—is possible insofar as we maintain a sanctifying relationship with the Loving Lord who enables us to consistently “will one thing.”  This means the real focus of our attention should be on the Holy Trinity and the provisions made for our salvation through the atoning work of the Second Person, Jesus Christ.

Following Eusebius and a long line of thinkers, Noble emphasizes the Atonement as the key for us to understand Christian perfecting.  Ultimately, on the Cross, Christ, by dying to sin, opened the way for us to likewise die to sin and become all we’re designed to be.  “Only by meditating on the doctrine of the cross can we be captivated by the love of God in such a way as to love him with that full and whole-hearted love of mind, soul, and strength, which is the essence of ‘entire’ sanctification” (#3723).  It’s all about Him, not us!  Too often holiness has been discussed almost exclusively in terms of us—our sins, our needs, our potential, our fundamentally human ways of attaining sanctity—whereas it must be primarily rooted in the Person of God, Christ Himself!  “‘Entire sanctification’ is not a human possibility, nor is it activated by my total consecration as an individual.  It is God’s gracious activity in the life of each believer, within the contest of the Body of Christ, the church, made possible by God’s once-for-all act of grace in the crucifixion of the old sinful humanity on the cross” (#4144).  

In His Incarnation, as well as His atoning death, Christ provided for us salvation full and free.  The Early Church wrestled long and hard to rightly insist that Jesus was “fully God, fully man.”  Consequently, as Athanasius and others said, by assuming our human nature Christ redeemed and sanctified it.  Sinless Himself, he bore our sins.  Thus “Irenaeus writes of ‘the pure One opening purely that pure womb which regenerates humanity to God, and which he himself made pure.’  As the Symbol of Chalcedon (451) expressed it, he was ‘like us in everything except sin.’  Taking our sinfulness in no way polluted him.  Our debt was swallowed up in his riches, our pollution cleansed in his purity, our sin burned up in the fire of his holiness” (#4528).  Living among us (as well as dying for us) Christ showed us how to be holy persons.  

To be holy, then, is to be rightly rooted in Christ Himself.  “In him, ‘the first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5), the old humanity has died and the new humanity, the new creation (2 Cor 5:17), has begun.  Christian holiness is founded upon—is a participation in—what he has done for us, once for all time in his death and resurrection.  It is a participation in him” (#4887).  Empowered by the Holy Spirit, believers may enjoy fellowship with God Himself and allow Him to inspire and work through them.  Inasmuch as God is Perfect Love, there is a perfecting process engaging believers in the on-going-work of sanctification.  At Pentecost, “the final event in the series of the mighty acts of God in Jesus,” this Reality dawned for the infant Church.  Now, as then, Christians are “able—not merely by effort or moral energy or discipline alone, but by the grace or gift of God—to make his or her consecration fully actual, and to love God and his perfect will whole-heartedly.  While still in the fallen body as part of a fallen human race (‘flesh’) and liable therefore to daily temptation, this mature Christian is no longer a divided mind or heart” (#5207).  Rightly understood, then, Christian holiness is “always a prayer, never a claim” (#5256).  

“Charles Wesley,” Noble says, “expresses for us the constant daily prayer that Christ, who is Love incarnate, crucified, and ascended, may breathe into us too his own Spirit that we may be filled with his love:  ‘Love divine, all loves excelling, / Joy of heaven, to earth come down, / Fix in us thy humble dwelling, / All thy faithful mercies crown!  / Jesu, thou art all compassion, / Pure unbounded love thou art; / Visit us with thy salvation!  / Enter every trembling heart.  / Breathe, oh, breathe thy loving Spirit / Into every troubled breast!  / Let us all in thee inherit; / Let us find that second rest: / Take away the bent to sinning, / Alpha and Omega be, / End of faith as its beginning, / Set our hearts at liberty.  / Come, almighty to deliver, /Let us all thy grace receive; / Suddenly return, and never, / Never more thy temples leave. / Thee we would be always blessing, / Serve thee as thy hosts above, / Pray and praise thee without ceasing, / Glory in thy perfect love.  / Finish then thy new creation, / Pure and spotless let us be; / Let us see thy great salvation / Perfectly restored in thee; / Changed from glory into glory, / Till in heaven we take our place, / ‘ Till we cast dour crowns before thee, / Lost in wonder, love, and praise’” (#5226).  

Intent on loving God, we must seek to reflect Him rather than reflect on ourselves and should, with St Paul, seek to “know Christ” rather than worry excessively about personal purity.  (A self-centered religion is the worst manifestation of sinful self-centeredness! )  Above all we must discover that at the heart of the Trinity there is a loving fellowship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The “One in whom we live, and move, and have our being” is most deeply Love.  To say God is Holy is to say He is Love.  

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In light of these recent presentations this is clear:  if H. Orton Wiley and his followers were right, the Church of the Nazarene has abandoned its historic position; if, on the other hand, today’s theologians (Oord, Lodahl, Noble) are right, Nazarenes were appreciably (and, everyone admits, sincerely) misled for half-a-century.  Then, perhaps, neither Wesley nor any of them are right—as Catholics and Calvinists and Pentecostals et al. insist!  Better minds than mine must sort out the answer! 

          In Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, William Voegeli sets forth a somber history  (the 100 years war between successful liberals and retreating conservatives) with an acute analysis of the creeping Leviathan that’s relentlessly assuming ever-more control of all aspects of American life. The book’s title reflects a 1964 Nation editorial which declared, as Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society unfolded promising to complete the New Deal, that whatever it proposed was “not enough” (#556). LBJ himself insisted, in 1964: ‘”We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few'” (#570). Whatever anyone wants Uncle Sam will provide! Underlying this attitude, as Steven F. Hayward writes in his perceptive Foreword is this: “Liberalism’s irrepressible drive for an ever larger welfare state without limit arises from at least two premises upon which the left no longer reflects: the elevation of compassion to a political principle (albeit with other people’s money), and the erosion of meaningful constitutional limits on government on account of the imperatives of the idea of Progress” (Kindle #147).

         Without doubt Progressives have successively enrolled a large majority of Americans in various programs, distributing benefits (from Social Security and Medicare to Food Stamps and college loans) that insure the popularity (even among conservatives) of the Welfare State. “The defining victory of the New Deal,” Voegli thinks, “was not the individual programs it created, but the evisceration of the principle that government, especially the federal government, had no rightful business undertaking a whole range of social improvements, no matter how gratifying the beneficiaries might find them. Once this ‘legitimacy barrier’ was demolished, liberals could frame the politics of the welfare state as a contest between the compassionate party that wants the government to give things to people and do things for them, and the mean-spirited party that wants to deprive people of all those indispensable and beneficial things” (#601).

          So long as “someone else” will pay for all these beneficial things, the “compassionate party” maintains its lock on a large percentage of the electorate. “As the British jurish A.V. Dicey wrote in 1914, ‘The beneficial effect of State intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, whilst its evil effects are gradual and indirect, and lie out of sight. . . . Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention'” (#3482). Thus Voegeli, though himself a committed conservative, has some somber advice for his compatriots: accept what is and compromise! Forget about abolishing the Welfare State! Republicans as well as Democrats have generally funded and enjoyed its popularity. Ronald Reagan merely tried to “curb” its growth and abjectly failed. His “‘triumph’ was to yield ground more slowly than any other political leader in the battle that conservatives consider their central mission” (#3360). The only workable strategy for those who fear its ultimate destructiveness is to point out its unworkability and support leaders such as Congressman Paul Ryan to carefully correct its abuses and prune away some of its worst excesses.

“Conservatives, in other words, need to take the position that America is going to have a welfare state, should have a welfare state, and it’s not part of the conservative project to bring about the disappearance of the welfare state, even in the distant future. The question is whether we are going to have a welfare state that uses its finite resources intelligently, concentrating on helping the people who need it most, or one that distributes benefits in an undisciplined and nearly random fashion” (#681).

         Having announced his intent in writing the book, Voegeli describes the welfare state. Trying to get a handle on all of the assorted governmental programs (federal, state, and local) truly numbs the mind and tries the soul! Even with official numbers in hand (or in computer) it’s equally hard to rightly interpret them! Limiting himself to federal programs, Voegeli calculates America’s welfare state “was 472 times as big in 2007 as in 1940” (#813). We’re spending 15 times as much on “human resources” (e.g. Social Security, Medicare, Education) programs than we did 60 years ago. Since recipients want “other people” to pay for it, the easiest solution, naturally, is to both inflate the currency and shift the ultimate accounting to coming generations through deficit spending. Progressives talk much about “giving things to people, while  limiting the discussion about the corresponding enterprise of taking things away” (#2413).

          Undergirding all this spending is a philosophical “rationale” carefully crafted by generations of  progressives. Without the historical developments clearing the way for Europe’s socialistic welfare states,  Americans needed to be coaxed into accepting certain economic ideas that were foreign to their limited government, free enterprise traditions. So American Progressives (notably Woodrow Wilson) determined to fundamentally transform things. Rather than taking the Founders’ views of the Constitution—inscribed in memorable documents such as The Federalist Papers—Wilson worked to adapt it to the modern, technological world. Rather than ground government in human nature, he turned to the ever-evolving history of the state, reflecting the influence of 19th century thinkers such as Hegel, Comte and Darwin.

Thus Wilson repudiated the Declaration of Independence’s “self-evident” declaration that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and declared them state-dispensed. Following President Wilson’s example. Franklin Delano Roosevelt adeptly advanced the Progressive agenda. In a 1932 speech, setting forth the “manifesto” of his New Deal, he celebrated notions of historical progress, justice and equality quite detached from any mooring in the essential human nature assumed by the nation’s Founders. What were once considered “natural rights” (life, liberty, property) by the likes of Thomas Jefferson were now to be re-defined “in terms of a changing and growing social order” (#1455). A “Second Bill of Rights” were now needed and FDR spelled them out—the government should assure everyone “a useful and remunerative job,” a living wage, a “decent home,” good medical care, protection from “the economic fears of old age and sickness and accident and unemployment, and “a good education.” FDR’s expanssive list of “rights” was, of course easily lengthened as increasing numbers of individuals and groups invented them.

         Under FDR’s orchestration, the Chief Executive assumed powers formerly reserved to the

Congress. He transformed the Supreme Court through intimidation and judicious appointments. Thus

began. New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg says, ‘”a revolution in jurisprudence that ended,

apparently forever, the reign of laissez-faire and legitimated the arrival of the Leviathan State'” (#1600). A

“living constitution,” yearly attuned to current conditions by the Court, replaced the one written by

Madison et al. in 1787. In practice, this meant approving virtually all expansions of federal powers.

Anything goes! “‘You’ve got a problem? We’ve got a program'” (2550). Indeed: “The New Deal

changed America’s Constitution from one where the powers of government were enumerated into one

where they were innumerable” (#1772). Yet this progressive triumph poses a very real problem: no one

really knows where we are going or how to scrupulously evaluate our success. Thus the “change” touted

by Barack Obama proves difficult to either define or measure! Just as infinity is immeasurable so too

limitless “rights” cannot be constrained! Consider, for example, the continuously evolving notion of “civil

rights.” The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which strictly required everyone be treated equally, quickly sprouted

into dicta mandating that some folks (through affirmative action) be given special treatment! So an

intensely color-conscious rather than color-blind society quickly emerged.

         Complicating the lack of coherent direction, the Progressive project has manifestly failed to fund

itself. Liberals have sought to evade the inescapable truth that everything must, in some way in due time,

be paid for, indulging in “a protracted exercise in intellectual dishonesty, borne of a conviction that the

question doesn’t need to be answered if it can be made to go away” (#2690). “Don’t worry,” we’re told,

“be happy!” Somehow things will all work out if we trust the social engineers in various branches of

government. Voegeli carefully examines the recipes (e.g. John Maynard Keynes’ economic theories and

John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society) for perpetuating the welfare state and painlessly easing

America into a European-style socialism. Yet, as Milton Friedman, among others have insisted, “There is

no such thing as a free lunch.” But just try suggesting this to Barack Obama while he was delivering his

last State of the Union Address!

         Progressives from Roosevelt to Obama inevitably promise to pay for the promised goods, easing

entrance to the Promised Land, by taxing the “rich.” (Exactly what makes one rich is yet another of those

undefined and flexible standards that makes any clear evaluation of Progressive rhetoric so frustrating!).

What Obama fails to mention, however, is the utter impossibility of taking sufficient funds from the “rich”

to pay for programs, which “cannot be realized merely by making the rich less rich. Enacting any

significant portion of the liberal agenda will also require making the merely comfortable noticeably less

comfortable—and liberals are terrified that imposing tax increases on upper middle-class voters will doom

them when those voters go to the polls” (#2999). Lots of folks who never dreamed they were “rich” would

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 suddenly awaken to the fact that the State officially defines them as such! To keep such voters happily

 supporting the Welfare State requires they be given much and taxed very little.

