Two such opinions hardly qualify as the last word, but in this case they’re clearly shared by most evangelical leaders who’ve spoken out to date (the rare exceptions include James Dobson, who’s said Mormonism still is a big deal).

In other words, the answer is no – it is almost certainly not 1960 all over again. Breathless pundits in search of religious intolerance are just going to have to look elsewhere for their quarry. ~Vincent Carroll, Rocky Mountain News

This little piece is so delightfully counterintuitive that one would expect Jonathan Chait to be its author.  No, an intrepid columnist at RMN has determined that a couple of guys with ties to evangelicals in Colorado don’t think Romney’s Mormonism will be a problem, which pretty much clinches it.  What about that Rasmussen poll that said 53% of evangelicals and 43% ofall voters would never consider voting for a Mormon?  That’s all a lot of hearsay!  Not like the scientific study of what two guys in Colorado think.

To gain stability – on domestic or foreign fronts – he’s willing to trade more than it is worth. Trying to prop up Gorbachev, Baker opposed American support for Balkan [bold mine-DL] freedom, nearly getting into a fistfight with fellow cabinet member Jack Kemp over it. Now, when the Iranian mullahs are beset by falling oil production and growing internal unrest, Baker wants to make it harder for Iranians to overthrow the mullahs just like he wanted to make it harder for Latvia and Lithuania to shake off the shackles of the Soviets. ~Jed Babbin

Ah, yes, the Lithuanians and Latvians now stand atop their Balkan peaks, basking in their freedom!  Well, Baltic, Balkan, whatever–it’s all the same to Jed.  Could Jed find either region on the map?  I wonder. 

In response to this, I propose Larison’s First Law of Foreign Policy Commentary: if you are too ignorant to know basic geography, your opinions on foreign policy are completely irrelevant.

One thing missing from all this discussion of religion and politics has been the increasingly evangelical character of American politics over the past generation. The key president here is not the impeccably secular John Kennedy, but rather Jimmy Carter, who presented his faith as central to his personal identity in a way that few presidents had done before him. In the wake of Carter’s presidency, and the rise of the evangelical Right, religion has come to the center of American politics, and, as such, deserves to be taken seriously, and questioned seriously.  

Richard Lyman Bushman gives a good example of not taking it seriously enough when, in his exchange with Linker, he uses the notion of freedom of conscience as a rhetorical trump card against any questioning of Romney’s Mormonism ( e.g. “Mitt Romney’s insistence that he will follow his own conscience rather than church dictates is not only a personal view; it is church policy.”) ~David Bell

This post from Mr. Bell is a good deal better than the last one, though still not without its own problems.  Fortunately, his colleague Jacob Levy had already discovered Prof. Fox’s response, which should improve the quality of the discussion over there a good deal.

In this post Mr. Bell thinks that Prof. Bushman has not taken religion seriously enough when he invokes the Mormon understanding of conscience, but here I think he has missed Prof. Bushman’s entire point in bringing up conscience.  Prof. Bushman mentions the role of conscience in response to Linker’s fear that the prophetic church authorities, which worry Linker because of their theologically instability, will be able to dictate to Mormon politicians how they should govern.  The point of Bushman’s explanation of how Mormons are supposed to make moral judgements is not to make a Mormon’s religion irrelevant or a way of pulling out a “rhetorical trump card” against any questioning of Romney’s religion.  He is attempting to explain that Mormons are actually obliged to make their own judgements, and that this tends to preclude the aforementioned danger of church authorities dictating policy positions to a Mormon public servant.  Regardless of whether the church authorities would try to do this (and, historically, they have not tried very hard), Mormon politicians would be obliged to judge the matter at hand for themselves.  As Prof. Bushman notes in his latest response:

Consider the Church’s own renunciation of control over the consciences of Mormon politicians [bold mine-DL]–a stand Catholics have not taken. Are you saying this is a false front? Keeping in mind the injunction in Mormon scripture to submit to lawful government, is there any real basis for concern? 

