Is Reasonablesness Fundamental to the Faith?

Pope Benedikt's address at University of Regensburg, Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections, has created a firestorm of protest. Perhaps a Financial Times headline caught it best: "Dry speech that snowballed around the world."


In his lecture to his old colleagues, the pope quoted a dialogue between a fourteenth century Byzantine emperor (Manuel II "Palaeologus" or "Ancient Reason") and a Persian Moslem scholar. Palaeologus's six hundred year old words offended some Moslems. Their extreme, even violent, reaction is tragically ironic.

Benedikt's speech is both a plea for reasonableness and a warning to the West against its exclusion of religion from public dialogue. The pope told the university faculty: "In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.

"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realms of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."

Benedikt quotes Manuel II Palaeologos as an occasion for citing his ancient argument that "Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. 'God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably ("syn logo") is contrary to God's nature.' "

The extremists who burned churches and who martyred Sister Leonella (Rosa Sgorbati) seem intent on confirming Manuel II's accusations. They reject the pope's call for a dialogue between cultures based on the inherent dignity of man and his fundamental right to life. Perhaps must offensive to these blood lusting fanatics is the pope's own fundamentalism: the proposition that "reason" or "reasonableness" (the German word is "Vernunft") is fundamental to faith because "Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature."

To link to the original text in German, click on the title of this post.

My Song

"The Lord is my strength and my song;" Psalm 118

This verse caught me this morning. It is from yesterday's Office. The Psalm is building up to a rousing affirmation that the Lord (Yahweh) is the Psalmist's savior in a very martial sense. The victory in verse fifteen ("There are shouts of joy and victory in the tents of the just.") is a military victory.

I asked myself how then is "song" the parallel equivalent of "strength?" The image must be a troop of soldiers going to battle singing as they march: their song feeds their will to fight; the words and the melody motivate their deeds.

In times past, songs unified men in work. This is how gangs of men build the rhythm to work in unison. Think of sea shanties! Each crew member pulled on the beat to heave the anchor.

We have lost something. In the factory, it is the discordant noise of machinery that divides us. We have mechanized the battlefield. The liturgists after Vatican II industrialized the mass.

In the liturgy, the role of chant is to join us in the rhythm of prayer: the common work of praising the transcendent God. We must relearn to pray like men.

You Are a Blessing

My children are from that generation for whom their life was legally a choice. We have gone from the biblical "Honor thy Father and Mother to "Thanks Mom for not killing me."

Julia Gorin brings this existential poignancy to our hearts and minds with her column in the August 17th Wall Street Journal.

Read. Weep. Pray and say "Thanks."



Thanks to Grace and Generations for Life for this link.

Are the Shia and The Sunnis the Real Story?

Policy Making Toward The Mid-East

At the creation of Israel, U.S. policy in the Mid-East seemed dominated by drift and the demands of demestic politics. Over the next five decades our perceived self interest in the Cold War dictated our policy. Lately, terrorism, domestic politics, and the ideology of democracy have dominated our policy.

The time has come to understand the theological substance that lies beneath the vagaries of the region's politics. This would provide policymakers a much firmer foundation for understanding the dynamics of the Mid-East. This post gives you, my reader, a jumpstart.

The Reading List

Masood Farivar reviewed Vali Nasr's new book The Shia Revival in today's Wall Street Journal. The Iranian born Nasr teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. His father, Seyyed Hosein Nasr teaches at GW.

Vali Nasr has made quite a splash lately. He has briefed some of the movers and shakers in Washington (an event reported on the front page of the Wall Street Journal) and published a major article in Foreign Affairs. Sandro Magister, one of the keenest observors of international affairs and the leading vaticanologist, provides a helpful analysis and summary of Nasr's arguments.

Magister adds an useful analysis in Repubblica, "Iran's Hegemony" by Khaled Fouad Allam, translated from the Italian. He tells us that "Khaled Fouad Allam is an Algerian-born expert on Islam who now lives in Italy where he teaches at the universities of Trieste and Urbino. He is held in high esteem by the Church of Rome and what he has to say easily finds ears that listen."

I doubt that it has occurred to either the realists or the idealists that make policy in Foggy Bottom and on Pennsylvania Avenue they need to know theology. As professor Kirk exclaimed to the Pevensies, "What do they teach them in those schools these days?"

Will Liberals Go the Way of the Shakers?

Someone has now done the numbers: Liberals have fewer children than conservatives.


The data are based on the 2004 General Social Survey. Professor Arthur C. Brooks (Maxwell School of Public Affairs, Syracuse University) calculates a "'fertility gap' of 41%." Professor Brooks' statistical vision of the future is enough to give Howard Dean strategic nightmares.

There are more fundamental things than politics. The Survey classifies people as politically liberal or conservative, yet my hunch is that analyzing the fecundity of theologically liberal and theologically traditional Americans would produce a similar result.

Why the difference?

One explanation can be found in Professor Brooks' quote from San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Mark Morford, who opines, "Maybe the scales are tipping to the neoconservative, homogenous right in our culture simply because they tend not to give much of a damn for the ramifications of wanton breeding and environmental destruction and pious sanctimony, whereas those on the left actually seem to give a whit for the health of the planet and the dire effects of overpopulation." In his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Brooks does not attribute the quotation, presumably to protect the guilty.

Perhaps a better explanation is optimism. Dr. George Richmond was a dear friend and true neighbor of mine when we lived in New Britain. We agreed on virtually nothing having to do with politics or religion, but never had a rancorous word. George once told me that it was a great act of courage to bring a child "into this world." (Grace was born in New Britain.)

Two views from the shed

If you see this world now as the only garden the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve will ever have, the future may seem bleak and children a pollution of that garden. If this world is a play and God is the screenwriter however, there is cause for optimism. More importantly, there is a world that becomes more and real than this poor imitation, if only we have the grace to follow Aslan higher up and higher in and we have the will and the courage to accept that grace.