          Yet another Progressive strategy is to call for taxing “corporations” rather than individuals.

 However, as Voegeli says: “The distinction between taxes paid by corporations and taxes paid by flesh-

 and-blood voters falls apart when analyzed” (#3211). When taxed, corporations immediately pass along

 their loss to consumers who thus pay the taxes by way of higher prices—a sales tax, to be precise. If the

 corporation cuts its profits in order to maintain prices, then investors (many of them moderate-income folks

 saving for retirement) pay for the welfare programs. Liberals surely know that taxing corporations is

 nothing more than passing along the tax burden to the people who buy their products without admitting to

 actually “taxing” the electorate. They also know the average voter fails to fully grasp this simple truth.

          Despite the many problems evident when “never enough” sets the agenda, American conservatives

 have done little to effectively constrain the expanding Welfare State. So rather than trying to destroy or

 even significantly diminish it, conservatives should take a more modest and potentially useful approach.

 The voters, who now regard programs such as Social Security as their inalienable right, will not accept any

 curtailment of such entitlements. So let them be! Just try to find ways to make the entitlement programs

 more efficient, less abused, and financially sound. “Starving the beast” by making careful cuts in certain

 areas—locating duplicate or antiquated programs—will inject a bit of financial integrity to the system.

“Means-testing” some programs—requiring recipients be clearly worthy of their benefits—is another

technique capable of enlisting voters’ support. Wisely pursued, such modus operandi may even enlist the

 support of thoughtful liberals as well as voters. “If liberals and conservatives decide they can do business

with each other it will be because conservatives accept they’ll never sell voters on ther huge benefit

reductions they ultimately seek, and because liberals decide they’ll never sell the huge tax increases they

ultimately need” (#4230).

******************************************

         William Voegeli has followed up his examination of “America’s limitless welfare state” in Never

Enough with The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe against Liberal Compassion (New York:

HarperCollins, c. 2014). He has nothing but praise for the classic compassion found in Scripture or moral

philosophers of antiquity. To personally feel sorrow in the face of others’ pain is always commendable.

But today’s “liberal compassion” is a new phenomenon. Anyone attentive to public life has easily noted

the increasing attention given various kinds of victims and the “compassion” urged with regard to them.

Bill Clinton’s famous words, “I feel your pain” have become a formidable plank in various political

platforms, and exit polls indicate Barack Obama won the 2012 election primarily because a majority of

voters (who thought Romney would do better in many ways as Chief Executive) thought Obama better

understood and identified with them. “Romney won clear victories among the three-fourths of the

electorate who believed a presidential candidate’s most important quality was whether his ‘vision for the

future’ (54 percent to President Obama’s 45 percent), whether he ‘shares my values’ (56 percent to 42

percent), or was ‘a strong leader’ (61 percent to 38 percent). Obama carried the one remaining category so

decisively, however, as to win reelection. Of the 21 out of every 100 voters who believed the most

important quality in a presidential candidate was that ‘he cares a bout people like me,’ 17 voted for Obama

and 4 voted for Romney” (#2321).

         Obama routinely reduces his political principles and objectives to kindness. Thus he appointed

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor not because she was a distinguished jurist but because she could

empathize with people. Such empathy, said George Lakoffin defense of her nomination, ‘”is at the heart of

progressive thought. It is the capacity to put oneself in the shoes of others—not just individuals, but whole

categories of people: one’s countrymen, those of other countries, other living beings, especially those who

are in some way oppressed, threatened, or harmed” (#368). Liberal politicians’ claims—e.g. Al Gore

sorrowing at his sister dying of tobacco-induced cancer and Obama lamenting his dying mother’s problems

with health care insurance—are frequently fudged (if not fabricated) to elicit maximum audience response.

But such rhetorical indulgences guarantee votes, and the Democrat Party has, Voegeli insists, effectively

turned into the Pity Party! Thus we’re witnessing “the Oprahfication of America, evident in the way

political conventions now aspire to be empathy-tests that can hold their own with daytime talk shows”

(#2195). Sadly enough, “A nation increasingly dependent on heartrending anecdotes to focus and activate

its sense of justice is one that’s losing the capacity for moral and abstract reasoning” (#2220).

         In a 2013 speech President Obama endorsed film critic Roger Ebert’s words (“Kindness covers all

of my political beliefs”) and declared “when I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every

single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a

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 stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not

 enough—I want your kids to do well also'” (#146). Unfortunately, as C.S. Lewis presciently said, a tender

 kindness that wants others to be “happy” often lacks specificity. ‘”Kindness, merely as such,” wrote

Lewis, “cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. …. It

 is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our

 lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible

 and estranging modes'” (#1374).

          Since “compassion” is so widely touted as the core value for Progressives—Garrison Keiller

defines his brand of liberalism as “the politics of kindness”—Voegeli insists we rightly define and

understand the word. “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘compassion’ means, literally,

 ‘suffering together with another,’ and is also defined, more substantively, as the ‘feeling or emotion, when

a person is moved by the suffering or distress of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines

one to spare or to succor.’ The OED notes a subtle but significant distinction between those two senses of

the term: the first is an emotion shared by ‘equals or fellow-sufferers,’ while the second ‘is shown toward a

person in distress by one who is free from it, who, is, in this respect, his superior'” (#275).

         Thus fee ling compassion marks one as a good person. To support politicians and policies stamped

compassionate enables one join the righteous crowd. “The term ‘compassion’—or ’empathy,’ or even

 ‘kindness’—is routinely used not just to name a moral virtue, but to designate the pinnacle or even the

entirety of moral excellence. Precisely because this moral conviction is ambient, with so many Americans

taking for granted that moral growth requires little else than feeling, acting, and being more compassionate,

it’s an important yet difficult subject to analyze. Compassion is the moral sea we swim in, which works

against our awareness of it, much less efforts to chart its depths and currents” (#136). Importantly, it’s

feeling something rather than doing anything! To “feel your pain” (as tearfully as possible) was sufficient

for President Clinton! Compassion is all about one’s own feelings, not about doing something to help

someone—that would require personally doing acts of mercy or charity. Wealthy liberals love to support

taxes on others to help the poor while evading such taxes themselves through various loopholes.

         This kind of compassion began with the birth of “modernity” in the 18th century. Feeling good

about our good feelings gained credence in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in many ways the

architect of the French Revolution and many subsequent socio-political movements. When he identified

with someone else, he said, ‘”and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not

want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself” (#611). Loving ourselves, we feel better

about ourselves when we feel empathetic or compassionate for others. If we give something to someone in

need, it’s not to actually help him but to inflate our own self-esteem! In the wake of Rousseau, says

historian Michael Kazin, “liberal modernism” has boosted self-expression and self-discovery and self-

esteem rather than self-sacrifice and self-denial: it prescribes ‘”the unchaining of sexual pleasure from

procreation, the liberation of art and literature from the didactic imperative, empathy with ethnic and racial

outsiders and an identification with the rougher aspects of life'” (#707).

         Voegeli charts this form of compassion as applied to such concerns as humanitarian aid, “higher

patriotism,” immigration, poverty programs, race relations etc. Inevitably it promises more than it delivers,

if one judges the actual assistance given needy people. Since they “always want America to be more

compassionate than it is,” (#1532) the needy must be perpetually needy. “Empathizers who get to feel like

good people because of their empathy, however, may prefer to regard empathizees’ sufferings as chronic

conditions to be managed rather than transitory ones to be solved. ‘Pity is about how deeply I can feel,’

[Jean Bethke] Elshtain argued. ‘And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious

reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs'” (#1871). This is especially true today when the

plight of America’s blacks is considered. However much “progress” may have occurred, white liberals feel

guilt for the problems plaguing the black community. Highly privileged themselves, they talk about

abolishing privilege! Since slavery is “America’s original sin,” all symptoms of its survival must be cut out

from the human heart as well as various institutions.

         So it seems, to Susan Sontag, that the great achievements of Western Civilization—Mozart’s

music, Newton’s science—cannot “‘redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.'”

Inasmuch as Westerners had abused non-Western cultures and the environment itself, the “white race is the

cancer of human history'” (#1814). Cancer patients, of course, can do little to save themselves! Seriously

sick people can do little on their own to improve their lot. Appeals to self-reliance or self-sacrifice are

branded hard-hearted and lacking compassion. Victims can neither be blamed for their status nor expected

to escape it. But in feeling pity for them the Susan Sontags of the world feel pleased with themselves!

Eric Metaxis has garnered well-deserved acclaim and awards for prize-winning biographies of William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  He has also emerged as an influential figure within a flourishing Christian community in New York City.  His most recent publication, Miracles:  What They Are, Why They Happen, And How They Can Change Your Life (New York:  Dutton, c. 2014), bears witness to both his roots in historic orthodoxy and contemporary Christian witness.  Thus he sets forth, in the book’s initial chapters, a philosophical case for the credibility of supernatural workings, followed by a much longer section detailing the stories of persons he knows and trusts who have experienced various kinds of miraculous events.  “To those who might think these stories merely subjective accounts and not objective evidence, it must be said that history comprises the subjective accounts of human beings:  and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an ‘objective’ truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective.  There can never be a question whether such things are subjective; the only real question can be whether those subjective accounts are reliable” (#98 in Kindle).  

Metaxis’ philosophical case for miracles relies heavily on arguments set forth by great 20^th century apologists (e.g. G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and C.S. Lewis’ Miracles) as well as recent scholarly works such as Craig S. Keener’s recent 1200 page Miracles.  To believe in miracles first and foremost entails believing in God.  If one believes that God created, ex nihilo, all that exists, it hardly seems irrational to believe He could do miraculous things within His creation, including the many biblical interventions and (above all) the Resurrection of Christ.  In a remarkable conversation a century ago between Adolph von Harnack, the incarnation of Protestant Liberalism, and Adolf Schlatter, his orthodox counterpart on the Berlin theological faculty, Harnack said the two were basically in agreement except for one small matter:  miracles.  To which Schlatter replied:  “No we are divided on the question of God, for what is at stake in the question of miracles is in fact whether God is God or merely a part of the realm of subjectivity.”  

As Augustine wisely said:  “Miracles are not in contradiction to nature.  They are only in contradiction with what we know of nature.”  And no one has put the case for the miraculous than Chesterton, who said:  “my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America.”  Taking witnesses at their word is basic to historical inquiry and the judicial process.  Ironically, “believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder.  The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord.  Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.  Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost.  If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural.  If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story.  That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle.  You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist.  It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.  But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred.  All argument against these plain facts,” Chesterton continues, “is always argument in a circle. If I say, ‘Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,’ they answer, ‘But mediaevals were superstitious’; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.  If I say ‘a peasant saw a ghost,’ I am told, ‘But peasants are so credulous.’  If I ask, ‘Why credulous?’ the only answer is—that they see ghosts.  Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.”  Circular arguments, naturally, go nowhere!  

“The Greek word for miracle,” Metaxis says, “is ‘simaios,’ which means ‘sign.’  Miracles are signs, and like all signs, they are never about themselves; they’re about whatever they are pointing toward.  Miracles point to something beyond themselves.  But to what?  To God himself.  That’s the point of miracles—to point us beyond our world to another world” (#289).   Rightly understood, the natural sciences can do no more than carefully describe the physical world.  To explain it easily leads us to infer miraculous events—the improbable appearance of life on earth, the existence of our finely-tuned universe, why there is something rather than nothing.  “Reason and science compel us to see what previous generations could not:  that our existence is an outrageous and astonishing miracle, one so startlingly and perhaps so disturbingly miraculous that it makes any miracle like the parting o the Red Sea pale in such insignificance that it almost becomes unworthy of our consideration, as though it were something done easily by a small child, half-asleep.  It is something to which the most truly human response is some combination of terror and wonder, of ancient awe and childhood joy” (#853). 

Turning to the contemporary “miracle stories” narrated by individuals Metaxis knows and trusts, we’re first reminded of transforming prototypes—some (such as St. Paul’s and Chuck Colson’s) instantaneous and others gradual (e.g. William Wilberforce’s and C.S. Lewis’s).  Metaxis himself bears witness to God’s intervention in his life, through an inexplicable dream involving a golden fish (IXTHYS), changing literally everything for him.  In his student days at Yale he’d hungered from something to give life meaning, but God mercifully “had something more for me:  He gave me his son, a living person, Jesus Christ.  I realized in the dream that Jesus Christ was real and had come from the other side to me—to me—and now I was holding him there in the bright sunlight and I was flooded with joy at the thought of it.  At long last my search was over.  It was over.  And it was true.  There was a God and Jesus was God and he’d shown that to me in a way that only I could understand, in a way that utterly blew my mind.  God knew me infinitely better than I knew myself, had taken the trouble to speak to me in the most intimate language there was:  the secret language of my own heart.  That was that” (#2149).  Later on, another powerful dream led him rather specifically to write his book on Bonhoeffer.  Adding to his own story, he shares those of Frederica Mathewes-Green, a talented writer, as well as “Cisco,” a former drug dealer who now gives witness to the powerful change wrought in his life by his Lord and Savior, and Alice von Hildebrand, the widow of Dietrich von Hildebrand who is herself a distinguished philosopher professor.  