Would the politicians’ judgements be informed by their upbringing and life in their church?  Obviously.  It is so obvious, in fact, that it hardly needs to be mentioned.  What Prof. Bushman’s remark about conscience was meant to accomplish was to counter Linker’s suggestion that Mormon politicians are somehow potentially open to receiving commands from their church elders on matters of public interest and will blindly follow what those authorities tell them to do.  Prof. Bushman says this is flatly wrong and that official church teaching proves this.  Is Prof. Bushman right about this?  If he is, Mr. Bell really has no reason to object to this point.

Damon Linker should have written his book about Mormons and politics.  It might have been equally over-the-top and outlandish in its way, but it would have generated a lot more interest than The Theocons, not least because it ties in directly to presidential politics. 

The cover article got the attention of Chris Matthews, who talks about it with David Gergen:

MATTHEWS:  On another front in the Republican Party, Mitt Romney is about to announce an exploratory committee tomorrow.  And what happens, the “New Republic” runs a front page story on the cover of their magazine about the dangers of a Mormon president.  That is pretty rough stuff.  And I read the long piece.  I don‘t think it does the damage they thought it would, but boy, what a long, exhaustive attack on someone‘s religion.

GERGEN:  Can you imagine if someone who had been—when John Kennedy was running, if the “National Review” opened up the great big package on the cover the dangers of having a Catholic in the White House?  Bill Buckley would never have done that.  Of course, he is Catholic, but nonetheless, that is just so below the belt and so inappropriate. 

MATTHEWS:  Is this the season we‘re entering?

GERGEN:  Well, I hope not because the mormonism issue is there.  It‘s lurking there, but it seems to me it‘s been entirely unfair to have this kind of whisper campaign that says a Mormon can‘t win.  You know, the conservatives believe that Mormons are engaged in witchcraft. 

You know, you hear that buzz out there, and, you know, Mitt Romney may or may not be your choice for candidate.  But he‘s got one heck of a record of accomplishment over a lot of things over time, that deserve to get a lot more attention before we ever turn to the question of whether the Mormonism is right or not.  In a day when we‘re burying Gerry Ford, I mean, I just find this stuff so…

I have had plenty of negative things to say about Linker’s article on Mormonism, but the Matthews/Gergen response is just pitiful, as is the reply from people at TNR.  Here is David Bell on their Open University page:

Linker’s critics are taking the predictable line that Romney’s religion is a private matter, and that any discussion of it therefore amounts to unacceptable prejudice. Linker is “below the belt,” to quote that concentrated essence of conventional wisdom known as David Gergen.

But most of his critics aren’t saying that, unless by “Linker’s critics” we mean Chris Matthews and David Gergen.  What the critics, including Profs. Fox and Bushman, are saying is that Linker gets extremely carried away with his logical unraveling of what Mormon acceptance of continuing prophecy must mean for their relationship with the government and what their millennarian expectations must mean for their politics.  They are saying that Mormons’ millennial hopes of Christ’s return, regardless of where it takes place, are very much on the back burner of actual Mormons’ concerns.  Prof. Bushman acknowledges how terribly logical Linker is being given the basic premises from which he starts, but finds all of his claims about the potential political dangers of prophecy in Mormonism entirely unfounded in the real world.  The critics insist that Linker needs to pay attention to what real Mormons have done in the public sphere and how LDS leaders have not noticeably interfered in the decisions of their members who serve in public office.  Because he does not do this enough, he gives the impression that there is some chance of political interference from church authorities when there is virtually no chance of it at all.  In this, he is amazingly wrong, and they take him to task for it.  But neither of them at any time says that no one should talk about Romney’s religion or that those who say critical things about it are prejudiced. 

As far as I know, David Gergen, ever the boring voice of the complacent middle that knows no strong conviction (except that all strong convictions are dangerous), is the only person to have suggested that the criticism was inherently inappropriate and unacceptable with the implication that it is an essentially private matter.  It was Chris Matthews, and not anyone who has engaged with the substance of the article, who called it “rough stuff.”  Why rough?  Because it raises questions–questions that thoughtful Mormons do not shy away from, but which seem to unsettle Chris Matthews quite a lot.  This is a silly response.  I think most people, Mormons and non-Mormons alike, agree: if you want to play with the big boys in national politics, you have to be able to hold your own in a fight and not run off in a fit when someone is less than superciliously nice to you, and this includes when they talk about your religion.  This is especially the case when you, the candidate, have decided to make your faith fair game by incorporating it into your campaign. 

