Debate Recap

I gotta say, it was an interesting night at the Chesterton Society/Worcester Humanists debate last night. There was a very good vibe in the air, lots of conviviality, and a genuine feeling that people were looking forward to a lively exchange of ideas.

I got to the debate at about 6:15, and there were already about ten cars in the parking lot (the debate was scheduled to being at 7PM). I had the feeling that there was some excitement about this debate, and that the crowd might be bigger than the twenty or thirty I anticipated. I entered the Unitarian church hall, where I had once been a parishioner, and it was a hive of activity. The humanists were working to set up the hall, to prepare the video equipment used to record the debate, setting out refreshments, and welcoming folks who were coming in the door.

I was engaged with last minute preparations with Michael Hughes, our principal debater, so I was somewhat distracted. I had also been trying to think of questions that might be posed to the Chestertonian side, and coming up with what I hoped were thoughtful answers. A particular question that had been bugging me: the claim that society had somehow "moved on" from Christianity, and that life had become progressively better as the Church's power had waned. I found an answer that satisfies me - have you?

I have to admit that I was nervous as things got started. I was glad that Mike had the intro - I could wait to see how things would go while he was on the hot seat. We had all heard the intro before - I had actually read his latest draft that morning. I knew that it was good, so I could take notes and see how the crowd was reacting. The crowd was large - all the chairs in the room were taken. It seemed that there were a lot more attendees on the Humanist side than the Chesterton side. But all told, there were over one hundred people in attendance. But it was not a hostile crowd. There were a few heads that consistently shook horizontally whenever the Chestertons spoke, but, by and large, the faces were generously listening.

The Humanists intro was pretty good. There were some inconsistencies, some bits of misinformation, and some claims that were slightly puzzling. But it was thoughtful, and it was a far cry from the usual fare of bits-and-parts bickering that usually makes up these discussions. Our opponents, Mr. David Niose and Mr. Brian Seitzman, were both gentlemen, well spoken, and generous.

I was somewhat dismayed that the schedule veered from what I thought it was going to be - instead of a five-minute rebuttal, we were asked to pose questions to the other side. As was evident from the rest of the questions that were posed that night, it was much easier to ask questions of the Catholic side, since there were more substanital issues and stances to which the Church subscribes. Trying to get a Humanist to answer questions about Humanism was somewhat like nailing jello to the wall. What it means to be a Humanist is fairly simple and stated in a few short phrases that do not provide traction for probing inquiry. I would have liked very much to have a few minutes to respond to the claims made by the Humanist side during the debate - especially things surrounding the fractured nature of Christian churches, some bits of misinformation about Christianity, and to discuss the reductionist nature of the Humanist position.

During the Humanists concluding remarks, I had to look down and take notes to prevent saying something like "Oh, my God" really loud. After an hour and change of debate, it was humorous, if exasperating, to hear their primary debater say that there could be no rational basis for religious belief and to basically blame it on a maternal guilt complex. Not shocking, but shocking, at the same time.

I call the debate a success, and here's why: we stated our position cogently without sinning against charity in the course of the debate. Well, I may have venially sinned against charity at several points in the debate, but luckily they only occurred between my ears and I didn't act on any temptation to smack anyone over the head. Victory!

Seriously, it was a success because we went into the lion's den and stated a case while preserving the bonds of charity. I don't care if anyone was converted (I do, really) they should have been!
One particularly difficult moment was when one of the Humanists got up, ostensibly to ask a question, and started reading what I presumed to be quotes from Hitchens' book on Mother Teresa. Total bunk, which was not unusual for the night, but I feel a certain delicacy in matters surrounding Mother Teresa. My response is akin to what one would feel if someone were insulting someone's mother. It is neither gentlemanly nor dignified to comment on such matters, and I feel the best, and most appropriate, response is a bonk on the head. Alas...

But three cheers for the Chestertons for their performance on that memorable evening, and especially for Mr. Michael Hughes, our chosen champion and fidei defensor. He acquitted himself admirably on the field of battle, and has shown himself trusty in pitched intellectual struggle.
The next debate will probably be in January or February of next year. (Mr. Niose, the Humanists' primary, humorously remarked that December is a busy time, even for a Humanist.) My wife recommended a more focused topic. I'm open to all comers - let me know what you think. Oh, and let me know what you're willing to do, as we'll be responsible for far more this time around. We can't be outdone in hospitality by the Humanists, who did, in fact, put on quite a nice evening.