Healing miracles abound throughout the history of the Church—and they continue today in New York City!  Indeed, writes Metaxis:  “They are more common than I ever thought” (#2371).  Cisco, the former drug dealer, prayed that an acquaintance be healed of AIDS—and he was!  One of Metaxis’ good friends, Christine, personally witnessed the dramatic healing of her grandfather, who had been unable to stand or walk for six months.  One of Christine’s aunts felt moved to pray for him and “put her hands on the grandfather’s legs and prayed a very powerful prayer that he be healed.  A moment after she had finished, the grandfather stood up and immediately started walking.  They were all stunned to witness it.  Christine said that even now, so many years after it happened, remembering it makes her very emotional.  She remembers thinking that she couldn’t believe it was possible for a miracle to happen right in front of her eyes, that in just a moment’s time God could wipe away so many months of misery and pain” (#2660).  

“Miracles of Inner Healing” also occur with regularity.  Paralyzing guilt disappears, dissolved by God’s forgiving power.  Broken marriages are re-knit, massaged by the Spirit’s reconciling energy.  “Angelic Miracles” recounted by several of the author’s informants point toward the continuous workings of divine messengers involved in earthly affairs.  Small events—such as finding keys or the inspiration to make phone calls or speaking words that touch the heart of a judge on behalf of an innocent cab driver, and near-death experiences—may all rightly be considered miraculous, Metaxis says, given God’s intimate interest and involvement in every facet of our lives.  

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Last summer, Dr. Rolf Enger, an Air Force Academy colleague of Dieter Rademacher (the pastor of the community church we attend in Lake George, Colorado) gave a fascinating presentation on the Shroud of Turin.  He had been involved, 30 years ago, with a 40-man scientific research team (the Shroud of Turin Research Project) granted access to the Shroud to carefully weigh all the evidence regarding its authenticity.   Members of the team were experts in various fields, representing diverse scientific disciplines, seeking the truth rather than to either debunk or demonstrate the Shroud’s authenticity.  The team were all volunteers and had no obligatory ties to the Catholic Church.  When I asked Dr. Enger to recommend a book detailing the investigation he pulled out a copy of Verdict on the Shroud (Wayne, PA:  Banbury Books, Inc., c. 1981) by Kenneth E. Stevenson (a scientist) and Gary R. Habermas (an historian).  I secured a copy of the book and find it quite well-done and persuasive.  In light of all the evidence, “the more we learn about the Shroud, the more likely it seems that the cloth is what it purports to be—the burial garment of Jesus Christ” (p. 5).  The image on the Shroud is of a bearded male, 5’11” in height, weighing around 175 pounds, well-built and muscular.  His “wounds in their entirety exactly match the wounds Christ received as recorded in the gospels” (p. 43).  

A chapter entitled “The Shroud and History,” provides details regarding the cloth’s 14^th century appearance in France with clues regarding its earlier history.  The image on the shroud resembles the face of Christ portrayed by Christian artists from the sixth century onward.  It is, in fact, “the standard face of Jesus in art” (p. 17).  Documents from the sixth century point toward the “image of Edessa, the ‘Holy Mandylion,’”—a cloth thought by some to have been brought from Jerusalem to Edessa by Jesus’ disciple, Jude Thadddeus, in the first century and then found in one of the walls surrounding Edessa.  This cloth was taken to Constantinople in 944, where it was “revered as the true likeness of Christ” (p. 20).  Following the 1204 sack of Constantinople by European crusaders, the cloth disappeared.  How it arrived in France a century later no one knows, though some think the Knights Templar played a role in preserving it.  When it was presented to the public in 1357 it was believed by some to be authentic and by others to be a “pious fraud.”  There seemed to be no way of resolving the controversy until quite recently, when new technologies facilitate a critical appraisal of the Shroud.  

Modern interest in the Shroud began in 1898, when an Italian lawyer, Secondo Pia, took pictures of it when it was publicly displayed.  Developing his pictures in a dark room, Pia was astonished to see the form of a man clearly evident in the negatives.  One can barely detect the form of a man when looking at the Shroud itself.  But the negatives truly brought to light a remarkable figure!  Obviously “the Shroud was not an obvious forgery.  Why would a fourteenth-century forger have painted a negative image?” (p. 71).  Subsequent, more sophisticated photographs detected no traces of pigment on it, indicating it was not a painting.  After more than a century of ever-improving scientific techniques, the authors “conclude that the scientists’ work made a forgery virtually impossible” (p. 122).  Interestingly, there is today more serious interest in the Shroud than in earlier centuries, and our more sophisticated the testing methodologies  increase the likelihood that it was the cloth covering Jesus’ body in the tomb.  

Clearly, there is blood rather than paint on the cloth.  And the image actually seems to have been generated by a “scorch”—a mysterious emanation of heat, almost like radiation!  The cloth itself is similar to others dating from first century Palestine, and some of the tiny plant pollens and spores found on it (discovered by microscopic analysis) are unique to that era and region.  Other tests reveal “that the Shroud image contains three-dimensional data” that can only be explained by it being placed on a recently-deceased body.  “The three-dimensional picture of the head of the man in the Shroud also revealed another surprise:  small button-like objects had apparently been placed over his eyes” (p. 82).  Coins were frequently placed on corpses in Jesus’ day, and a knowledgeable numismaticist concluded “that the coin over the right eye of the man in the Shroud was a lepton minted in the time of Pontius Pilate” (p. 82).  

Whether or not the image on the Shroud is that of Jesus can never be proven.  But the wounds on the man certainly match up with the Gospel accounts of His crucifixion.  He had been scourged, suffering some 220 wounds, with the Roman flagrum, the device used by Roman soldiers in the first century.  His head had been lacerated by a crown of thorns.  Bruises on his shoulder indicate he carried a heavy object.  He was nailed to the Cross with nails through is wrists, not his palms—something we now know was the Roman custom, though not known in the Medieval Era.  His legs were not broken, indicating he died on the Cross.  A wound on his side indicates he suffered a spear thrust as he expired.  “The evidence is consistent at every point.  The man of the Shroud suffered, died, and was buried the way the gospels say Jesus was” (p. 162).  A mathematician, collating all the data, estimated the probability that “we have 1 chance in 82,944,000 that the man buried in the Shroud is not Jesus” (p. 167).  A rather strong probability!  

So what does it mean for us in the 21^st Century?  It primarily means the Gospels can be trusted, down to their rather specific details.  The Shroud also strongly supports the Christian belief in Jesus’ Resurrection—the “scorch” on the cloth may have been caused by a burst of supernatural energy as He arose from the dead.  And finally, the Shroud reminds us that philosophical naturalism—including its dogmatic denial of miracles—cannot explain a multitude of things, including the Shroud of Turin.  

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Paul Badde is a diligent German journalist, a devout Catholic who has devoted many years to demonstrating the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin and other sacred artifacts.  In the amply, indeed lavishly illustrated The True Icon:  From the Shroud of Turin to the Veil of Manopello (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2010), he provides summaries of the latest research that give reasons to believe in the supernatural origin of the both cloths, both well are preserved in Italian churches.  “The shroud [of Turin] has long been the most thoroughly investigated piece of fabric in the world.  And after all that, the origin of the image that rests on its fibers remains utterly inexplicable” (Kindle #140).  

Badde revisits the history of the Shroud, including its probable journey from Jerusalem to Edessa to Constantinople and ultimately to France in the 14^th century.  Having studied the documents and visited the sites, he asserts:  “Everywhere it was as if we were following the trail of a protective hand that again and again mysteriously rescued this cloth from a great number of dangers” (#647).  And he sums up the most recent scientific studies regarding its composition.  Beyond the Shroud, however, the Veil (the small sudarium or napkin thought to have been placed on Jesus’ face) of Manopello has been little noticed or acclaimed—something Badde is determined to rectify.  “To this day the little burial cloth complements the large burial cloth and makes it accessible.  Together they fit into the Gospel of John [cf. Jn 20:7] like the last pieces of the puzzle” (#1143).  

Granted their authenticity, the Shroud and Veil are the earliest witnesses to the Gospel of Christ.  Written documents were composed two decades later.  But the Shroud, “with the traces of the Passion is the first page of the Gospels.  The delicate little napkin, which was revered for so long in Rome as ‘the veil of Veronica of Jerusalem’, is the second.  Both originate at the zero hour of Christianity.  Thus two images—and not any new scrolls—form the hot core of the Good News of Christendom.  The images were there when words failed—and the apostles were still speechless” (#1373).  To Badde, in “these two cloths the mystery of the Christian faith is presented as in no other document.  They marvelously fill up the brief text of the Gospel” (#1436).

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In The Face of God:  The Rediscovery of the True Face of Jesus (San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, c. 2006), Paul Badde sets forth a deeply personal quest, involving scores of journeys and interviews, to validate the Volto Sancto (the “Holy Veil,” thought by many to be the legendary Veronica’s Veil) of Manoppello as the very cloth placed on Jesus’ face when He was buried.  Badde traces the Veil’s journey across the centuries until it was publically displayed in Rome half a millennium ago.  He also studies a multitude of ancient and medieval artistic works, mostly in churches, depicting Jesus in accord with the face on the Veil.  Though far less renowned than the Shroud of Turin, it portrays the exact same image.  Indeed, Heinrich Pfeiffer, a learned Jesuit professor and highly regarded specialist, says there is a “‘complete correspondence that results when you place the Face from the Shroud of Turin on top of that of Manoppello.’”  Thus we are driven to conclude “that the image on the sudarium and that on the Shroud originated at the same time’” (#1299).  If indeed the two images are authentic, they dramatically reveal to us the deepest truth of the Christian faith, for as Cardinal Ratzinger declared:  “‘God,’ of whom there can be no images, nevertheless has a face and a name and is a person.  And salvation consists, not in being immersed in namelessness, but rather in the ‘satisfaction in seeing his face’ that will be granted to us when we awaken’” (#182).  

Similar to the linen Shroud, the Veil preserves the face of a man, but on an almost transparent, iridescent fabric—byssus, the most expensive of ancient fabrics, which was woven with painstaking care from mussels’ fibers.  With modern microscopic technology, we find no traces of pigment, so it is not a painting.  Still more, it is simply impossible to apply paint to mussel silk.  The image must be the result of some other process.  To Professor Heinrich Pfeiffer, who meticulously examined it in the 1990s, the veil had probably “been laid on top of the large sheet in which the crucified Christ had been laid.  That would also explain, he said, why the Turin Shroud bore a negative image, and the veil laid on top of it, in accordance with the rules of photography, a positive one” (#1227). 

In Badde’s passionate perspective, the images on the Veil and the Shroud were inscribed by Christ’s face, supernaturally revealing God Himself.  “The Veil of Manopello is the sudarium of Christ.  This is the mysterious second cloth from the tomb of the crucified Christ that John the Evangelist discovered about forty hours after the death of Jesus in his empty tomb—together with another linen sheet, which is today preserved in Turin” (#3711).  Both cloths are incredible inasmuch as no naturalistic explanations suffice, and together they “reflect nothing less than the miracle of the absolutely inexplicable Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  They are not photos or painting; they are themselves marvelous new creations by God.  The two images are as inexplicable as life itself” (#3723).  

Diana West is a Yale-educated journalist, writing a weekly syndicated column with a decidedly conservative slant.  Determined to understand and explain certain features of modernity, she ties together interesting threads of evidence and teases out possible conduits of elucidation that prod the reader to ponder her presentations rather than thoughtlessly embrace her perspectives.  Four decades ago Eric Hoffer, in Reflections on the Human Condition, warned: “If a society is to preserve its stability and a degree of continuity, it must know how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, attitudes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.” Now Diana West declares the adolescents have done precisely that.  In her first book, The Death of the Grown-Up:  How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization (c. 2007) she took a critical look at the effective defection of adults in various crucial societal roles.  Whereas many writers have lamented the “prolonged adolescence” plaguing the Western world, West suggests it has become institutionalized!

  She began awakening to this fact when still a child, after spending a year with her family in Ireland (far away from her Los Angeles home) while her father worked on a novel.  Returning to America, she was struck by the strangeness of many things she’d earlier taken for granted.  This included the childish behavior of adults.  She began to see that:  “Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist, and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth’s promise.  No more.  Why not?  A profound civilizational shift has taken place, but, shockingly, it is one that few recognize” (#79 in Kindle).   Teenagers no longer aspired to become adults and adults longed to behave like adolescents.  So “father and son dress more or less alike, from message-emblazoned T-shirts to chunky athletic shoes, both equally at ease in the baggy rumple of eternal summer camp” (#124).  Clergymen, once determined to appear as serious adults, now try to dress more casually than day laborers.  In fact, “More adults, ages eighteen to forty-nine, watch the Cartoon Network than watch CNN.  Readers as old as twenty-five are buying ‘young adult’ fiction written expressly for teens” (#97).  