Mr. Bell’s focus on Matthews and Gergen allows him to make the debate into one where Linker’s critics are supposedly refusing to engage in the substance of the matter, which results in an automatic pass for Linker’s hyperbolic and unfounded claims.  By holding up Matthews and Gergen as somehow representative of the responses to Linker, which they are not, he makes it seem as if all of Linker’s critics are accusing Linker and TNR of religious bigotry.  “Please make the mean, old David Gergens stop saying bad things about us!” he seems to be crying. 

So far as I can tell, very few critics have made any such accusations, and even fewer have tried to take refuge in the lame argument that “religion is a person’s private business” as Mr. Bell claims.  Perhaps for someone who publicly advocates that religion is purely private and personal, that might be a little more true, but, for any religious conservative or religious liberal who believes that his religion does or should inform public policy in any way, his religion becomes the legitimate subject of scrutiny and inquiry.  Mr. Bell is right when he argues this, but his entire post gives the impression that some band of harsh critics is relentlessly harrassing TNR with charges of prejudice, which is complete nonsense. 

Virtually no one, except maybe David Gergen, is really questioning TNR‘s motives in running the piece.  No one questions Linker’s motives.  As he has shown, he is not really prejudiced against any particular religion, but he is against any kind of religion in the political sphere.  I do not assume that the editors there are being any more prejudiced towards Mormons than they would be towards any conservative religious person, for whatever that’s worth.  But Mr. Bell is not being serious when he refers to “Gergen, et al.,” when the only person he is really responding to is Gergen.  He gives the impression of an entire gang of people accusing TNR of religious prejudice, when all he really has to go on is David Gergen being bothered by anything so controversial as a discussion about religion.

My copy of Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics As If Families Mattered arrived today, and I look forward to digging into it over the weekend (Nativity services permitting) and being prepared to join, albeit from afar, the conversation that will be beginning next Monday at the blog.

From an E.F. Schumacher quote cited at the start of Chapter I:

If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied.  Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools.  Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.

Jim Antle is making sense in his latest at American Spectator:

In this case, Mormons have a long, bipartisan tradition of responsible secular governance: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (whose ascension doesn’t seem to have caused any concern), Democratic Congressmen Mo Udall and Dick Swett, longtime Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, and Romney himself don’t appear to have taken all their cues from Salt Lake City. There is no evidence that any of them “view U.S. politics as a stage on which the ultimate divine drama is likely to play itself out, with a Mormon in the leading role.”

The evidence may not matter to some liberal secularists. They have proven they are not resistant to making faith-based political arguments themselves.

Prof. Bushman takes up the rhetorical cudgel again against Damon Linker:

I am asking you not to focus so narrowly on what you take to be the logical implications of revelation. That is what critics of fanaticism have been doing for centuries. Look at the historical record of the past century as Mormons have entered national politics. Is there evidence of manipulation? Consider the Church’s own renunciation of control over the consciences of Mormon politicians–a stand Catholics have not taken. Are you saying this is a false front? Keeping in mind the injunction in Mormon scripture to submit to lawful government, is there any real basis for concern?

Unfortunately, Prof. Bushman’s appeal may not go anywhere.  The secular critics of suppoedly dangerous religious folk seem to be saying: “We don’t watch what you say or what you do–we watch what we say you must inevitably do.”

Ramesh Ponnuru remarks on what Linker got right:

One thing I think Damon Linker got right is that the potential negative reaction to a candidate’s Mormonism is not limited to evangelical conservatives. Thinking about those voters alone, however, I wonder if Romney would be better off if the Mormon church did not present itself as Christian. The suspicion of heresy seems to be part of what riles people up; it wouldn’t be present if Mormonism were just another religion.