Humanist Debate

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I'd like to solicit your ideas for the upcoming debate with the Greater Worcester Humanists, which is scheduled for Saturday, September 25 at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Shore Drive. As a primer to conversation, I would like to present you with some material from the Humanists' website, outlining the virtues and doctorine of the Humanist movement. You'll remember that the topic of the debate will be "Christianity or Humanism, Which Holds the Better Hope for Humanity". Here are the aforementioned links:

What is Humanism, by Fred Edwords
http://worcester.humanists.net/home/humanism

Humanist Manifesto III - 2003
http://www.americanhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_III

Humanist Manifesto II - 1973
http://www.americanhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_II

Humanist Manifesto I - 1933
http://www.americanhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_I

Other Humanism Essays and Links
http://www.americanhumanist.org/Who_We_Are/About_Humanism

Michael Hughes and myself will be participating in this first debate. We'll be meeting on August 20th at the Old Timer in Clinton to discuss our strategy, and anyone who is interested in participating on that evening is welcome to provide us with their feedback. We'll also be holding something of a "mock" debate in the course of the meeting on September 11th.

In the meantime, please provide some feedback on the Humanist literature referenced above. The wider the circle of intellectual vision we can bring to this debate, the better off we will be. You can leave your comments by clicking on the link below that says "# COMMENTS". If you have any questions about leaving comments online, shoot me an email.

Best,

AFZ
Prez.

On Localism

The following is an article that was published on the T&G website on my new blog, Locally Grown. I thought you Chestertonians might find it interesting.

Best,

AFZ


Did I mention that I’m an amateur philosopher? Well, I am. I won’t bore you with all of my philosophical meanderings, but I will make some case for the philosophical basis for localism. By 'localism' I mean an emphasis on your immediate community in terms of economics, recreation, and politics. Our culture has become more and more 'global', which is not per se a bad thing. Globalism has brought significant economic growth for large swaths of world population. But, I would argue, globalism has over-extended itself in many areas to the detriment of, again, large swaths of world population.

The guiding principle, for me, in discussions of 'globalism' vs. 'localism' is something called the Principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity states that all institutions should function at the lowest hierarchical level at which they are effective. Stated simply, it says that “Small is Beautiful”. There are some things, like building jets, that can’t be done effectively at a local level. But there are other things, like making hamburgers, that can be done quite well at a local level. And not only can hamburgers be made locally, there will be more benefits to sourcing, producing, and buying your burgers locally.

There are many reasons for this, but here is a briefly stated list that outlines the benefits of buying your burgers (or art supplies, or tires, or real estate services) from a local, independent business:

1. Several studies have shown that when you buy from an independent, locally owned business, rather than a nationally owned businesses, significantly more of your money is used to make purchases from other local businesses, service providers, and farms - continuing to strengthen the economic base of the community.
2. Non-profit organizations receive an average 250% more support from smaller business owners than they do from large businesses.
3. Where we shop, where we eat, and have fun - all of it makes our community home. Our one-of-a-kind businesses are an integral part of the distinctive character of this place.
4. Locally owned businesses can make more local purchases requiring less transportation and generally set up shop in town or city centers as opposed to developing on the fringe. This generally means contributing less to sprawl, congestion, habitat loss and pollution.
5. Small local businesses are the nation's largest employer, and often provide employees with more opportunities for professional growth, personal development, and advancement.
6. Local businesses often hire people with a better understanding of the products they are selling and take more time to get to know customers.
7. Local businesses are owned by people who live in this community, are less likely to leave, and are more invested in the community’s future.
8. Local businesses in town centers require comparatively little infrastructure investment and make more efficient use of public services as compared to nationally owned stores entering the community.
9. A marketplace of tens of thousands of small businesses is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term. A multitude of small businesses, each selecting products based not on a national sales plan but on their own interests and the needs of their local customers, guarantees a much broader range of product choices.
10. A growing body of economic research shows that in an increasingly homogenized world, entrepreneurs and skilled workers are more likely to invest and settle in communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character.

I'm not anti-growth, and as I said, I believe that some businesses best function at a large, international level. But I believe that we have been sold a bill of goods when we are told that it's all about the bottom line. Sure, McDonalds can get me a hamburger in two minutes for 99 cents. But, to paraphrase Hilaire Belloc, "Industrialism has ensured that all over the world men can enjoy exactly the same bad wine." McDonald's has ensured that we all have access to the same bad hamburgers, almost to exclusion.

It's hard to take a stand for localism without some bashing of globalism. But the point is not to bash, but to point out the benefits of local, independent businesses. Personally, I find the investments that I make with local businesses always pay off. Even though I can't buy a can opener anywhere but Wal Mart or Target, there are lots of opportunities to support local businesses. I think it's an investment you won't regret.

Faithful Presence

A fairly interesting discussion of the Christian impact on culture is to be found on Christianity Today's website here.