If only such similarities were merely superficial!  But abetted by Hollywood films and rock-and-roll music and pop journalism and progressive education, adults (and particularly fathers) have abandoned their traditional roles.  Whereas children were once duty-bound to care for their parents, now parents are obligated to make life enjoyable for their offspring; children once circled around their parents, but today’s adults orbit like helicopters around their kids.  Before WWII, homes were adult-centered; following the war they became increasingly child-centered.  The signal adult endeavor in centuries past was what Lionel Trilling termed “making a life,” seriously pursued by all mature persons.  Now we are more likely to be concerned with “enjoying life,” playing with our “toys,” and we no longer revere “what goes along with maturity:  forbearance and honor, patience and responsibility, perspective and wisdom, sobriety, decorum, and manners—the wisdom to know what is ‘appropriate,’ and when” (#173).  Consequently, as Mike Males says:  “‘The deterioration in middle-aged adult behavior has driven virtually every major American social problem over the past 25 years’” (#665).  

Beyond describing—with a journalistic flair for telling anecdotes and exaggerations and provocative examples—the various symptoms of societal decay, West seeks to explain what has happened, why America has changed so dramatically in half-a-century.  She concludes, in accord with (though never citing) some of the past century’s finest thinkers (notably C.S. Lewis and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI), that moral relativism is the culprit.  Once we began talking about “values” rather than “virtues” we tossed aside the moral objectivity needed for a healthy society.  We thus inhabit a moral universe that “no longer sees any point in inculcating ‘good’ or ‘moral’ behavior in its young.  Rather, it labors to encourage ‘better choices.’  Instead of virtues to live by, society provides ‘news you can use’ about hygiene, about cliques, about tattoos, about sex, about STDs, about alcohol, about drunk driving, about rape, about gang rape, about date rape, about date-rape drugs, about other drugs . . . the list of vices to bone up on is endless” (#1729).   Never is it suggested that casual sex is bad—it’s just something to be properly informed about in order to make personal (i.e. “safe”) choices.  Above all one must never be “judgmental” or “prudish” or “xenophobic” about much of anything lest it “offend” someone.  “Openness and acceptance on every and any level—from personal to national, from sexual to religious—are the highest possible virtues of the postmodern Westerner.  This makes boundaries and taboos, limits and definition—anything that closes the door on anything else—the lowest possible sins” (#3140).  

This is dramatically evident in today’s multicultural climate, wherein nothing critical of Islam is allowed.  Our claims to avoid offense out of respect are more likely the silence of fear.  As President George W. Bush quickly discovered, no reference to a “crusade” will pass the scrutiny of political correctness.   No one dare suggest that Muslims shouting Allahu Akbar—“Praise Allah”—are following Islamic teachings.  None dare insist that Jihad, in Islamic tradition, always means violent aggression, defeating and subduing non-Muslim peoples.   “Terrorists” there may be, we’re told—but they are incidental extremists, a title easily applied to Christians or Jews as well as Muslims.  All religions are equal and thus equally capable of disreputable behavior.  Submitting to this kind of thinking, many Westerners have unwittingly submitted to the dhimmitude described by Bat Ye’or:  the guards around synagogues in Europe and the security lines in airports equally denote a people under siege, a culture capitulating “to the infringement of freedom” orchestrated by the advance wave of militant Islam.  

Unfortunately, “Our leaders and pundits, our generals and academics, pay repetitive and obsequious obeisance to ‘noble Islam’ (with never a bow, of course, to ‘noble’ anything else).  They depict jihad as a mutation of Islam—the ‘distorted,’ ‘hijacked,’ or ‘defiled’ practice by the ‘violent fringe’ or ‘tiny band of extremists’—despite jihad’s central, driving, animating role throughout the history of imperial Islam.  As for dhimmitude, it remains an alien concept, even as non-Muslims in the West are increasingly accommodating themselves to Islamic law and practices.  While the president of the United States appears no longer to consider Islam an out-and-out religion of ‘peace,’ he’s settled into an equally ahistorical formulation by delegitimizing jihad violence s ‘the perversion of a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death’” (#4997).   

How unlike from Barack Obama was Winston Churchill!  “Sharp and direct, Churchill says what he has seen, and what he thinks about what he has seen—sans gag, filter, rose-colored glasses, or net.”  Commenting on the Muslims he’d encountered, he wrote:  “‘How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays upon its votaries!  Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.  The effects are apparent in many countries.  Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the prophet rule or live.  A degraded sensualism deprives this live of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.  The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a power among men.  Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. . . .  But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.  No stronger retrograde force exists in the world’” #5027).  Churchill thought as an adult, facing the oft-harsh reality of things.  We need men like him today.  “Eternal youth is proving fatal; it is time to find our rebirth in adulthood” (#5083).

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Few books have sent me to check sources and order cited monographs more than Diana West’s American Betrayal:  The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (New York:  St Martin’s Press, c. 2013).  In part this is because she refers to fresh historical evidence regarding Soviet espionage in America, but mainly because she suggests—almost in a stream-of-consciousness style, studded with journalistic jibes and off-the-cuff comments—connections and plausible interpretations that challenged some of the notions I’d earlier absorbed from mainline historical works.  So I review American Betrayal with a real skepticism regarding West’s position conjoined with an admiration for her willingness to look for fresh explanations while trying to understand this nation’s development.  I also share her concern for what George Orwell discerned in 1936 (when writers dealing with the civil war in Spain lost interest in evidence and objective reporting):  “What is peculiar to our age,” said Orwell, “is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.”  Still more, he said:  “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines.”  

Unfortunately, some writers (such as Orwell) who have tried to present evidence and stand for truth have all too often been ignored or smeared by devotees of various “party lines.”  Ideology easily trumps truth!  Thus Whittaker Chambers declared, in his memorable memoir, Witness:  “The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else.  What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades . . .  [This] is a statement of fact that need startle no one who voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and consciously unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years.  It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power” (pp. 741-42).   Equally important, Chambers—and Diana West as well—probes beneath the details to a philosophical hypothesis, linking today’s “cultural relativism” to critical decisions made by this nation’s leaders during the past century.   

West’s story begins with the 1934 appearance of William A. Wirt, a famous Indiana schools superintendent, before a select House committee regarding an insidious plot to destroy “the American social order.”  There were, he’d earlier alleged, schemers (notably some of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Brain Trusters” such as Jerome Frank, who brought Alger Hiss to Washington, and Rexford Tugwell, who was positively infatuated by the “Soviet Experiment”) working inside some New Deal agencies.  So Wirt came to Washington to disclose what (based on first-hand information) he knew.  The Democrat-controlled committee, however, refused to grant Wirt a fair hearing, taking every opportunity to suppress his evidence and smear his character.  FDR and his devotees in the press ridiculed Wirt and he slid quickly into obscurity.  Six years later, however, one of the Democrats on the committee, John J. O’Connor (D-NY) admitted to helping quash Wirt’s testimony and was lamented having helped turn the “thumbscrews” on him.  In retrospect, O’Connor said he’d come to believe much Wirt had claimed was in fact true.  

That Wirt was right provides Diana West a guiding light whereby to understand how America was first betrayed by supporters of Stalin and his Communist ideology and more recently by defenders of Islam and its role in the world.  Dealing with both movements, American leaders seemed unable to deal honestly with evidence and make clear moral judgments regarding how this nation should respond.  She wrote this book, primarily, what “throughout eight years of George W. Bush and four years of Barack Obama, caused our leadership to deny and eliminate categorically the teachings of Islam from all official analysis of the global jihad that has wracked the world for decades (for centuries), and particularly since the 9/11 attacks in 2001?” (#273).   She actually finds many “parallels between America’s struggle with Communism and with Islam” (#395).  Indeed:  “As enemies of the West, godless Communism and godcentric Islam are strangely, eerily similar, in their collectivist, totalitarian natures, in their dysfunctional ideological reliance on the Eternal Foe for forward thrust, and, above all, in our blindness to all related and resulting implications of our struggle against them” (#513).  

When telling the story of Communist inroads West relies on significant historical studies done since Soviet archives opened to Western scholars in the 1990s, though her interpretations are sometimes more assertive than their carefully-nuanced works suggest.  She also emphasizes the importance of earlier truth-tellers such as the English historian Robert Conquest, the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the American journalist, Eugene Lyons.  Conquest’s delineation of Soviet brutality (ca. twenty million killed under Stalin) began with The Great Terror, a 1968 publication countering the generally pro-Stalinist position of academic historians.  Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich began his career of exposing the Soviet gulag archipelago.  And Lyons’ Red Decade told of Bolshevik inroads into America, while his Assignment in Utopia reveals his transformation from a “committed fellow traveler and dedicated apologist of the Soviet experiment to outspoken and remorseful anti-Communist” (#2253).  

It is now undeniable that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy and the Rosenbergs transmitted information regarding America’s nuclear research to the USSR.    There’s little doubt that Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers were witnesses to the truth in their post-WWII testimony before congressional committees.  But West finds much more regarding Soviet influence within the Roosevelt administration.  She takes seriously the words of a Russian researcher, Vladimir Bukovsky, who said:  “‘Because of the documents I recovered [in Soviet archives], we now understand why the West was so against putting the communist system on trial.  It is not only that the West was infiltrated by the Soviets much deeper than we ever thought, but also that there was ideological collaboration between left-wing parties in the West and Soviet Union.  This ideological collaboration ran very deep [emphasis added]’” (#1288).  

Consider one of the many instances West investigates, the “Soviet First” policy followed in FDR in his Lend-Lease program.  Initially adopted to help England in its “finest hour,” struggling to defend herself, it turned into a massive funnel moving American industrial goods to Russia, even when it meant denying supplies to American forces under Douglas MacArthur then embattled in the struggle with Japan in the Philippines.  According to Major George Racey Jordan, the officer in charge of distributing massive amounts of war materials from a base in Montana, the Soviets were given “first priority” and received  newly-minted airplanes sorely needed by the U.S. Army Air Force.  Implementing Lend-Lease (dubbed by Jordan “the greatest mail-order catalogue”) delivered “to the USSR those half a million trucks and jeeps that Khrushchev declared in 1970 were indispensable to the Red Army sweep across Eastern Europe, pulling the Iron Curtain down behind them” (#2614).  Among other items Jordan shipped to Stalin were the aluminum tubes and uranium needed to build a nuclear reactor.  Conventional historians think supplying Russia with war materials a wise move, necessary to defeat Hitler.  To West, however, it seems better understood as naively arming an evil tyrant, Stalin, who was above all determined to expand his power throughout Eastern Europe.  Drawing upon Jordan’s diaries, along with other sources, she suggests that Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most influential advisor and virtual “co-president” was primarily responsible for dispatching so much aid (via Lend Lease) to the USSR.  Indeed, Jordan said, “Harry Hopkins’s name was invoked daily by the Russians” (#3317) seeking to secure additional Lend Lease supplies.  

Right at the center of the controversial hypotheses highlighted by West in American Betrayal stands Harry Hopkins, labeled FDR’s “one man cabinet” by Life magazine in 1941.  For several years Hopkins, the one-time social worker elevated to cabinet positions by FDR, lived in the White House and constantly advised the President.  He, or his trusted assistants, accompanied FDR to all the important wartime conferences, and his views were clearly shared by the nation’s chief executive.  At the 1943 Tehran Conference, for example, Charles Bohlen remembered, Hopkins played a central role.  “‘Roosevelt was relying more and more on Hopkins, virtually to the exclusion of others.  At Tehran, Hopkins’ influence was paramount’” (#6636).  Illustrative of his eminence, when Hopkins entered a room, Averell Harriman says, Stalin “‘got up, walked across the room and shook hands with him.  I never saw him do that to anybody, not even Roosevelt.  He was the only man I ever saw Stalin show personal emotion for’” (#6336).  The men he fostered and supported form a “Who’s Who of the Roosevelt years:  Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, White House Chief of Staff Adm. William D. Leahy, Vice President Henry A. Wallace” (#3178).  FDR’s final Secretary of State, Edward J. Stettinius, who represented the U.S. at Yalta, was a loyal Hopkins’ protégé who had earlier worked within the Lend Lease organization.  