Well, yes and no.  It bothers Christians that Mormons claim to be Christians (with the probable implication that they are more or less just like all other Christians, only better Christians and not apostates) while holding what are clearly stunningly heterodox beliefs, but what bothers some Christians just as much are the beliefs themselves.  For Christian voters, for whom a candidate’s faith is an important element of why they choose to support or oppose him, someone who is an infidel is hardly to be preferred over a heretic, though there will probably be strong opposition to either one.  Were the LDS to say, somewhat improbably, “We’re not at all Christian the way everyone else is Christian and we’re proud of it,” it would not make LDS beliefs any more acceptable to those who already find them troubling.  Earlier today I was commenting on Prof. Nassif’s article that referred to “the Great Tradition.”  By any reasonable definition, that Great Tradition does not even encompass Assyrians and non-Chalcedonians, much less Mormons.  I think you could reasonably expect a number of conservative Christians, and not just evangelicals, to view with skepticism the candidacy of any self-styled Christian who does not belong to “the Great Tradition.”  Someone might object that this approach would also compel many religious conservatives to look askance on the candidacies of other non-Christian candidates, but I assume that is rather the whole point of this controversy.

Wilfred McClay has tried to do three things in the first part of his new Commentary piece: 1) tell us that conservatism is still alive and kicking (which, I would note, is something that few conservatives themselves doubt); 2) the elections were not a repudiation of conservatism (about which almost everyone was agreed before McClay wrote his article); 3) George Bush is really some kind of a conservative.  To show this, he chooses different critics at random, taking on some from the Washington Monthly symposium at certain points, completely changing the subject in bringing in Phillips and Linker (the latter is not, as far as I can tell, someone who claims to be a conservative, at least not anymore) and then throwing in the ridiculous Andrew Sullivan just for laughs. 

Since the first two claims are fairly redundant, except as excuses for kicking conservative dissidents whom Mr. McClay seems to dislike at least partly because they are dissidents, that leaves the third bit as something of a new contribution.  The “Bush is really way more conservative than Reagan” article has become a type all its own, to which some of us will reply, based on Mr. Bush’s egregious record, “Obviously not” or, if we have no strong attachment to the myth that Reagan was a great conservative, “So what?”  As it happens, Mr. McClay tries something a little different here.  His argument is, as near I can tell, “Bush is just as conservative as Reagan was when Reagan wasn’t being conservative.  So there!”

Before we get to that, let’s take a detour.  The first two arguments are not without interest.  After having asserted that the dissidents compare Bush to Reagan and find him wanting, even though Reagan himself was hardly a paragon of conservatism, he then tells us that the “querulous” Richard Viguerie (he of the “Time For Us To Go” Seven in Washington Monthly) used to criticise Reagan for his poor treatment of conservatives.  In short, Mr. McClay thinks he has hit on something by showing that conservatives like Mr. Viguerie found President Reagan to be insufficiently conservative in the 1980s (which he was) and today find Mr. Bush to be even less conservative than President Reagan, when all he has done is help confirm that the critics have been consistently opposed to Republican Presidents who either corrupt or abandon conservatism for their own policy ends.

Mr. McClay seems very concerned that we have all forgotten many things (lest we forget, lest we forget, he seems to be shouting at us):

Americans in general too easily forget such times of struggle and division, making them over into placid and uncomplicated memories. A bipartisan example of this creative amnesia occurred at the time of Reagan’s death in June 2004 and spilled over into that year’s presidential campaign. Television journalists and Democratic candidates alike repeatedly contrasted the idyllic spirit of unity at home and cooperation abroad that allegedly prevailed during the cold-war years under Reagan with the national disunity prevailing over the Iraq issue under Bush. Many Americans, even some old enough to know better, seem actually to have credited such ridiculous assertions.

We forget, too, that predictions like Joe Klein’s have been made again and again since 1981. We forget that the current charges of “theocracy” were thoroughly rehearsed in the Reagan years, when Reagan’s open support for the beliefs of evangelicals was passionately decried, and his affirmation of the veracity of the Bible was used against him (notably in the 1984 campaign) to suggest that he would recklessly seek to bring on Armageddon. And we forget that not only Reagan but every Republican President since Eisenhower has been solemnly adjudged a cretin by the national press during his time in office, only—even unto the supposedly irredeemable Richard Nixon—to be turned into a wise leader after his departure from power.

We also forget that the Reagan administration itself, far from being happily unified, was driven by internal battles between “pragmatists” and “ideologues,” conflicts that prefigured many of the policy battles of the present. And we forget that, outside the administration, Reagan got plenty of grief from his own Right as well. 