The article is an interview with James Davison Hunter, author of To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Mr. Hunter's primary hypothesis is that cultural impact is not merely a factor of the quantity of material that a group or school contributes to the public sphere, but also a factor of the vehicles by which it arrives there. An interesting contrast brought up in the discussion is the fact that Christian publishing generates revenues of $10 billion annualy but is not at all discussed in the New York Times Review of Books. It is an example of structures of cultural elites controlling access to the cultural discussion.

How is it that American public life is so profoundly secular when 85 percent of the population professes to be Christian? If a culture were simply the sum total of beliefs, values, and ideas that ordinary individuals hold, then the United States would be a far more religious society. Looking at our entertainment, politics, economics, media, and education, we are forced to conclude that the cultural influence of Christians is negligible. By contrast, Jews, who compose 3 percent of the population, exert significant cultural influence disproportionate to their numbers, notably in literature, art, science, medicine, and technology. Gays offer another example. Minorities would have no effect if culture were solely about ideas, but that's clearly not the case.

His prescription is something he calls "Faithful Presence", as well as a thoughtful dialogue with the centers of cultural influence. Both are, I think, Chestertonian in nature.

Faithful Presence, in essence, is an abandonment of Nietzschean principles of 'will to power' by allowing Christian influence to permeate society through, well, actual Christian charity. According to Mr. Hunter, looking to change the culture directly is an adoption of the principles of power that Christians are railing against in the first place.

This does not constitute an abandonment of dialogue, but rather an insertion of Christian ideas into the intellectual conversation in a way that is inherently Christian in execution. So not just the end of the intellectual discussion (or the discussion of law, morals, art, etc.) must be Christian, but the means by which that discussion is engaged. The whole process must be recognizable as Christian, throughout.

This is where Mr. Hunter's thinking is reflecting G.K. Chesterton the most. Chesterton was not only known as a Christian in thought, but he was also perceived to be a Christian in his style, manner, bearing, and in all his dealings. He was a joy to be around, even when he disagreed with you.

It reminds me of a maxim of St. Josemaria Escriva: "Be firm in doctorine, but pliant in manner." The combination of charity in thought and deed is thoroughly Chestertonian.

The stakes are high, in that it is our ability to be Christian in the public sphere that is at stake. But I believe that Mr. Hunter's thesis is a useful reflection that reminds us that Our Lord said that as Christians we would be known by our love for each other.

Mary and the Convert, Part II

I have here rashly undertaken to write on a subject at once intimate and daring; a subject which ought indeed, by its own majesty, to make it impossible to be egotistical; but which does also make it impossible to be anything but personal.

"Mary and the Convert" is the most personal of topics, because conversion is something more personal and less corporate than communion; and involves isolated feelings as an introduction to collective feelings. But also because the cult of Mary is in a rather peculiar sense a personal cult; over and above that greater sense that must always attach to the worship of a personal God. God is God, Maker of all things visible and invisible; the Mother of God is in a rather special sense connected with things visible; since she is of this earth, and through her bodily being God was revealed to the senses. In the presence of God, we must remember what is invisible, even in the sense of what is merely intellectual; the abstractions and the absolute laws of thought; the love of truth, and the respect for right reason and honourable logic in things, which God himself has respected. For, as St. Thomas Aquinas insists, God himself does not contradict the law of contradiction.

But Our Lady, reminding us especially of God Incarnate, does in some degree gather up and embody all those elements of the heart and the higher instincts, which are the legitimate short cuts to the love of God. Dealing with those personal feelings, even in this rude and curt outline, is therefore very far from easy. I hope I shall not be misunderstood if the example I take is merely personal; since it is this particular part of religion that really cannot be impersonal. It may be an accident, or a highly unmerited favour of heaven, but anyhow it is a fact, that I always had a curious longing for the remains of this particular tradition, even in a world where it was regarded as a legend. I was not only haunted by the idea while still stuck in the ordinary stage of schoolboy scepticism; I was affected by it before that, before I had shed the ordinary nursery religion in which the Mother of God had no fit or adequate place. I found not long ago, scrawled in very bad handwriting, screeds of an exceedingly bad imitation of Swinburne, which was, nevertheless, apparently addressed to what I should have called a picture of the Madonna. And I can distinctly remember reciting the lines of the "Hymn To Proserpine," out of pleasure in their roll and resonance; but deliberately directing them away from Swinburne's intention, and supposing them addressed to the new Christian Queen of life, rather than to the fallen Pagan queen of death.

"But I turn to her still; having seen she shall surely abide in the end; Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend."

And I had obscurely, from that time onwards, the very vague but slowly clarifying idea of defending all that Constantine had set up, just as Swinburne's Pagan had defended all he had thrown down.