Though West stops short of definitively branding Hopkins a Soviet agent, she certainly provides incriminating evidence leading to that conclusion.  For example, she cites Oleg Gordievsky, “a former KGB colonel and KGB London chief who later served as an undercover British secret agent in Moscow (1974-85);” in 1990 he “reported that as a young KGB agent in the 1960s, he had heard Iskhak Akhmerov, the most spectacular of the secret Soviet spymasters or ‘illegals’ in wartime America, devote most of a lecture at KGB headquarters ‘to the man whom, he alleged was the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States:  Harry Hopkins’” (#3401).  If Hopkins was, in fact “the most important of all” agents—surpassing Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs and Harry Dexter White—he deserves serious scrutiny!  Thus far, however, conventional historians have dismissed allegations regarding Hopkins—probably seeking to preserve FDR’s reputation.  Without further research, I cannot render a verdict on Hopkins—but I’m now curious and willing to entertain questions regarding his role in shaping FDR’s foreign policy.  

West tackles yet another controversy when she deals with the Allies’ wartime decision of to open a “second front” in northern France and attain “total victory” against Hitler.  In 1943, given the recent successes of American and English armies in North Africa and Italy, some military leaders (General Mark Clark, commander of Allied forces in Italy) and Winston Churchill, urged a concerted military movement through the Balkans and Austria to the heart of Germany.  It would be a shorter route, benefitting from bases and troops already in place around the Mediterranean.  Since Nazi forces were still mired down in the USSR, these analysts believed a rapid end to the war could be achieved.  Many of them also feared that Stalin wanted to ultimately occupy and control Eastern and Central Europe—something he could not do if the war ended quickly.  He desired, according to the Russian historian Viktor Suvorov, “the war to last as long as possible in order to exhaust both Germany and its Anglo-American opponents.  Stalin was fighting to expand the Communist Empire.  He wanted open-ended war to do so” (#6421).  So “Uncle Joe” Stalin adamantly insisted on an invasion in France and FDR (strongly influenced by Harry Hopkins) supported the Russian dictator.  Thus D-Day! 

West certainly leans in the direction of “conspiratorial” suspicions.   She certainly has incited strongly mixed reviews of her work.  But by challenging, with impressive documentation, conventional histories, she drives us to consider views and scholars worth considering.  

    As we grow older, we frequently regret decisions we’ve made and causes we’ve embraced, simply wishing we’d had more wisdom a few decades ago.  Reflecting on this in his Retractions, St Augustine looked back over his many decades of preaching and writing and found himself somewhat terrified when he considered the words of Jesus:  “Of every idle word men speak, they shall give account on the day of judgment” (Mt 12:36).  He further reflected on the words of James, warning teachers not to use words wrongly.  In Augustine’s case, he noted that even in old age he was less than “perfect,” but he was less so in “early manhood,” when he began to “write or to speak to the people, and so much authority was attributed to me that, whenever it was necessary for someone to speak to the people and I was present, I was seldom allowed to be silent and to listen to others and be ‘swift to hear but slow to speak.’”  

In my “early manhood” I was persuaded, by trusted “experts,” that we faced an “ecological crisis” of massive proportions.  With typically youthful enthusiasm I supported the “environmental” movement and invested considerable time and resources championing its message and goals.  I wish then I knew what I now know!  I wish I could have read Alston Chase instead of Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich!  Unfortunately, Alston Chase was himself then in the process of learning, to his sorrow, what we both needed to know.  Recently re-reading and again appreciating two of books helped me clarify why I now consider myself a “recovering environmentalist,” still in love with the wonders of creation but deeply skeptical of those writers (e.g. Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold), organizations (e.g. the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and Greenpeace), and politicians (e.g. Al Gore and Barack Obama) who use environmentalism to justify their political agendas.  

Forty years ago Alston Chase left a tenured academic post (teaching the philosophy of science but increasingly disillusioned by the radical student assaults on the humanities in the ‘60s) and moved, with his wife, to a remote ranch in Montana’s Smith River country.  Building a log cabin 50 miles from the nearest town, they lived without electricity or telephone, enthusiastic “back-to-earth” devotees.  Later given the opportunity to write a book on Yellowstone National Park—a place he intimately knew and passionately loved—they sold the ranch in 1981 and moved to Paradise Valley, Montana, and he began a research project that culminated with the publication of Playing God in Yellowstone:  The Destruction of America’s First National Park (Boston:  The Atlantic Monthly Press, c. 1986).  A rare blend of scholarly acuity and personal passion, his treatise brilliantly illuminates much about the modern environmental movement.  He is particularly effective in analyzing its philosophical roots and New Left politics. 

Chase began his research project planning to celebrate the conservationism long associated with Yellowstone, which was set aside by Congress in 1872 “for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”  Plunging into the project he soon grew alarmed at the park’s conditions and management.  Rather than being preserved it was being destroyed!  Key creatures (including the beaver) that flourished 50 years earlier had disappeared.  “Perhaps no animal was more important in Yellowstone ecology than the beaver,” and without them “the ponds had silted in, spring runoff in the streams had increased, the water table had dropped, and the drier ground was not producing the crop of palatable browse that it supported when the beaver had been there” (p. 13).  What had happened to the beaver?  (In time Chase was discovered that the park’s out-of-control elk population had destroyed the beavers’ habitat and driven them from their ancient home!)  

Thus he discovered that many of Yellowstone’s problems stemmed from the unintended consequences of park management.  Since 18^th century hunters had depleted the park’s original buffalo and elk herds, game “managers” a century ago determined to restore them.  Once done, however the bison and elk, free from predators (including man)  which had once limited the size of the herds, rapidly proliferated.  “In thirty years the bison had been saved from extinction only to become a nuisance” (p. 22).  More significantly, the burgeoning elk herd especially threatened other species (such as beaver)  in the park.  To address this problem, President Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, set up a committee which issued the “Leopold Report” in 1963.  Largely attuned to the emergent environmentalism of the day, the committee urged the park be made a “vignette of primitive America.”  Wolves and grizzly bears and mountain lions (but not hunters!) were to be brought back into the park in order to control the elk herd.  

Ironically, Chase says, no one really knows what “primitive America” actually looked like!  In fact, the report “inadvertently replaced science with nostalgia, subverting the goal it had set out to support” (p. 35).   A growing contingent of environmentalists, moving from non-profit organizations such as the Sierra Club into the ranks of the Department of Interior, dreamed of “saving the wilderness.”  They shrewdly invented a “wilderness” that had never existed, since “there was never a place on earth untrammeled by man” (p. 45).  They reintroduced “predators” that showed little interest in elk, so the persisting elk problem accelerated.  The newly-prescribed “natural-fire” policy—allowing fires ignited by lightning to burn freely—failed to effectively clear the park of dead wood and underbrush.  The fires died out quickly, it was found, because the elk had consumed the dead grasses.  They neglected to notice that Indians, for many millennia, had lived and hunted in the Yellowstone area, significantly impacting the ecosystem, especially by lighting fires to keep “large areas in open grassland, forests from reaching climax, sagebrush from spreading, and many edible plants prolific” (p. 97).   Had modern “scientists” and “environmentalists” studied and followed such Indian practices rather than denying their ancient presence therein, Yellowstone would be much better than it is today!  “Denied its Indian past, it deprived us of the knowledge needed to keep it pristine.  As it turns out, ignoring the Indian was not only bad history, but bad ecology as well” (p. 115).  

After meticulously detailing and explaining developments in Yellowstone, Chase effectively analyzes the “environmentalists” whose philosophy and political activism underlie various of the park’s problems.  Many (if not most) of them are in fact pantheistic religious zealots.  Invoking John Muir rather than Jesus, they revere Emerson more than Moses and turn to Thoreau rather than Isaiah.  With Thoreau they believe:   “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”  Rejecting the Judeo-Christian faith in a personal God, they embrace nature photographer Ansel Adams’ commitment to “‘a vast, impersonal pantheism’” (p. 304).   Remarkably, in the name of “ecology” they also reject objective, empirical, environmental science!  Rather than attending to evidence regarding the environment, they follow their convictions—all too often derived from spurious treatises such as Rachel Carson’s enormously influential Silent Spring—and insist everything be subsumed under a self-regulating “web of life” perspective.  Along with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold’s The Sand County Almanac (setting forth a celebrated “land ethic”) serves as a sacred text, veritably the Bible of environmentalism.  Citing Carson and Leopold, an alleged “science of ecology” gained momentum, especially among activists without advanced scientific training.  Reflecting this, the “countercultural” historian Theodore Rosak declared:  “The science we call ecology is the nearest approach that objective consciousness makes to the sacramental vision of nature which underlies the symbol of Oneness” (p. 323).  

Rosak, speaking as one of what Chase calls “the California cosmologists,” found in “ecology” a way to salvation for himself as well as the planet.  His The Making of a Counterculture inspired young folks to join “hippies” and Zen Buddhists and mythical “Native Americans” and mystics of various sorts following a “new vision that sacralized nature” and liberated them from traditional social and moral structures.  “A California Cosmology materialized, coalescing around three overlapping ideas.  The search for a new religion led to the insight that Everything is sacred.  The search for a new science led to the principle:  Everything is interconnected.  The search for a new politics of commitment centered on the belief that Self-transcendence is possible through authentic experience” (pp. 347-348).  Intrinsic to this cosmology is the pantheistic dogma of the self-regulating nature of the natural world which became environmentalism’s deepest certainty.  If true, nature would function perfectly if simply left alone.  Thus elk and bison, left alone, simply could not overpopulate Yellowstone—a mysterious “invisible hand” would sustain them in healthy numbers.  But as careful scientists—biologists in the field rather than students in “interdisciplinary” college classes—studied the evidence it became clear that nature does not know best!  The deepest conviction of many ecologists stood refuted by the facts.  “Although few were aware, Leopold’s land ethic—now part of the creed of contemporary environmentalism—rested on no foundation at all” (p. 325).  

Sadly enough, for Yellowstone this foundationless “land ethic” became the prescription for the park’s destruction!  The mule deer and antelope, the bighorn and beaver seen by Theodore Roosevelt can hardly be found.  Following the New Philosophy of Nature dictated by environmentalists, park managers rely on the “interconnectedness of things” rather than biological data.  Trying to “deep-freeze an ecology” that never existed, indulging in nostalgia rather than empirical investigation, Yellowstone may very well become the “Victim of an Environmental Ideal” (p. 375).  

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A decade after issuing Playing God in Yellowstone:  The Destruction of America’s First National Park, Alston Chase published an equally prescient treatise focused on the Pacific Northwest entitled In a Dark Wood:  The Fight over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology (New York:  Houghton Miflin Company, c. 1995).  Writing this book drove him to a deeply “disturbing” conclusion:  “An ancient political and philosophical notion, ecosystems ecology masquerades as a modern scientific theory.  Embraced by a generation of college students during the campus revolutions of the 1960s, it had become a cultural icon by the 1980s.  Today, not only does it infuse all environmental law and policy, but its influence is also quietly changing the very character of government.  Yet, as I shall show, it is false, and its implementation has been a calamity for nature and society” (p. xiii).

Ecology masquerading as science gained credibility in 1962 with the publication and popular reception of Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring.  “The book launched the modern environmental movement, which changed the values and politics of the nation” (p. 1).  Those changes were dramatically evident in the Pacific Northwest, where environmental zealots effectively disabled a logging industry that represented an earlier understanding and use of natural resources.  Throughout most of American history, loggers had helped fuel and growth and economic vitality of the nation.  They were a hardy and highly-respected corps of workers.  Blessed with productive soils and abundant precipitation, the Pacific Northwest (with its fast-growing, demonstrably renewable Douglas fir and coastal redwood trees) was producing one-fourth of the nation’s softwood.  Forestry experts (rooted in the empirical science of silviculture) and federal bureaucrats (entrusted with managing public lands) alike declared that logging was good for the forests, a blessing for both the people who used wood and the lands that grew trees.  

And, indeed, America’s forests were growing, producing more trees than were being cut!  “Private timberlands that had been clear-cut earlier in the century were coming back, ensuring a continuing supply in the next century.  As tree planting reached record levels, wildlife, benefiting from improving habitat conditions, flourished” (p. 71).  The more scientists studied the California redwoods the more they found evidence favoring clearcutting—an abhorrent thought to tree-hugging “old forest” devotees.  Studious silviculturalists “found that the more trees they cut, the greater the redwood regeneration.  The undisturbed stands experienced almost no regrowth of any kind and the heaviest mortality; the areas of light selection encouraged resurgence of shade-tolerant grand fir and hemlock.  But in the clear-cuts redwood sprang back in profusion” (p. 225).  By the mid-1980s, especially on carefully managed private lands, “redwood forests were growing as they never had before” (p. 225).  

