Oh man, is that humiliating, or what? I cannot believe I’m typing these words, but with the start of the primary and caucus season only a few weeks away, it looks like the only way Mitt Romney, with many millions in the bank and years of experience running for president in his background, can win this thing is if Newt Gingrich blows himself up. Fortunately for Romney, there’s a significant chance of that happening, Newt being Newt. But still! Ed Kilgore:

But even more importantly, Romney’s shocking weakness against Gingrich suggests that his supposed trump card, “electability,” doesn’t really matter all that much to Republican voters. Given present trends, that’s not as surprising as it might seem. Ever-increasing majorities of likely Republican primary voters are expressing the opinion that they’d prefer a nominee who reflects their values and views to one with a better chance of winning next November. And even among the minority who say they care most about electability, it should by no means be assumed that that concern translates into support for Romney, given the recent ascendancy of the conservative dogma that run-to-the-center moderates are guaranteed losers and the parallel belief—born of the party’s exceptional contempt for Barack Obama—that any true conservative is destined to win in 2012. To put it bluntly, the conservative activists who dominate the Republican presidential nominating contest are split between those who simply don’t believe adverse polls about Gingrich, and those who would rather control the GOP than the White House, if forced to choose.

People are starting to say that a Gingrich nomination would be a Goldwater ’64 moment for the Republican Party: a walloping defeat suffered by an ideologically pure candidate whose candidacy opened the door for a thorough transformation of the GOP, and the ultimate rise and triumph of Ronald Reagan. I can’t see it. Love him or hate him, Barry Goldwater was a conviction politician. Far as I can tell, the only thing that distinguishes Gingrich, a creature of Washington who has extraordinarily slippery principles, is that he’s an articulate despiser of the things and people that GOP ideologues despise. That’s not much of a base for rebuilding anything.

Readership of this blog dips on weekends, so I worry that many of you will not have seen my post titled “The Cult of Wall Street.” In it, I mentioned something a Catholic priest told me, about an old monsignor of his acquaintance who, in a conversation about some seminarians headed off to study at the NAC in Rome, said, “Those poor boys. They leave here in love with Jesus, and come back in love with the Church.” A commenter, Bones, just posted the following on that thread:

Rod, your anecdote about the monsignor is painfully true, at least in my experience.

I had 2 friends apply for the seminary after university: 1 was somewhat of an outspoken and prideful lad, the other a more humble and nervous fellow. Prior to joining the seminary, the former decided to take 6 months to work with mission priests among the poor in the streets of Tijuana, while the latter was invited to a summer-long seminar by George Weigel to be held in Krakow. So the one friend goes and works among the poorest of the poor in one of the most dangerous cities in our hemisphere, and the other heads off to Krakow and listens to the movers and shakers of the American Catholic Right for 6 weeks.

It was to my dismay that when they returned and we met up, the roles had been reversed. My friend who’d worked in Mexico had become a very soft and spiritual person, and his idea of the priesthood was to basically live a life of utter servitude to all the people in his parish. The friend who’d spent his month and a half in Krakow came back enamored with the glory and splendor of the institutional church, and wanted leadership and his own journal. He was also very upset with ‘liberals’, though he never named names.

I see in the Krakow student Bones knows myself, and a temptation to which I would have been — and would be — almost helpless in the face of. I suppose it’s useful to know that about oneself. I suppose.

By the way, I listened today to a Fresh Air interview with NYT media columnist David Carr, recorded a couple of months ago but sitting dormant on my iPhone. It was quite interesting. I was taken by the last eight minutes or so of the piece, in which Carr, a recovering drug and alcohol addict, talked about his faith. From the story version:

“I’m a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of, it’s good to stand with my family. It’s good that I didn’t have to come up with my own creation myth for my children. It’s a wonderful community. It’s not really where I find God. The accommodation I’ve reached is a very jury-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in [substance abuse] recovery, I’ve been helped … by all of these strangers who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life — and one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. Not only is that not a general human impulse, but it’s not an impulse of mine. And yet, I found myself doing that over and over again. Am I, underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good? That’s sort of as far as I’ve gotten.”