It may still be noted that the unconverted world, Puritan or Pagan, but perhaps especially when it is Puritan, has a very strange notion of the collective unity of Catholic things or thoughts. Its exponents, even when not in any rabid sense enemies, give the most curious lists of things which they think make up the Catholic life; an odd assortment of objects, such as candles, rosaries, incense (they are always intensely impressed with the enormous importance and necessity of incense), vestments, pointed windows, and then all sorts of essentials or unessentials thrown in in any sort of order; fasts, relics, penances or the Pope.

But even in their bewilderment, they do bear witness to a need which is not so nonsensical as their attempts to fulfill it; the need of somehow summing up "all that sort of thing," which does really describe Catholicism and nothing else except Catholicism. It should of course be described from within, by the definition and development of its theological first principles; but that is not the sort of need I am talking about. I mean that men need an image, single, coloured and clear in outline, an image to be called up instantly in the imagination, when what is Catholic is to be distinguished from what claims to be Christian or even what in one sense is Christian.

Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our Lady did not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things, and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity.

The instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her; when I finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.

Mary and the Convert

Before the month of May is out, I thought I'd share a lengthy piece by G.K. on Our Lady in two parts. I present Mary and the Convert, from The Well and the Shallows. -AFZ

I was brought up in a part of the Protestant world which can best be described by saying that it referred to the Blessed Virgin as the Madonna.

Sometimes it referred to her as a Madonna; from a general memory of Italian pictures. It was not a bigoted or uneducated world; it did not regard all Madonnas as idols or all Italians as Dagoes. But it had selected this expression, by the English instinct for compromise, so as to avoid both reverence and irreverence. It was, when we came to think about it, a very curious expression. It amounted to saying that a Protestant must not call Mary "Our Lady," but he may call her "My Lady." This would seem, in the abstract, to indicate an even more intimate and mystical familiarity than the Catholic devotion. But I need not say that it was not so. It was not untouched by that queer Victorian evasion; of translating dangerous or improper words into foreign languages.

But it was also not untouched by a certain sincere though vague respect for the part that Madonnas had played, in the actual cultural and artistic history of our civilisation. Certainly the ordinary reasonably reverent Englishman would never have intended to be disrespectful to that tradition in that aspect; even when he was much less liberal, travelled and well-read than were my own parents. Certainly, on the other hand, he was entirely unaware that he was saying "My Lady"; and if you had pointed out to him that, in fact, he was generally saying "a My Lady," or "the My Lady," he would have agreed that it was rather odd.

I do not forget, and indeed it would be a very thankless thing in me to forget, that I was lucky in this relative reasonablenesss and moderation of my own family and friends; and that there is a whole Protestant world that would consider such moderation a very poor-spirited sort of Protestantism. That strange mania against Mariolatry; that mad vigilance that watches for the first faint signs of the cult of Mary as for the spots of a plague; that apparently presumes her to be perpetually and secretly encroaching upon the prerogatives of Christ; that logically infers from a mere glimpse of the blue robe the presence of the Scarlet Woman--all that I have never felt or known or understood, even as a child; nor did those who had the care of my childhood. They knew nothing to speak of about the Catholic Church; they certainly did not know that anybody connected with them was ever likely to belong to it; but they did know that noble and beautiful ideas had been presented to the world under the form of this sacred figure, as under that of the Greek gods or heroes. But, while putting aside all pretence that this Protestant atmosphere was actively an anti-Catholic atmosphere, I may still say that my personal case was a little curious.

On St. Philip Neri

Yesterday was the Feast of St. Philip Neri, a truly Chestertonian saint. Over at the First Thoughts blog, there is a lengthy excerpt of the Venerable John Henry Newman reflecting on St. Philip's contribution to Church and culture. Here's a sample:

St. Philip Neri ... lived in an age as traitorous to the interests of Catholicism as any that preceded it, or can follow it. He lived at a time when pride mounted high, and the senses held rule; a time when kings and nobles never had more of state and homage, and never less of personal responsibility and peril; when medieval winter was receding, and the summer sun of civilization was bringing into leaf and flower a thousand forms of luxurious enjoyment; when a new world of thought and beauty had opened upon the human mind, in the discovery of the treasures of classic literature and art.

He saw the great and the gifted, dazzled by the Enchantress, and drinking in the magic of her song; he saw the high and the wise, the student and the artist, painting, and poetry, and sculpture, and music, and architecture, drawn within her range, and circling round the abyss: he saw heathen forms mounting thence, and forming in the thick air:—all this he saw, and he perceived that the mischief was to be met, not with argument, not with science, not with protests and warnings, not by the recluse or the preacher, but by means of the great counter-fascination of purity and truth. He was raised up to do a work almost peculiar in the Church. . . . for Philip preferred, as he expressed it, tranquilly to cast in his net to gain them [souls]; he preferred to yield to the stream, and direct the current, which he could not stop, of science, literature, art, and fashion, and to sweeten and to sanctify what God had made very good and man had spoilt.

The rest is here.