An alternate approach to the forests, however, dramatically surfaced on the first “Earth Day” in 1970, featuring a parade of 100,000 people walking up New York’s Fifth Avenue.  Rooted in the pantheistic visions of Emerson and Thoreau, of John Muir and Ansel Adams, shaped by the shifting paradigm of colleges and universities, and sharing the ethos of the ‘60s New Left, radical “ecologists” championed “preserving” rather than “conserving” Mother Nature.  Rejecting Western Christian Civilization, they imagined themselves capable of inventing a “new,” far better civilization that respected and followed the “web-of-life” portrayed by Rachel Carson type ecologists.   “A new era was dawning in which not sustainability but aesthetics and the desire to maintain forests in their “natural” state would be paramount, and increasing numbers of the public would perceive efficient forestry as an oxymoron.  Forests would be seen by many as cathedrals in which to worship a new god” (p. 74).  

Their worship would be empowered by federal legislation, especially the 1973 Endangered Species Act—termed “a law for all seasons” for its unclear and easily expanded provisions.  The congressmen drafting the law had minimal biological understanding but maximal confidence in what they’d heard about “ecosystems” and “ecology” and “biodiversity” and “the balance of nature.”  They took seriously the pronouncements of “ecosystems ecologists” such as Barry Commoner and environmental activists overflowing with “fuzzy, pantheistic, and animist notions of the unity and spirituality of nature” (p. 103).  “Nature knows best,” Commoner declared in The Closing Circle, and multitudes believed him.  “Few noticed there was little evidence for the doctrine.  Ancient philosophical ideas, resurrected by the government as a means of control and masquerading as science, had captured the public imagination, producing an Endangered Species Act whose consequences no one could anticipate” (p. 104).  

Pushing beyond Commoner’s “nature know best” mantra, Bill Devall (yet another California professor) delved into the notion of “biospherical egalitarianism” and “deep ecology;” therein he picked up a “sledgehammer of an idea” with which he wanted “to change the world” (p. 120).  Probably unaware of the idea’s 19^th century roots (in G.W.F. Hegel and Ernst Haeckel), Devall embraced a monistic philosophy that erased significant differences between human beings and other creatures.  Thus all living creatures are equal and merit respect if not reverence.  If everything is interconnected and equal, humans neither differ from other organisms nor have special rights.  Indeed, those “ecosystems” that constitute “fundamental units of existence” may be more entitled to protection than humans.  Followed by a variety of back-to-earth enthusiasts, “deep ecologists . . . unwittingly embraced ideas that synthesized an American religion of nature with German metaphysics:  a holism that supposed individuals were only parts of a large system and had no independent standing; antipathy to Judaic and Christian values of humanism, capitalism, materialism, private property, technology, consumerism, and urban living; reverence for nature; belief in the spiritual superiority of primitive culture; a desire to go ‘back to the land’; support for animal rights; faith in organic farming; and a program to create nature reserves” (p. 129).  

Thus armed, intellectually, radical environmentalists turned their eyes on the Pacific Northwest and determined to “preserve” it in accord with their idyllic image of an “archaic,” primitive forest, unsullied by the hand of man.  And they found an effective tool with which to accomplish their ends—the spotted owl.  Chase’s meticulous examination of the spotted owl should be read by anyone seriously concerned with America’s environment!  With virtually no scientific basis, activists effectively persuaded both the public and the judicial system that the own was an “endangered species” that needed vast amounts of “old-growth forests” to survive.  Though only 14 owls (that’s right:  14!) provided the basis for the first report on them, the political battle to save the trees (and the owls) was launched.  When carefully examined, another influential paper (by Russell Lande) proves to have been “an exercise in scientific wool-gathering, a collection of calculations based on scanty evidence and laced with false assumptions” (p. 247).   By promoting Lande’s paper as bona fide science, “environmentalists captured the political ground while simultaneously writing a new chapter in the continuing corruption of science” (p. 248).  Ever more “species” and spurious “sub-species” were declared to be endangered—the Pacific yew tree, the marbled murelet, several kids of salmon, sparrows, beetles, and trout.  With amazing rapidity, the federal government (primarily through the courts) moved to stop logging throughout much of the Pacific Northwest, bankrupting small logging firms and devastating scores of once-prosperous communities.   Biocentrism reigned!  “Even as evidence accumulated” to the contrary, true believers such as Dave Foreman and his “Earth First!ers” pushed their way into those “positions of power and prestige” that shaped the nation’s future (p. 173).  “Emotion and plausibility, not truth, count in politics” (p. 226).  

Earth First!ers and their allies (notably Judy Bari and her Wilderness Women) used a variety of tactics—spiking trees, staging protests, lobbying politicians, enlisting radicalized professors, filing endless lawsuits.  Chase carefully describes the activists and their proclamations, showing how they were consumed by their biocentric philosophy.  They were in effect waging a class war to defend the forests. Representing the upper-middle class and supported by affluent city dwellers filling the coffers of elitist environmental organizations such as the Wilderness Society and Environmental Defense Fund, the activists overwhelmed the generally less educated and significantly poorer loggers, ranchers, and farmers living on the land.  More importantly, by 1990 “biocentrism had become the philosophy of America’s ruling classes” (p. 359).  Journalists and professors, bureaucrats and professors, elementary teachers and recycling devotees were all passionately committed to a spurious creed that cited computer models resting on “ecosystem” assumptions rather than empirical evidence.  “Teaching that humanity was destroying the earth, they spread fear of global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, dioxin, asbestos, and indeed anything that was new, was made by humans, or signified change” (p. 362).        

With the election of President Bill Clinton (and his fear-mongering Vice President Al Gore) in 1992, biocentrism spread throughout all levels of the nation’s polity.   “Save the trees!  Save the forests!  Save the fish!  Save the woods!”  Such words, chanted as a “catechism” by Denis Hayes in a 1993 “rock concert for trees” shortly before President Bill Clinton presided over a “Forest Conference” in Portland, demonstrated the triumph of the modern environmental movement.  Though Clinton himself “was another reed blowing in the ideological wind,” he adroitly aligned himself with the Gore-style biocentrists, filling “his administration with apostles of the new order” (p. 384).  Like-minded scientists were relied on as “experts” and activists in various environmental organizations were appointed to head bureaucracies.  “Sustainable development” became the slogan for minutely supervising “every square inch of American real estate” (p. 389).  

         Anyone seeking to understand Israel today should carefully study Joshua Muravchik’s Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel (New York: Encounter Books, c. 2014). A Fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, Muravchik has solidly established himself as a serious scholar determined to chart the historical roots of contemporary affairs. (His 2002 treatise. Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, remains one of the best analyses of perhaps the most powerful political movement of the past century). As the subtitle of his most recent publication indicates, he wants to help readers better understand the remarkable reversal of world opinion regarding the state of Israel. Far more than describing what’s transpired in the past half-century, he seeks to explain why things have happened.

 And though he focuses on Israel, much that he says clearly parallels what’s taken place in America. To be precise: the same leftist agenda that has harmfully impacted the only outpost of Western Civilization in the Mideast has successfully subverted much that has traditionally upheld the American way. During the first 25 years of its existence, the state of Israel enjoyed rather widespread world support and admiration. Then things began to change. In part this resulted from the sheer power Muslims wielded by virtue of their numerous oil deposits. They began exerting influence on the United Nations and those nations dependent on them to fuel modem economies. More importantly, Muslims benefited from “an ideological transformation that saw the rise of a new paradigm of progressive thought that Arab and Muslim advocates helped to develop. It involved multiculturalism or race-consciousness in which the struggle of the third world against the West, or of ‘people of color’ against he white man, replaced the older Marxist model of proletariat versus bourgeoisie as the central moral drama of world history (#147).

         Following WWII, largely because of the Holocaust, there was a “reservoir of sympathy for the Jews wider and deeper than they had known over the millennia” (#285). Conversely, the Arabs (who had generally sided with the Nazis) were disliked if not scorned. Yet as they succeeded in establishing the new nation of Israel the Jews—successfully branded Zionists—began to elicit increasing criticism. Following the Six Day War, an astonishing military triumph, propagandists began to successfully portray Israel as a brutal Goliath pulverizing homeless and helpless Palestinians. “The altered perspective that made Israel look big instead of small was accompanied by a shift in ideological appearances that was no less important. The Arab states were seen as autocratic and reactionary. But the groups that came to speak for the Palestinians presented them as members of the world’s ‘progressive’ camp” (# 522). Emerging as the Palestinian spokesman was Yassar Arafat, mentored by his distant relative, Haj Amin al-Husseini—the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who spent the war years in Berlin broadcasting vicious anti-Semitic screeds—and early aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood.

         Determined to secure politically what Arab armies had failed to accomplish militarily, Arafat shrewdly ingratiated himself with Leftists in Russia, China, North Vietnam, Cuba, Europe and America. Though not a particularly devout Muslim, “he could channel Das Kapital and the holy Koran with equal conviction. ‘Our struggle is part and parcel of every struggle against imperialism, injustice and oppression in the world,’ he affirmed. ‘It is part of the world revolution which aims at establishing social justice and liberating mankind'” (#739). He especially admired the North Vietnamese, who had politically defeated America despite militarily losing the war. Almost overnight Israel lost “the public relations gift of opponents who were collaborators of Hitler and Goebbels; now they faced the comrades of such chic, romanticized figures as Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. Not only had David become Goliath, but on the other side the frog had become a prince” (#822).  

          Arafat early envisioned and implemented the use of terror to accomplish (working through the Palestinian Liberation Organization or Fatah) his ends—reviving tactics earlier used in Arab uprisings in the 1920s and 1930s. PLO gangs such as Black September hijacked airplanes, holding passengers and crews hostages in order to exact huge cash ransoms or effect the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli  jails. (In 1972 one hijacked plane was successfully stormed and liberated by an elite squad of Israelis including two future prime ministers—Ehud Barak and Binjamin Netanyahu.) In that same year, eight  Black September terrorists attacked the Olympic residence hall of Israeli athletes in Munich, killing two  and taking nine hostages. They demanding a plane to fly them out of Germany, but a firefight at the airport  resulted in all the hostages’ deaths as well as several terrorists’. Though Arafat himself always posed as uninvolved in such terrorist acts, it now “seems clear that Abu lyad, one of Arafat’s two oldest colleagues and top aides, was the chief of Black September, and that blood-soaked group, at first mysterious in its origins, turned out to be nothing other than Fatah in disguise” (#1103).

          Following the Munich attack, Israel’s Massad methodically hunted down and killed all the surviving terrorists. America’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, reacting to the killing of some Americans, sent a spokesman to inform PLO representatives ‘”that this killing of Americans has got to stop—or else . .. torrents of blood will flow. and not all of it will be American.’ They add that this ‘blunt message astonished his listeners [who] had not expected to hear such a direct threat from an American official.’ Kissinger says that after this, ‘attacks on Americans—at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO—ceased”” (#1141). Europeans, however, sought to passively placate the terrorists. “Such appeasement had  a corrosive effect on the spirit of Europe, as almost always happens when people bow to threats and  violence rather than finding the courage to stand up to them” (#1153). Arab oil—and the threat of its  reduced flow as was manifest in the 1973 embargo and subsequent recession—brought Europeans to their knees. Many countries (including 30 out of 33 black-ruled States in Africa) broke ties with Israel in order to bolster their standing with Arabs.

          Arab ascendency in Europe was paralleled by triumphs in the United Nations. As the UN welcomed delegations from scores of new nations—many of them former European colonies—the balance of power quickly shifted. Given an opportunity to excoriate the rich and powerful, third world delegates engaged in endless rhetorical attacks on America and the West. Israel, identified as a Western outpost amidst an ocean of Arabs, was selected as a special target of abuse. In 1974, the Arab states introduced “Palestine” as an item for consideration and the General Assembly invited the PLO to participate in its discussions. “No one who was not a representative of a government except the Pope … had ever before been granted such a privilege, but the vote was overwhelming, 105 to 4” (#1481) Representing the PLO was Yassar Arafat, accompanied by “none other than Alt Hassan Salameh, the commander of the Munich Olympics massacre” (#1496). Brashly disregarding UN protocol, Arafat kept his pistol on his hip and pointedly called for the elimination of the state of Israel. He also effectively cultivated the strategy of equating “Zionism” with “racism” (a theme quickly spelled out in a UN resolution), thus enrolling all the modern multiculturalists for whom it is virtually the only serious sin. His “bloodthirsty harangue was greeted in the temple of nations with a standing ovation the likes of which had perhaps never been heard there before” (#1513).

         In successive decades, the U.N.’s General Assembly has routinely passed resolutions decrying a laundry list of spurious Israeli “crimes” and “abuses.” Still more: various U.N. agencies (effectively aided by well-funded “non-profit” organizations such as Amnesty International and mainline Protestant denominations) actively work to promote the Palestinian cause both in the Mideast and around the world. “The conclusion is inescapable. By its countless one-sided resolutions and numerous ‘investigations’ of Israel with predetermined results; by providing a global infrastructure for the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel; and by UNRKW [United Nations Relief and Works Agency], which sustains the idea of the ‘right of return,’ the United Nations has served systematically to challenge Israel’s legitimacy and weaken its global position. This is the crucible of Israel’s demonization” (#1616).