He says significantly more than this, and I encourage you to listen to the interview if you have the time and the interest. Carr was fairly nervous talking about his faith. My guess is that he just doesn’t have the vocabulary, nor does he work in a professional environment in which people have faith, or if they do have faith, where they talk about it. This, to my ears, makes his discussion of faith on this interview all the more genuine, and affecting. In fact, I thought when it was over that this is probably how most people who practice religion do so. They don’t understand much about what they profess, nor do they see it as all that necessary. But they do intuit, at some level, that what’s going on here is important, and in some sense necessary. The part of the interview that I found most affecting was his characterization of religion as the thing that frees him from the prison of Self. My path to religion was rather different from David Carr’s, and I practice it in a different way. But you know, I get what he’s saying, and feel the same way. I think the reason I drank so much as a younger man, before I became religious, and certainly before I met my wife, was because it was the only way I could get free from bondage to Self. Of course it is a false freedom, only the simulacrum of freedom. I suppose an atheist would say I just traded one opiate for another. I disagree, obviously.

A mystery of faith: to find oneself, one has to lose oneself. But to lose yourself in drink or drugs is to be in a worse hell.

Micah Mattix moved his family from Switzerland (his wife’s home) back to the US in pursuit of his academic career. They now live in Houston. He wrote this last summer from Switzerland, where they were visiting:

About a week after we arrived, my oldest daughter asked me why we ever had wanted to leave such a beautiful place. I told her we hadn’t. “So why did you?” “Circumstances,” I told her. In 2005, I received a grant to do research at Yale. It was “an opportunity we couldn’t refuse,” to use an apt cliché. I resigned my assistantship at the University of Neuchâtel, we put our things in storage, packed up the kids and left, planning to be back at the end of the academic year. One year became two, two became three, and with no professional opportunities on the horizon in Switzerland, we ended up staying in the States. It just happened.

But, of course, it didn’t just happen. As is the case, I suppose, with many young people just starting out in life, profession trumped place in terms of importance—partly out of material necessity, partly out of a sense of calling, and partly, I’m afraid, out of male ambition—and so the result is that we are now living in Houston, Texas, not Morges, Switzerland. Our kids speak English much better than they speak French and understand themselves to be American, not Swiss, even though they possess both nationalities.

It’s not easy to visit a place that used to be home but is no longer—especially a place as beautiful as Switzerland. Within a day it’s as if you had never left, and you feel as if you should do everything you can to return. You question the decisions that led to moving away in the first place and wonder what life would have been like if you had chosen differently.

I have never really been to Switzerland, only traveled through the Alps on a train from Milan to Heidelberg, but I think it was without question the most beautiful landscape I’ve ever laid eyes on. In my imagination, heaven looks like Switzerland. I don’t know why.

Ever moved away from somewhere and regretted it?

He was once thought of as one of the founding fathers of contemporary American conservatism, but the traditionalist Russell Kirk, who died in 1994, would be alien to conservatism today, argues David Jenkins. Excerpt:

This type of egotism seems to be running rampant among those—particularly in the right-wing media—who profess to be conservative. I believe this unfortunate phenomenon is the by-product of traditional conservatism being shoved aside by a radical, libertarian-inspired ideology that is deeply antithetical to traditional Burkean conservatism.

This ideology elevates personal freedom and financial gain far above all other values, and in doing so, empowers its followers to dismiss or even belittle anything that does not directly serve those parochial ends.

One of our nation’s most authoritative conservative voices was Russell Kirk, an author and political theorist credited with giving rise to conservatism’s intellectual respectability in post-World War II America. President Reagan called him “the prophet of American conservatism.”

In his seminal book “The Conservative Mind, From Burke to Eliot,” Kirk pointedly described how the nation deviated from true conservatism in the 1920s. He wrote:

The United States had come a long way from the piety of Adams and the simplicity of Jefferson. The principle of real leadership ignored, the immortal objects of society forgotten, practical conservatism degenerated into mere laudation of ‘private enterprise,’ economic policy almost wholly surrendered to special interests—such a nation was inviting the catastrophes which compel society to re-examine first principles.

These words are no less applicable to the situation we have today.

Just listen for 10 minutes to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or Mark Levin and you will hear private enterprise exalted with the level of reverence and passion typically afforded religious belief, and the accumulation of monetary wealth promoted as the ultimate measure of human success.

Ambition is good and necessary, but as Kirk put it “ambition without pious restraint must end in failure.”