Of course, “we” don’t forget any of this, if by “we” he means conservatives opposed to Mr. Bush.  The telling thing about Mr. Bush is that he gets grief from conservatives for some of the same things that outraged conservatives when Reagan did them (e.g., amnesty) and that he has virtually no conservative accomplishment to his name to offset his terrible record on most everything else.  In other words, “we” know that Reagan wasn’t terribly conservative, but “we” also remember that Reagan was a lot more conservative than Bush has ever been.   

As the recent nostalgia-fest surrounding President Ford’s funeral should remind us (lest we forget!), the deaths of former Presidents are becoming the occasions for collective forgetting and mass deception about what actually went on during the administrations of the deceased executive.  President Ford?  He was a national healer and champion of bipartisan compromise!  President Reagan?  We were behind him all the way!  No doubt in twenty years some people will look back on this administration as a period of eight years of solidarity and comity, but only because things will have become so much worse that Dobleve will appear wise and sane compared to the contemporary administration. 

There has perhaps been a little too much Reaganite nostalgia among conservative dissidents who should be feeling nothing so much as deja vu when they look at the Bush administration (oh, remember the good old days…when the neocons were gaining in prominence and we were giving amnesty to illegal immigrants!).  Nonetheless, it is not simply nostalgia that makes these people look back favourably on President Reagan and that also makes them find Bush to have governed in a far less conservative fashion.  They need only look at what Mr. Bush says and what he does to recognise that he has almost nothing in common with most people who call themselves conservatives.  By a more traditional conservative standard, he does not remotely qualify.

In fact, Mr. McClay essentially cedes the point about abandoning conservative principle: “Okay, sometimes principle has been abandoned, but it was always in a good cause!”  What standard, then, is Mr. McClay using to vindicate his “pragmatic” politicians who abandon conservative principle?  The standard of serving “broadly conservative ends.”  His ideas of what constitute “broadly conservative ends” are largely horrifying to behold.  Consider:

One such principle, according to some conservatives, is the limitation of executive power. But Thomas Jefferson, who himself held a strict-constructionist view of executive authority, violated that view in order to undertake the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation and made it a continental power. Abraham Lincoln made extensive use of executive authority, including the suspension of basic civil liberties, in order to prosecute the Civil War and save the Union. During the Eisenhower administration, the exercise of federal authority to enforce basic civil rights for blacks in the Jim Crow South righted a historical wrong that seems unlikely to have been righted in any other way.

There shouldn’t have to be any qualification that only “some conservatives” think limiting executive power is an important political principle, but unfortunately today that qualification is essential.  In any case, I cannot think of three examples better designed to prove the critics’ case.  In each case, we are faced with an arbitrary use of executive power that did some measure of damage to our republican and federal system of government.  In no sense can we say that the first two served “broadly conservative ends,” since the first contributed to the weakening of the Republic and the second to its destruction.  In the third, Mr. McClay invokes just the sort of justification that paves the way for every lawless tyranny: “righting a historical [sic] wrong.”  In abusing the powers of the executive, each of these Presidents contributed to different degrees to the corruption of the Republic and the consolidation of power in an abusive central government.  In the case of Lincoln, his arbitrary uses of power contributed to the permanent annihilation of the decentralised confederation of states and its replacement with an effectively unitary nation-state.  Nationalist can admire him for that if they want, but we should recognise that it is the action of a liberal revolutionary, a Red Republican like Garibaldi, and not the work of a conservative. 

With the expansion of the Purchase, the seeds of future centralisation and ruin of the Republic were sown.  While the New England Federalists who protested this were early opponents of a feared “slaveocracy,” they were also tapping into the very logic of Antifederalist and Jeffersonian critiques of the new federal government that a large Republic could not long endure.  They were proven right.  (The Republicans were preoccupied with acquiring vast tracts of arable land in the service of their agrarian ideal and were apparently insufficiently wary of the potential for future consolidation that territorial expansion would inevitably bring.) Territorial expansion appears good and proper to a nationalist, but it is not at all obvious that it is necessarily a “broadly conservative end.”

