Tag Archives: Asceticism

Review of Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics

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(Source: Religion & Liberty vol 22, no 2)

My review of Ross Douthat‘s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (ISI, April 2012) ISBN: 978-1439178300. Hardcover, 352 pages; $26.00.

Among other things, Ross Douthat argues in his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, that Americans have become a “nations of narcissists.” He sees the evidence for this in our becoming a “nation of gamblers and speculators, gluttons and gym obsessives, pornographers and Ponzi schemers, in which household debt rises alongside public debt, and bankers and pensioners and automakers and unions all compete to empty the public trough” (p. 25).

Looking around, it is hard to dispute this. The free market is no longer really and truly free but distorted by crony capitalists who collude with government regulators to further their advantages at the expense of their neighbors. Likewise under the guidance of a materialistic anthropology that merely seeks to throw money at the tragedy of human suffering, our social safety net is no longer safe or social for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

And yet, while I appreciate his analysis, I’m not sure I agree with Douthat that we have become a nation of narcissists. It isn’t that I don’t agree that narcissism is a problem in America, it is, but it is not an American problem as such. Much less is it unique to our era. Self-absorption – one of my professors in graduate school referred to it as selfaggrandizement, is constant temptation in our fallen state. The central struggle of our life in both its personal and social dimensions is precisely to resist the lure of our self-centered and self-aggrandizing desires. Continue reading →

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Theology of the Soda Ban

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It’s the combination of values that is puzzling: a quasi-religious zeal to eliminate soda, salt, and saturated fat on the one hand, and the toleration-nay, promotion-of grave offenses against human dignity and health on the other. When premarital sex, homosexuality, contraception, and abortion are encouraged in health class, isn’t Michael Bloombergs crusade against sugary drinks a bit odd? As the Church is backed into a corner because of its teaching on sexuality, and its institutions face increasing pressure to compromise and cooperate with abortion, gay marriage, and contraception, and after the city bans religious groups from using public property, lawmakers are getting moralistic about food. Its a good thing if people eat less fat and sugar, to be sure, but lets put first things first.

…

What distinguishes true religion from false is that true religion binds one to Another, whereas false religion binds one to the self, even when there are taboos, fetishes, idols, and (almost literally) forbidden fruit. The healthy polis is one where both soul and body are able to flourish, and the healthy heart is the Christ-like heart, regardless of how well it holds up on a treadmill.

Read the whole essay here.

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Relativism and Religious Liberty

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Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO writes:

For far too long, we have tolerated insulting public conversations about our moral responsibilities in economic life. Something similar has been happening in the religious-freedom debate over federal threats to conscience, most notably the Department of Health and Human Services’ mandate for insurance coverage of contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. One side is trying to drown out serious concerns about religious liberty with cries of the “war on women,” in the hope that single women aren’t discerning voters and will take the charge at face value. Of course, proving that cynical insinuation wrong is our work as citizens. We must educate ourselves and others to ensure that our politics are worthy of the dignity of the men and women they exist to serve

. Based on comments here, those I’ve received privately and from what I’ve read on other sites, I think think it fair to say that there isn’t a single position on a wide range of public policy matters that is shared by all, or even most, Orthodox Christians. While this is lamentable in moral matters it is a good thing in practical or prudential matters. Let me go explain. In the prudential order, not only can we disagree among ourselves we should disagree. No one person can truthfully claim to have the single right answers in prudential matters. Yes there certainly are wrong answers both practically and morally. But how best to bring the Gospel to our culture or how best to foster a just social order, these are practical questions that don’t lend themselves to quick and definitive answers. Why is this? Because the practical order is dynamic. No matter how well I understand things the truth of the situation and its myriad details is always more than my grasp of it. Moreover because human beings are free the situation is constantly shifting. This is why, to return to the quote at the top of the post, a robust religious liberty is essential to a free and just society. We disagree not only in practical matters but on those of ultimate significance. But, and I hear you ask, are you advocating relativism? No, I’m not. Far from it in fact. There is such a thing as objective truth in not only religion but morality as well. Acknowledging our differences is not relativism but humility. It is only when I see freedom as an end in itself that I fall into relativism. We live in a fallen world and so we, I, will abuse freedom. I frequently confuse liberty with license. Religious liberty like economic freedom is abused when it becomes the goal. We distort both when we forget that they are means to pursuing the good, the true, the just, and the beautiful and all to foster human thriving. And so we disagree among ourselves and thank God for it! Not because there is no truth (the very fact of our disagreement testifies that there is) but because I need the intellectual asceticism inherent in your challenge of not just my views but of me. Relativism, I would suggest, is nothing more or less than my refusal to accept the ascetical struggle at the heart of the intellectual life and the life of social engagement lived in a manner commensurate with human dignity. In Christ, +Fr Gregory