On the First Things blog, Micah Mattix draws our attention to a Christmas tale from the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Excerpt:

While Gogol wears his religious commitments somewhat more lightly in his earlier works than he does in Dead Souls, he nevertheless uses slapstick and stock characters in The Night Before Christmas to serious effect. He reminds us that the devil will be confounded by his own darkness and that God, in his infinite wisdom, will use simple folks, like blacksmiths, with all of their crudeness and selfishness, to participate in his vanquishing of Old Nick. God does not use the self-righteous—the merely pristinely polished life—to further his kingdom. He rarely uses the elite or the religious “pundit.” Most often, he uses the simple, the unrefined, to accomplish his work, because they, at least, will give glory where glory is due.

Here’s a link to the Amazon page for the new edition of the Gogol novella Mattix is talking about. It’s not a Christmas story for kids; it’s about the Devil coming to earth on Christmas Eve to confound the plans of a village blacksmith.

I know next to nothing about Russian literature, and I regret that. For many years I’ve intended to start reading it, but never have made good on it. I’ve made several forays into The Brothers Karamazov, but have never stuck with it. I’m not sure why, aside from the fact that I find it more difficult to stick with fiction than non-fiction. I bought a copy of The Master and Margarita a couple of years ago after reading a compelling essay about it, but I gave up halfway through. I didn’t understand it. To contemplate starting to read Russian literature makes me think of entering a thick forest, one full of mysteries and dread and enchantments, but definitely a difficult path.

Any enthusiastic readers of Russian literature among my readers? Tell us about it. What makes it distinctive? Which books are your favorites?

That is the recent testimony  before a Congressional committee of Cynthia Farahat, a Coptic Egyptian activist. She told US Congressmen about what life is like as a second-class citizen in Egypt: how Copts are persecuted, even killed, for their religion. It was like that under Mubarak, and it’s even worse now, in the post-revolutionary, pre-Islamist political order there. Why do I say pre-Islamist? Because:

Egypt’s liberals have been apoplectic over the early results from the recent elections here. Everybody expected the Islamists to do well and for the liberals to be at a disadvantage. But nobody — perhaps with the exception of the Salafis — expected the outcome to be as lopsided as it has been so far. Exceeding all predictions, Islamists seem to be winning about two-thirds of the vote. Even more surprising, the radical and inexperienced Salafists are winning about a quarter of all votes, while the more staid and conservative Muslim Brotherhood is polling at about 40 percent.

Some conservatives — including the priest on whose blog I found this video — are trying to blame the Obama Administration for the plight of Egyptian Christians. Nonsense. I wish it were that simple. As Farahat points out, the persecution of Christians by the Islamic majority happened under the rule of Hosni Mubarak, who was an American ally (and one of the biggest recipients of US foreign aid). Successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have backed Mubarak’s regime, and never found it convenient to press its client state to treat Christians better. Everyone who knew anything about Egypt knew that the old order was weak and corrupt, and bound to fall sooner or later — and that if true democracy came to Egypt, it would be Islamist, because that’s how most Egyptians think. The Obama Administration could not have stopped Tahrir Square if it had tried.

As Americans, if we are distressed by what we see unfolding in the wake of the Arab Spring, we ought to think, and think hard, about our received idea that liberal democracy is the destiny of mankind. Remember how startled the Bush Administration ideologues were to wake up and find that the voters of Gaza, in the first free and fair election there, had chosen Hamas to govern them? It’s in our cultural DNA to side with democrats against their authoritarian governments, and that prior commitment to liberal democratic principles often hides the unpleasant reality of what kind of massively illiberal results liberal democratic procedure will produce.

But we’d better get used to it in Egypt. Egypt’s future is Islamist. The only question is whether it’s going to be hard Islamist or soft Islamist. God save the Copts. The US should open its doors to Coptic emigrants fleeing present persecution, and the persecution that is to come. I would be as willing to support financially that emigration, just as I would have been willing to support the emigration of Soviet Jews. Then again, I also believe the US has a moral obligation to open its doors to Iraqi Christians fleeing Islamic persecution there, given that Washington played a direct role in bringing that about.

Given how compliant the Russian Orthodox Church has been to the Putin government, this is news:

The Russian Orthodox Church added its influential voice over the weekend to calls for a just election process in Russia. The step followed demonstrations across the country that called for a recount or a fresh vote, and outpourings from individual members of the church’s clergy, who reflected popular anger at the flawed Dec. 4 election.