Comparing Mr. Bush’s happy democracy-talk with President Reagan’s unfortunate enthusiasm for the same, Mr. McClay asks:

If Bush has abandoned conservatism in saying such things and acting upon them, then what are we to make of Reagan?
 

Well, what “we” make of President Reagan is that he was unfortunately too enthusiastic about democracy but was never so foolish or wild-eyed as to think that America should be in the business of toppling other governments and installing democratic regimes around the world.  He never said idiotic things about ending tyranny around the world, and he never committed us to a large-scale war to advance such crazy notions.  President Reagan’s democracy-talk was mostly harmless and to some degree beneficial insofar as it served as an inspiration and an example to other nations to fashion their own democratic governments without much help from anyone else.  Much of the democracy-talk is forgiveable because President Reagan rarely let it overtake his assessment of what was in the national interest, and he usually did not identify the promotion of “freedom and democracy” with the national interest.  To the extent that he did, and to the extent that neoconservatives were involved in the pushing foreign policy in that direction in his administration, President Reagan made grave mistakes, not least by setting precedents that could then be used by more radical and less intelligent men later on. 

As for the second part of Mr. McClay’s article, readers will already know what I think of references to the national identity being based in “principles and propositions” and the idea that a country “stands for” something.  This talk is like nails on the chalkboard for me.  Perhaps when I have more time (and when I finally stop cringing), I will be able to say more about that.

Schumacher, along with that other great subsidiarist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, championed the idea of self-limitation. This necessary virtue for a healthy economy, a healthy culture and a healthy environment, is enshrined in the everyday realities of family life. Families teach us to be selfless and to sacrifice ourselves for others. It is these very virtues that are necessary for the practice of the economic and political virtues so sadly absent from our ailing and deteriorating world.

The increasing atomisation of society in the direction of self-centred individualism not only undermines the family but undermines the present and future health of the economy and the environment. The elevation of so-called “rights” over responsibilities has further accentuated the rise (preceding the fall) of heedless hedonism with its rampant consumption of the world’s resources.

In short, therefore, and to conclude these opening remarks, all true economics begins with the Family and ends with the Family. Small is still beautiful because families still matter! ~Joseph Pearce

Of course, faithfulness to the truth of the Great Tradition, not organizational continuity, is what counts most. My point is simply that those who value classical faith will increasingly engage with Orthodox churches, which incarnate the Great Tradition day by day as a living tradition. I’m not arguing that the Great Tradition is the exclusive property of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It is not. Early church fathers, mothers, ascetics, councils, creeds, art, music, and spirituality are the rightful heritage of all orthodox Christians—Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox alike. There is no room here for Orthodox triumphalism or romanticism. All orthodox believers share a common ecumenical heritage. But few historians would dispute the conclusion that in comparison to the 20,000 Protestant denominations in existence today, the Orthodox community can most justifiably claim to be the fullest heir apparent of the Great Tradition. ~Bradley Nassif

Via Rod Dreher

I think Prof. Nassif’s is right when he suggests that those inclined to study early Church history and the formative centuries of Christian doctrinal development are probably going to be drawn to Orthodoxy.  Certainly, there is a much greater likelihood that a thorough study of early doctrine will draw someone to Orthodoxy or Catholicism once he recognises that formal statements of doctrine do not conflict with Scripture and are, in fact, a reaffirmation of the same truths expressed  in the technical language of theological definitions.  He will be drawn to one or the other of these confessions when he becomes familiar with the truth that most of the literary production of the Fathers is made up of commentary on the meaning of Scripture and that most serious doctrinal disagreements arose out of vying interpretations of certain passages or the methods by which disputing parties were interpreting Scripture.  False oppositions between revelation and “the inventions of men” will break down and seem absurd to him, and he will no longer regard Tradition as some unfortunate growth that needs to be removed to get back to the “real” Faith.  As he discovers that the fourfold meaning of Scripture allows for a more complete, richer and more beautiful vision of God’s revelation, he will become disenchanted with the limited dimensions of both strict literalism and the sentence-chopping nightmare that is high criticism.  So I think it is very possible that those who learn these things will be led to engage with and eventually embrace Orthodoxy. 