         Anti-Israeli rhetoric and maneuvers especially thrive in socialistic environments, whether intellectual or political. Well-equipped for the task, Muravchik effectively recounts 20th century developments that led to the founding of the new nation of Israel as a thoroughly socialistic state, thereby garnering considerable enthusiasm amongst egalitarian devotees around the world. The Labor Party, the kibbutzim, the general mood of the infant nations thrilled many who envisioned a socialist Utopia minus the negativities of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. “As a kind of socialist model, Israel enjoyed great prestige within the halls of the Socialist International” (#1847). In time, however, European socialists (such as Austria’s Bruno Kreisky and West Germany’s Willy Brandt) turned away from Israel and cultivated ties with revolutionary movements throughout the “global South,” supporting the likes of Fidel Castro and, naturally, Yassar Arafat.

          Kreisky and Brandt clearly represented significant changes in the socialist world. The “New Left”—birthed in 1968 by European “revolutionaries” and in America by “counter-cultural” agitators such  as Tom Hayden and Bill Ayers—quickly infiltrated and transformed Western institutions. They especially targeted universities—violently seizing control of facilities, imposing demands on administrations, turning campuses into centers of political activism rather than intellectual discipline. “The books and ideas that for generations were regarded as the backbone of Western civilization were now systematically ‘deconstructed.’ Moses and Jesus, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Locke and Burke, Hamilton and Jefferson were exposed as but so many ‘dead white males’ whose principal importance was to perpetuate the hegemony of their race, class, and gender. At long last, their victims day had come, and the study of their oppression and resistance replaced the traditional ‘canon’ on the front stage of higher education” #2106). Reflecting this transformation, “Jean-Paul Sartre, once an orthodox Stalinist, gave voice to this profound rewrite of leftist canon in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched  of the Earth. ‘Natives of all under-developed countries, unite!’ he wrote. The riveting movement for civil rights of blacks in America melded with the global anticolonial cause to create a larger image of ‘the rest against the West,’ or rather against the White West” (#3769).

          Helping orchestrate this New Left agenda was the late Columbia University Professor Edward Said, an American totally devoted to the Palestinian cause. His works are required reading in nearly a thousand university syllabi. Entire courses are devoted to him in top-tier institutions such as UCLA and Georgetown University. Influential leftists, notably Noam Chomsky, took his view of Israel and the Arabs as their own. Said made his mark in 1978 with the publication of Orientalism, a work perfectly attuned to an era dominated by white guilt for racism. A year later he published The Question of Palestine, calling for the liberation and self-determination of the oppressed Arabs residing in Israel-controlled lands. Given his influence. Said deserves examination—something Muravchik does diligently.

          Though he glibly postured as a “Palestinian” Professor Said “largely falsified his background” (#2194). Said was in fact born to wealthy parents in Cairo, Egypt, and lived there until moving to the United States at the age of 15, where he received an elite education (including degrees from Princeton and Harvard) and remained for the rest of his life. His dishonesty extended from his autobiographical materials to “all his work, beginning with the most influential. Orientalism” (#2272). He distorted or ignored

evidence and misused his sources (routinely skewing quotations). At one time these were serious academic sins, but they are easily tolerated in the “postmodern” university, suffused as it is with skepticism, relativism, and nihilism. Because Said castigated white people as racists, redefining Arabs as oppressed persons of “color,” dressing up his “malignant charlatanry” with academic jargon and oblique references to celebrities such as Foucault, he enjoyed a unique status in the academic world, providing him a platform with which to rebrand Israel as a Goliath walking roughshod over poor Palestinians.

          As if dealing with enemies abroad were not enough, Israelis faced mounting internal dissension, largely replicating the New Left’s agitation in Europe and America. As “the left turned against Israel it was inevitable that Jews would appear in growing numbers among Israel’s fiercest critics” (#4077), generally styling themselves “anti-Zionists.” They detested the Zionism personified by one of the nation’s founders, Menachem Begin (the powerful leader of the Likud Party and sometime prime minister) who “believed to his core that ‘the Jewish people have an eternal historic right to the Land of Israel'” (#2676)—thus envisioning a nation with the geographic boundaries established under David in the Old Testament. More secular Israelis worked to establish a compromise with Palestinians leading to a “two state” position. And some “anti-Zionists” even promoted a one-state solution, giving Palestinians full control of the nation!

Thus MIT’s Noam Chomsky, an influential American leftist, “long advocated the replacement of Israel with a bi-national socialist state along the lines of what he called the ‘successful social revolution’ of Communist Yugoslavia” (#4100). Political battles between these factions “proved to be an inexhaustible resource for Israel’s enemies, much as the Vietnam War gave rise to an ‘adversary culture’ in America that stoked an anti-Americanism that strengthened the hand of Communist forces” (#2898). Anti-Zionist academics (including “New Historians” who debunked the nation’s official version of its founding) and journalists (some cultivating a “prophetic” rather than reportorial stance) especially aired their discontent with the nation’s policies, promoting a “peace movement” that triumphed in 1993 with the Oslo Accords.

         Then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who championed the “peace” attained between Jews and Palestinians at Oslo, was gunned down at a Peace Now rally in 1995. Five years later Yassar Arafat unleashed his intifada with suicide bombers blowing up buses and restaurants. We now know “that once the intifada began, Arafat’s forces released from custody hundreds of terror operatives belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad whom the Palestinian Authority had incarcerated under the system of security cooperation with Israel that had been a cornerstone of the peace process” (#4311). It became clear that large numbers of Palestinians, led by the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Arafat himself, wanted to destroy Israel rather than establish an independent state of their own.

          Suddenly some of the Peace Now supporters had second thoughts! Benny Morris, the professor who coined the term “new historians,” said: “The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don’t see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the buss to happen to all of us.'” This led him to declare: “‘There is a deep problem in Islam. It’s a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn’t have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game'” (#3257).

          As Muravchik’s analysis of Israel’s intelligentsia makes clear, modem Israel is generally “on the wrong side of the left’s new paradigm.” Pro-Palestinian activists such as Rachel Corrie (a 23 year old American fresh from her studies at Evergreen State College working for the International Solidarity Movement [ISM] and dying under the treads of a military bulldozer while trying to “non-violently” stop Israel’s clearing ground to deter intifada infiltrations) stirred up anti-Israeli sentiments around the world. To effectively do so, ISM distributed “a doctored photo display intended to show that the Israeli bulldozer had struck her deliberately” (#3730). Another American ISM volunteer, Richard Hupper, contributed $20,000 to Hamas, thus supporting that terrorist group’s effort to destroy Israel. To Hamas, ‘”Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope'” (#3718). While rockets rain down and grenades are thrown at them, Israelis must deal with protesters such as Hupper and Corrie who insist the Jews are the provocateurs, the occupiers, the villains in the Mideast.

         Thinking about Rachel Corrie’s work in Israel, Muravchik is perplexed that: “The delicate child who admonished herself not to step on a flower, who could not endure the thought of whales dying or trees being felled, exhibited cold indifference to the death of Israelis. What force was it that had wrought such a transformation?” (#3724). It seems clear that what Eric Hoffer described in The True Believer applies to her. She (like many before her in the French and Russian and Cuban revolutions) had embraced a leftist “creed” that bred ‘”fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance'” (#3724). She clearly shared what Milovan Djilas—a leader in making Yugoslavia Communist before being sent to jail for some deviant thoughts—discerned as a blind faith that “they have been named by a higher power, which they call history, to establish the Kingdom of Heaven in this sinful world'” (#374). To true believers like Come, “the favored groups—blacks, browns, former colonials—were not merely objects of sympathy; they were regarded as the vessels of universal redemption” (#3775).

         However demonstrably misguided and meretricious they may be, leftists such as Rachel Come have effectively placed “Israel in the Dock.” Jews rather than Arabs are called upon to justify their policies—indeed, to justify their very existence! Western news agencies, in their portrayal of Israel, are particularly committed to this approach, inevitably filming incidents staged to portray Palestinians as victims. Academics and churchmen tout boycotts of Israel as a way to liberate the oppressed Palestinians. Thus the famed physicist Stephen W. Hawking withdrew from a 2013 scholarly meeting in Jerusalem in order to demonstrate his “solidarity” with oppressed Arabs. His sensitive conscience was, however, apparently untroubled when he keynoted a conference in China, proudly appearing in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People and demonstrated his indifference to (if not support) of the Communist dictatorship.

         With the likes of Stephen Hawking—and Jimmy Carter and Desmund Tutu—condemning Israel, the nation today stands truly imperiled. “For all its might, Israel remains a David, struggling against the odds to secure its small foothold in a violent and hostile region. The relentless campaign to recast it instead as a malevolent Goliath places it in grave peril” (#4853). A “second holocaust” is, in fact, not only desired by millions of Muslims but quite possible. The sheer number of Arabs and their oil-based wealth certainly threaten the existence of the tiny Jewish state. But more threatening “is the intellectual power of the contemporary Leftist paradigm” that denies Israel’s validity, consigning her “to the side of darkness and villainy, even in the face of the reality that, measured by the Left’s nominal values—freedom, democracy, tolerance of racial, religious, and sexual diversity, equality of status for women, generosity to the needy Israel is among the world’s best countries and its enemies rank among the worst” (#4794).

         Considered by some “Britain’s best-known intellectual dissident” for his staunch defense of such English traditions as fox-hunting, Roger Scruton is a philosopher who has flourished as a writer who routinely lectures at universities without making a career as a tenured member of the professoriate.  Thus his writings, while addressing the timeless concerns of a philosopher, are much more accessible and wide-ranging than those of his peers.  Nevertheless, he was invited to give The Gifford Lectures (without question the most prestigious award for philosophers concerned with religion) in 2010 and published them under the title of The Face of God (London:  Continuum International Publishing Group, c. 2012).

         Distressed by the “consequences of the atheist culture that is growing around us”—rejecting both God’s Reality and any morality rooted in His Being, thereby escaping “the eye of judgment by wiping away” His face—Scruton endeavors to address questions awakened by those experiences that provoke us to deal with our own “consciousness, judgment, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the things that make the human condition so singular” (p. 8). While acknowledging the legitimacy and importance of cosmological evidences regarding God’s existence, he prefers to focus on psychological clues pointing to His Presence.  He is the One to Whom we pray.  “He is in and around us, and our prayers shape our personal relation with him” (p. 13).

         To better understand this, Scruton invites us to consider “the meaning of three critical words:  ‘I,’ ‘you’ and ‘why.’  And in exploring those words I shall be constructing a general theory of the face:  the face of the person, the face of the world, and the face of God” (p 23).  If God is a Person, we might best engage Him through dialogue, intentionally interacting with Him in ways that defy purely naturalistic explanations.   As we reflect on our mysterious ability to communicate in languages, both verbal and mathematical, we enter into a realm of reality unobservable to empirical science, a subjective world full of distinctively personal thoughts and judgments and decisions.  Inwardly we know we arc free to think and love and act; we know we are more than biological automata following a pre-determined scheme.  “So maybe God is a person like us, whose identity and will are bound up with his nature as a subject” (p. 45). As a person He can say “I” and interact with other persons such as I.   

         When I say “I” something important is manifest.  I identify myself as a unique being within a world of beings. I think about yesterday’s weather and today’s schedule and tomorrow’s uncertainties, all freely associated within my mind.  I’m also aware of certain moral judgments and responsibilities accompanying my thoughts. I am, in short, self-conscious in ways unknown in the purely animal world.  And I recognize, as a self-conscious person, other persons with whom I discourse, to whom I am accountable, and who should be accountable to me.  Such persons are known to me almost exclusively through their faces, “the outward form and image of the soul, the lamp lit in our world by the subject behind it is through understanding the face that we begin to see how it is that subjects make themselves known in the world of objects” (p. 72).  Indeed; “the face is the subject, revealing itself in the world of objects” (p. 80).  In their spontaneous smiles and laughs and tears and blushes and deeply expressive eyes we intuitively know truths about persons we encounter. In loving relationships we enjoy communion with other persons.  (On the other hand “Fashion models and pop stars tend to display faces that are withdrawn, scowling and closed.  Little or nothing is given through their faces, which offer no invitation to love or companionship.  The function of the fashion-model’s face is to put the body on display; the face is simply one of the body’s attractions, with no special role to play as a focus of another’s interest” (p. 107).  