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My Ruth Institute Podcast: Asceticism and Human Freedom

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Here’s the link to my interview with Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. the founder and President of the Ruth Institute. We’re talking about asceticism and human freedom. Ruth Institute Podcast.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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Cui Bono?

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For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

(Mark 8:36, NKJV)

You can buy this t-shirt!

During the discussion after Metropolitan Jonah’s talk at AEI (here), a young man from Occupy DC said that he thought Christians need to participate in the protests. While I think we can, and should, admire the young man’s concern for the economically poor, I think it would be helpful to examine a bit more closely his assertion that the Christian community has a moral obligation to join in the current round of protests.

Not, mind you, that there isn’t cause of concern about the shape the American economy; there certainly is. What I question is not the seriousness of our situation, or even if Christian should engage in social protest but how we might want to think about such protests.

Writing at the Evangelical Portal at Patheos [How Christians Ought to "Occupy" Wall Street (and All Streets)], Jordan Ballor points out that Christians must resist the temptation to identify the current OWS protesters with what he calls “such heroes of the Christian tradition as John Calvin, St. Francis, and John Wesley.” Doing so is not only an anachronism, it overlooks the fact that while “the Christian gospel has inherently social implications and that in some cases direct political action and social activism are entailed, at least for individual Christians working out of their own convictions,”, such “involvement in and support of the Occupy protests do not represent a normative way for Christians of all convictions to engage the world.” At its best, protest is ”in addition to,” not “instead of,” an evangelical witness rooted in personal holiness.

Let me explain. Continue reading →

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Marxism, Libertarianism or Asceticism?

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In light of Metropolitan Jonah‘s recent take at the American Enterprise Institute (see here and here), I thought this from The American Conservative essay on libertarianism of interest:

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake.

There are many varieties of libertarianism, from natural-law libertarianism (the least crazy) to anarcho-capitalism (the most), and some varieties avoid some of the criticisms below. But many are still subject to most of them, and some of the more successful varieties—I recently heard a respected pundit insist that classical liberalism is libertarianism—enter a gray area where it is not really clear that they are libertarians at all. But because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hill is a kind of commonplace “street” libertarianism, I decline to allow libertarians the sophistical trick of using a vulgar libertarianism to agitate for what they want by defending a refined version of their doctrine when challenged philosophically. We’ve seen Marxists pull that before.

This is no surprise, as libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.

Read the rest: Marxism of the Right.

 

A just economic order, to say nothing of a just civil society, requires not only good laws but a virtuous citizenry.  Good laws in the hands of bad men, as Plato reminds us, makes us worse than slaves, they make us fools. Continue reading →

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Kristin Rudolph: Metropolitan Jonah Warns of Perilous Consumerism

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In light of this year’s ‘Black Friday,’ when some stores opened at midnight, others were the site of violent grabs for cheap bath towels, and one woman injured 20 individuals with pepper spray to get a gaming console, it would be difficult to argue America does not have a consumerism problem. Some, such as the Occupy Wall Street folks, might say this issue comes from a “greedy” capitalist system and could be solved by more government control of corporations. But the problem of excessive consumerism is deeply personal, and cannot be solved politically, according to Metropolitan Jonah, Archbishop of Washington and Metropolitan of All America and Canada for the Orthodox Church in America.