But, as Prof. Nassif’s article already hints, the number of people for whom this is relevant or even possible is relatively small.  This approach was extremely important and meaningful for me, but it is necessarily a fairly bookish, academic and intellectual route that simply does not apply to most people.  It does not even apply all that often to evangelicals.  In my experience, many converts to Orthodoxy find such a route to be very much a “Western” kind of conversion–a thing of the mind and not of the heart, if you will–and they are often keen to talk about experience rather than doctrine.  Church history is not unimportant to them, but you might be surprised at how relatively little knowledge of it some of the most evangelical converts to Orthodoxy have (to which they will respond that the “cradle” Orthodox don’t know all that much, either, which is in many cases unfortunately true).  There is nothing really wrong with emphasising experience, since it is a living Faith we are supposed to be witnessing, but I would simply note that the approach Prof. Nassif describes is one that relies heavily on acquiring “the Great Tradition” through words and books rather than images, liturgy and in the silence of prayer.  Contrary to the conventional prejudice against dogma and book-learning, I think this is a very good way to enter into any tradition and I have a hard time understanding how you fully acquire a religious tradition without engaging with its core writings to some significant degree. 

This approach Prof. Nassif describes may lead to an explosion of Orthodox intellectuals and scholars, some of whom we already see in such prominent Anglophone converts as Jaroslav Pelikan, David Hart and, most recently, the great English patristics scholar Andrew Louth (and, if rumours are to be believed, Sir Steven Runciman before his death in 1999), but it will necessarily have limited reach.  At the risk of sounding rather passive and non-evangelistic, I would note that the Liturgy probably does more on a weekly basis to draw in the unchurched and the disenchanted than anything else the Orthodox are or could be doing, and it is not for nothing that virtually every introductory work on Orthodoxy makes use of the (almost certainly apocyphal) tale from the Russian Primary Chronicle that purports to relate the story of how the Rus’ became Orthodox.  As many reading this will probably already know, this is the story of the Grand Prince, Saint and Equal to the Apostles Vladimir sending emissaries to different lands to learn about the major religions of the time to determine which one St. Vladimir should accept.  The emissaries report on each in turn, and each time they come back with discouraging news (the Islamic prohibition on alcohol especially puts off the Rus’ian ruler) until they report of their journey to Constantinople and their experience of the Liturgy in Hagia Sophia, about which they famously said: “We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.”  Anyone who has to been to a full hierarchical Orthodox Liturgy at a cathedral knows what they were talking about.  To my mind, that is the greatest means of Orthodox evangelism, because it is the most integrated and complete expression of the Faith that everyone experiences on a regular basis.      

None of this means that the Orthodox should necessarily eschew evangelising by other means.  There is truth in the charge that we tend to go along with the stereotype that says that evangelism means preaching hellfire and banging down people’s doors, which some of us use as an excuse for not making much of an effort, but in America in particular I suspect that the marginal position of Orthodoxy for much of the last century, the small number of adherents and its close associations with ethnic immigrant communities all worked to encourage Orthodox Christians here to keep a low profile and not be seen as meddlesome or aggressive in their proselytising.  The Orthodox in America remain such a small religious minority that I think there will continue to be resistance against any move towards a more “evangelical” Orthodoxy.  If this were to be the Orthodox century, it would be a great thing, but on this I’m afraid I will have to remain a skeptic for the time being.

Justice was never ours to render; Saddam, and Iraq, committed no crimes against us. Some of these crimes were in fact abetted or willfully ignored by us, hence the truncated nature of his trial and the haste of his execution, before the defendant was given the chance to embarrass the United States. Saddam would pass out of the custody of the U.S. military just hours before he would hang, and no doubt not until every assurance had been made that there would be no delay in sending him to the gallows. This was not justice, this was an expression of power. Worse, it was an uncertain, ignoble, and unconfident expression of power.

Justice is for the aggrieved, for the people; for nations there is only the law, accomodation, or war. That’s why the triumphalism, now so pathetically muted in passive acknowledgement of its absurdity, surrounding the capture and conviction of Saddam Hussein stinks of dishonesty. Originally we, and the Iraqis, were supposed to be sated by this offering; now it takes place with the same furtive, anxious air that accompanied the transfer of sovereignty. ~Dennis Dale