         So how might we sec the face of God?  As human beings we are deeply troubled by the guilt, disgrace, sorrow and death that result from decisions freely made in the past.   We long for forgiveness and restoration within the community of persons.  We also crave immortality.  Thus a multitude of religious rites and practices have developed within human history, and some of us now and then discern, in “sacred moments,” a supernatural reality beyond the natural world.  “All sacred moments are moments of gift—of gift revealed as the way things are.  The distinctiveness of the Christian Eucharist is that it makes this wholly specific.  The Eucharist commemorates God’s supreme gift, which is the gift of himself—his own descent into the world of suffering and guilt, in order to show through his example that there is a way out of conflict and resentment—a way to restore through grace the givenness of the world” (p. 172)

          For Scruton,  the Christian message of God-in-Christ revealing Himself as agape love “gives the greatest insight into our situation,”’ and “the I that gives itself opens a window in the scheme of things through which we glimpse the light beyond—the I AM that spoke to Moses’” (p. 172).  He IS—and in Christ He is really present.  He Is Really with us (Immanuel, God with us). 

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          In The Soul of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c 2014), Roger Scruton returns to (and reinforces) themes earlier treated in The Face of God:  Discerning the Real Presence of God, the mystery basic to mystical experience and divine revelation and liturgical worship.  To this the celebrated mathematician and philosopher Blaise PascaJ gave witness following his nuit de feu, “the night of 23 November 1654 when, for two hours, he experienced the total certainty that he was m the presence of God—‘the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and the wise men.’ other words a personal God, intimately revealed, not conjured by abstract argument.  Pere juste, le monde ne t’a point connu, mais moi, je t’ai connu, [GR translation:  righteous Father, the world has not know you, but I myself, I have known you] he wrote then, on the scrap of paper on which he recorded the experience:  astonishing words, which only total conviction could have engendered” (p. 12).  

          To share Pascal’s conviction in the 21^st century requires us to first deal with the highly influential and strident claim of evolutionary psychology (e.g. Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy) that reduces  religious reflection and affection to simple chemical processes within the brain.  Scruton endorses Mary Midgley’s dismissal of the “nothing buttery” that reduces “emergent realities to be ‘nothing but’ the things in which we perceive them.”  To the nothing buttery coterie, “the human person is ‘nothing but’ the human animal, law is ‘nothing but’ relations of social power; sexual love is ‘nothing but’ the urge to procreation; altruism is ‘nothing but’ the dominant genetic strategy described by Maynard Smith; the Mona Lisa is ‘nothing but’ a spread of pigments on a Canvas, the Ninth Symphony is ‘nothing but’ a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre.  And so on.  Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy” (p.39).  

          Skillfully rejecting such reductionism, Scruton insists “that functional explanations of the evolutionary kind have no bearing on the content of our religious beliefs and emotions” (p. 3).  Much more than matter-in-motion distinguishes us human beings.  We may very well function as animals in many ways (eating, sleeping, copulating), but in our minds we wonder about things true, good, and beautiful, we ponder what philosophers call “qualia” and do math not merely because we want to measure distances but because of the sheer beauty of intricately balanced equations.  We think morally, “reaching beyond” the evolutionary struggle to survive, discerning ethical norms and reasons for proper behavior.  And we also speak coherently in highly complex ways, far beyond the capacity of other animals.  Importantly, “Language enables us to distinguish truth and falsehood; past, present, and future; possible, actual, and necessary, and so on.  It is fair to say that we live in another world from nonlinguistic creatures. They live immersed in nature; we stand forever at its edge” (p, 5).

          Standing forever at nature’s edge, we sense another world, a transcendental realm of realities (theological and ethical as well as mathematical and musical) more vital than the material things we touch and taste.  We experience what Scruton repeatedly refers to as a “cognitive dualism,” somewhat akin to Aristotle’s “hylomorphism,” understanding one Reality in two equally valid ways.  Situated at this horizon—immersed in sacred places, repeating sacred chants, celebrating sacred rites—we open our inner being to the timeless realm of God, hungering for a face-to-face encounter with Him.  Religious aspirations are truly perennial deeply embedded in human nature.  Thus Scruton says:  “The real question for religion in our time is not how to excise the sacred, but how to rediscover it, so that the moment of pure intersubjectivity, in which nothing concrete appears, but in which everything hangs on the hear and now, can exist in pure and God-directed form Only when we are sure that this moment of the real presence exists in the human being who experiences it, can we then ask the question whether it is or is not a true revelation—a moment not just of faith but of knowledge, and a gift of Grace” (p. 23}.

         To Scruton, evidence for God’s existence may be found primarily in the psychological, rather than the cosmological, realm.  Probing the depths of human conscious and personal relationships, rather the limits of outer space, brings us in touch with the One He Who Is.  I primarily identify myself as a person—“an individual substance of a rational nature,” according to Boethius, “I know that I am a single and unified subject of experience” (p. 72). Interacting with other persons, I use terms such as good and beautiful, tragic and comedic, necessary for the I-You relationships requisite for us.  In these relationships “ideas of the self and freedom cannot disappear from the minds of the human subjects themselves.  Their behavior toward each other is mediated by the belief in freedom, in selfhood, in the knowledge that I am I and you are you and that each of us is a center of free and responsible thought and action” (p, 64).  “Each human object is also a subject, addressing us in looks, gestures, and words, from the transcendental horizon of the I.  Our responses to others aim toward that horizon, passing on beyond the body to other being that it incarnates.  It is this feature of our interpersonal responses that gives such compelling force to the myth of the soul, of the true but  hidden self that is veiled by the flesh” (p, 74).  So too we may interact with God as a Person.

          Thus we find the Hebrew Scriptures celebrating God’s covenant relationship with his people.  Almighty God established “a binding agreement, in which God Commands obedience only by putting himself under obligations toward those whom he commands. The idea that God can be bound by obligations toward his creation has had a profound impact on our civilization, since it implies that God’s relation to us is of the same kind as the relations that we create through our promises and contracts.  Our relation to God is a relation between free beings who take responsibility for their actions.  And the simplest form that such a relation can take is that of an exchange of promises—a form that has been recognized by the law since ancient times” (p. 78). Consequently, Scruton says, if we think through the implications of this divinely-designed covenant “we will arrive at the ancient concept of natural law: the concept of a law inscribed in human reason itself, and which issues precisely from our disposition to bind ourselves in free agreements and to live with our neighbors on terms.  There is, as I prefer to put it, a ‘calculus of rights, responsibilities, and duties’ that is inherent in our search for agreement, and this calculus lays down the constraints that must be obeyed, if we are to arrive at a consensual political order” (p. 81).

          This “natural law” is not the law of physics or biology, for it transcends them.  It reveals to us a deeper—or higher—realm of reality and truth regarding who we are and what we should do as persons, it prompts us to enjoy people as persons rather than use them as things.  It aligns us with a deeply religious realm wherein we find permanent things—the things that matter most.  We are thus capable of discerning sacred spaces (e.g. the “music of the spheres”) and designating sacred things (e.g. temples and cathedrals).  This “experience of the sacred is interpersonal.  Only creatures with ‘I’ thoughts can see the world in this way, and their doing so depends upon a kind of interpersonal readiness, a willingness to find meanings and reasons, even in things that have no eyes to look at them and no mouth to speak” (p. 134).  Rightly experienced, “The ‘order of the Covenant’ emerges from the ‘order of nature’ in something like the way the face emerges from the flesh or the movement of tones from the sequence of sounds in music.  It is not an illusion or a fabrication, but a ‘well-founded phenomenon’ to use the idiom of Leibniz.  It is out there and objectively perceivable, as real as any feature of the natural world” (p. 175).  And it comes to us from God, who is the “soul of the world”— the “all-knowing subject who welcomes us as we pass into that other domain, beyond the veil of nature” (p. 198).

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         In Gentle Regrets:  Thoughts from a Life (New York: Continuum, c. 2005), Roger Scruton reflects on those “uncomfortable truths” that have in fact given him tasting “comfort.”  Many of them were early found in classic books such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.  He discovered that “Shakespeare’s plays are ‘works of philosophy—philosophy not argued but shown” (p. 9).  He found T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets an effective antidote to Oswald Spengler’s pessimism. Though these and many other books were read while young Scruton was in school, many of the most important of them were not part of the prescribed curriculum,

         Brn in 1944, he “grew to immaturity in the sixties, when disorder was the order of the day.  Like most of my generation, I was a rebel—but a meta-rebel, so to speak, in rebellion against rebellion, who devoted to shoring up the ruins the same passionate conviction that my contemporaries employed in creating them.  How this happened is a mystery.  I have gained nothing whatsoever from my anti-antinomian stance, and discarded my socialist conscience only to discover that a socialist conscience was the one thing required for success in the only spheres where I could aspire to it” (p. 19). He had become, in his mid-20s, following his days at Cambridge, a conservative!  Early granted a lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, he found himself surrounded by leftist luminaries such as Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian whose “vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools” (p. 36).  

          Fortuitously, Scruton discovered Edmund Burke, the great 18^th century philosopher-statesman, with whom he shared a deep interest in aesthetics.  “Like Burke, therefore, I made the passage from aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of intellectual incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost experience of home” (p. 39).  Through Burke’s critical analysis of the French Revolution, Scruton realized “that the Utopian promises of socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract vision of the human mind—a geometrical version of our mental processes that has only the vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human lives are conducted” (p. 40).  Burke stood for such old- fashioned things as individual freedom and sexual standards and religious traditions—things which Scruton celebrated in his 1997 publication, The Meaning of Conservatism, a book that “blighted what remained of my academic career” (p. 41).

          Indelibly branded as a “conservative,” he was effectively ostracized by the English intelligentsia., especially when he linked up with a vigorous minority of like-minded thinkers; seeking to publish their views in the “belligerently anti-communist” Salisbury Review.  His articles and books elicited general disdain from powerful professors such as A.J. Ayer.  “However hard I tried, however much scholarship, thought and open-minded argument I put into what I wrote, it was routinely condemned as ignorant, sloppy, pernicious, or just plain ‘silly’” (p. 55).  The doors to a university career quickly closed to him, so he determined to make his own way as an independent thinker.  

          In the process he slowly shed his youthful atheism and opened himself to the claims of traditional religion.  He found Christianity’s sexual ethos and artistic masterworks persuasive.  And he discovered when interacting with “true believers”—many of them Jiving under oppression in Poland and Czechoslovakia—how “faith transfigures everything it touches, and raises the world to God” (p. 63).  He took to heart some of the words of a devout, and quite conservative, Catholic priest, Monsignor Gilbey, who had been Catholic chaplain in Cambridge when Scruton studied there:   “‘We are not asked to undo the work of creation.   Or to rectify the Fall. The duty of a Christian is not to leave this world a better place.  His duty is to leave this world a better man’” (p. 68).

          The second person who influenced Scruton was a young Polish university student (Barbara) living in Gdansk, Poland.  Asked to teach at the Catholic University of Lublin, he discovered that in “an occupied country with a censored press, there was, comparatively speaking, complete freedom of speech . . . the only university I knew where a right-winger could speak openly in defense of his views” (p. 72).  In discussions with Barbara, he discovered a woman possessed with “the crazy idea . . . that she could help me to salvation” (p. 75).  Her witness—and the series of letters and meetings that followed—introduced Scruton to a person who “observed her world with the eye of religion, seeing in everything the sign of God’s creative power and the call to free obedience.  Hers was a simple, humble, priest-haunted life, and yet it was lived more intensely and more completely than mine” (p. 76). She “spoke easily and quietly of communism, which she saw as the Devil’s work—a swindle, born of the father of lies, but no different in essence from all other attempts, both great and small, both public and private, to live a lie” (p. 78).   She, like Monsignor Gilbey, insisted that the really important things “was not to improve the world, but to improve yourself” (p. 79).

          Added to his growing interest m religion was his experience in being a father.  After his first marriage ended in divorce, plunging him into “an unhappiness that lasted two decades,” and after sampling some of his generation’s sexual revolution, Scruton remarried and sired a son named Sam.  Then 54 years of age, witnessing his son’s birth, after “decades of arrested development, I grew up” (p. 109).  “To watch a child grow up is to become detached from yourself and attached to another, whose total dependence compels independence in you” (p. 115).   As a father he deeply understood the difference between a family and the State, with which it as war in modern society.  He and his wife thus “belong to a growing class of dissidents, at war with the official culture and prepared to challenge it” (p. 117).

         Gradually, bit by bit, Scruton was “regaining my religion.”  Along with most of his contemporaries, he had little concern for religion in his early years. But some of his early longings, awakened by reading Rilke and Eliot, prepared him to consider religious truth-claims.  His own analysis of his own self-consciousness persuaded him of the “truth that we are free, accountable and objects of judgment in our own eyes and m the eyes of others” (p. 226).  He learned to appreciate the importance of sacrifice—particularly self-sacrifice—in living well.  Moving to the country, he began attending a small church where he began listening to readings from the Book of Common Prayer and volunteered to play the organ.  Though unable to affirm traditional, orthodox Christian belief, he did find himself inwardly persuaded that the religious life was more true to life experiences than the secular scientism of modernity.  And so he became perhaps England’s finest conservative philosopher with a somewhat heterodox Christian perspective. 

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