“It is evident that the secretive nature of certain elements of the electoral system concerns people, and there must be more public control over this system,” said Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, the most prominent spokesman for the church, in remarks to a widely followed Orthodox news Web site. “We must decide together how to do this through civilized public dialogue.”

The pronouncement by Father Chaplin, chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s synodal department of church and society relations, was especially significant because he is often criticized as an apologist for the Kremlin. He has made several conservative statements in the past year, including a call for an Orthodox dress code in Russia, that have stirred controversy.

In a telephone interview on Sunday night, Father Chaplin said that if the church obtained proven documentation of election violations from named sources, it would be ready to take it up with government officials.

“If there are proven facts, then  of course we’re going to examine them, present them to the church hierarchy and discuss them with the Central Election Commission and other government bodies,” he said.

Father Chaplin’s remarks to the Web site appeared intended to get the church back out in front of individual clergy members’ condemnations of election rigging, a first for the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. The comments might suggest the government is accommodating the critique of the political system, perhaps because it has become too widespread to stifle.

“It’s amazing that this awakening of civic consciousness has affected the church as well, and not just lay people but clergy, too,” Sergei Chapnin, editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, said last week, on the sidelines of a seminar about Russia’s historical identity, before the new statement by Father Chaplin.

What’s so inspiring to me about this is that, if you read through the story, it sounds as if courageous parish priests are leading, and the Moscow Patriarchate has no real moral choice but to follow.

Hard to believe that next week at this time, I’ll be in my new house in St. Francisville, drinking coffee and blogging. We spent these last few days saying lots of goodbyes. Lots of goodbyes. It’s a good thing that we know we’re going to a good place, and going there to do the right thing. If not, this would be so very much more difficult — as difficult as it was to leave Dallas. Though the Dallas move was complicated by the fact that it wasn’t morally compelling, as this is — I was moving my family to what I believed at the time was a more secure job, given the chronic pessimism and instability in my industry — it’s also the case that by now, Julie and I have our resilience worn down. We’re sick and tired of moving, of telling people we love goodbye. Please God, may this be the last time.

Yesterday in line after church to kiss the cross, I thought, “This will probably be the last time I see Father Noah unless we both make it to heaven.” Then I kissed the cross in his hand, and he said, “I hope we see you again, and if not, then God willing, we will see each other in heaven.” And I thought thank God for the hope of everlasting life, and reunions that never end. Otherwise, these goodbyes would be unbearable.

Putting on our seatbelts in the church parking lot, I said to Julie, “Why are you crying?” As if I had to ask.

“That would have been a wonderful church for our kids to grow up in,” she said.

People here have been so good to us. The Philadelphia area is such a good place to make one’s home. It’s difficult to dwell on that much just now. There are boxes to pack, things to do, and a long, long drive ahead of us, which we’ll undertake on Thursday morning, bright and early.

Broncos won again today. Though quarterback Tim Tebow’s brand of public Christian piety is not my thing, I find people who get worked up over it to be whiny, cynical pains in the rear. What a pleasant surprise to find the NYT’s Frank Bruni not to be one of them. From Bruni’s column:

He reminds us that strength comes in many forms and some people have what can be described only as a gift for winning, which isn’t synonymous with any spreadsheet inventory of what it supposedly takes to win.

This gift usually involves hope, confidence and a special composure, all of which keep a person in the game long enough, with enough energy and stability, so that a fickle entity known as luck might break his or her way. For Tebow that state of mind comes from his particular relationship with his chosen God and is a matter of religion. For someone else it might be understood and experienced as the power of positive thinking, and is a matter of psychology. Either way it boils down to stubborn optimism and bequeaths a spark. A swagger. An edge.

It’s easy to be pessimistic about optimism. When peddled generically by unctuous politicians, it can seem the ultimate opiate, a cop-out and fallback when there’s nothing more substantive to sustain you. But optimism can have an impact. It’s what radiates from Tebow and fires up the Broncos. And therein lies a lesson about leadership with a resonance beyond football.

Besides, as Bruni says, when so many athletes make headlines for criminal or otherwise immoral behavior, it’s ridiculous to complain about Tebow taking a knee and saying a prayer.