In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, the Metropolitan discussed the challenges Christians face in a consumerist society. He explained “the real cultural battle is not against consumerism or capitalism, it’s against secularism,” which leads us to live by “values economically determined.” “Consumerism is perhaps the most powerful tool of secularism,” because it results in the “reduction of the human person to an object: a buyer and consumer,” the Metropolitan said.  Relationships and community are increasingly defined “as wanting the same stuff,” as the cult-like following of Apple illustrates. Buying iPods, iPhones, and iPads is often “about buying into a community,” and this generation “treats each other as if they were actually iPods …we want our friends to look like people in commercials.” Continue reading →

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Enigmatic turkeys, silent fish, and the mystery of love

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In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished. G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered (1908)

 

 

Continue reading →

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Metropolitan Jonah: Asceticism and the Consumer Society

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Metropolitan Jonah at AU 2011

The Acton Institute has  posted the text of Metropolitan Jonah’s Acton University talk  “Asceticism and the Consumer Society.” His Beatitude’s remarks, delivered on Thursday, June 16, at the plenary session looked at consumerism and worship to “opposing movements in the human heart.” In the course of his talk, Metropolitan Jonah cited Orthodox Christian theologian Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s definition of secularism as “in theological terms … a heresy … about man.”

Man was created with an intuitive awareness of God and thankfulness to Him for the creation. In return, the creation itself was made to be a means of communion and revelation of God to man. Man was thus created as a Eucharistic being, the priest of creation, to offer it in thanksgiving to God, and to use it as a means of living in communion, the knowledge and love of God. Man was created to worship. In our fallenness, turning from God to created things as ends in themselves, we lost the intuitive knowledge of God and our essential attitude of thankfulness to Him. Secularism is rooted in this loss of divine awareness, the darkening of our intuitive perception of the creation as the sacrament of God’s Presence. It is a denial of our essential reality as human beings, and our reduction to purely material animals. Thus the refusal to worship and give thanks, to offer the creation in thanksgiving back to God, is a denial of our very nature as humans.

What Schmemann is testifying to is that “worship is truly an essential act, and man an essentially worshipping being.” It is “only in worship” that I can find “knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world.” As the etymology of the word orthodoxy suggests, the true worship of God and the true knowledge of God converge and are together become the foundation of obedience to Him.

Metropolitan Jonah, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, said the “fruit” of secularism is despair. The cure for this despair is the Cross of Jesus Christ:

The Christian ascetical life, that is the life of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, the works of mercy and obedience, is the application and the appropriation of the Cross to my life. It is the means by which I both enter into a life of communion with God and become myself a sacrament of that communion for others. This is possible because at its most basic level, asceticism “is the struggle of the person against rebellious nature, against the nature which seeks to achieve on its own what it could bring about only in personal unity and communion with God.” Our “restoration” to a life of personal communion with God and so our personal “resistance” to the powers of sin and death, “presuppose a struggle” within each human heart that is often lacking in contemporary society and even our churches.

You can read Metropolitan Jonah’s “Asceticism and the Consumer Society” on the Acton site.

Sitting in the audience that night, I can testify to the very enthusiastic reception his Beatitude received both for his words and for his gentle and pastoral spirit.  During the 45 minute address, there was barely a sound to be heard in the audience of approximately 625 conference participants. After he finished his Beatitude received a standing ovation and answered questions from the audience for about 30 minutes.

From any perspective one wishes to look at it, his Beatitude’s presentation at Acton University was a great success.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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Happiness, Religion and the Ascetical Imperative

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Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America–and How We Can Get More of It by Arthur C Brooks, an economist. Brooks applies the empirical research methods of his disciplines to the question of what makes us happy. He makes the provocative argument that there is a correlation between personal and social happiness on the one hand and religious faith and a life of personal sacrifice on the other.

Whether traditional or progressive in their theology, religious believers tend to be happier that their secular neighbors. In part this seems to be because religious believers are committed to a transcendent or higher purpose that allows them to find personal meaning in their lives especially in times of hardship.

Likewise, a high level of personal happiness is associated with a life of sacrifice. While the initial sacrifice might not make us happy and might even cause us some discomfort (e.g., raising children or giving blood), over the long term people who tangibly serve others are significantly happier than those who do not live as generously.

Taken together this suggests (to me at least) that the higher purpose offered by religion—even the Christian religion—is not sufficient for a happy life. Our faith must also be ascetical. The empirical research confirms what the Church knows; asceticism is a key element for a happy life both for us personally and as a community.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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