The Bosque Boys

Monday, May 19, was the Feast Day of St. Dunstan. Among his accomplishments was a political practice that is part of our heritage of British Liberty.

From Brits at Their Best: full post

In AD 973 Dunstan created a coronation ceremony for Edgar that is still used today. The people affirmed their willingness to acclaim him King; and he in turn swore an Oath to the people. The Coronation Oath that Edgar swore embodied the practical ideals of justice -

“First, that the church of God and the whole Christian people shall have true peace at all time by our judgment; second, that I will forbid extortion and all kinds of wrong-doing to all orders of men; third, that I will enjoin equity and mercy in all judgments.”

In this ceremony the King commits himself by sacred oath to perform justice. By this fact of public oath, the monarch can, at least in principle, be held accountable for his conduct in office. Absolute Monarchy, in its widest sense, is thereby forbidden. The King himself must hold to an external standard other than his own will.

Thank you, Saint Dunstan.

The United Methodist Church is a very large and important body of Protestants, with churches scattered all across America. At their recent General Conference, a meeting of leaders that occurs every 4 years, some significant actions were taken. Links and quotations are from the official news site of the UMC.

On homosexuality:

Delegates to the 2008 General Conference on April 30 rejected changes to the United Methodist Social Principles that would have acknowledged that church members disagree on homosexuality.

Delegates instead adopted a minority report that retained language in the denomination’s 2004 Book of Discipline describing homosexual practice as “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

The adopted wording in Paragraph 161G also states that “all persons are individuals of sacred worth, created in the image of God,” and that United Methodists are to be “welcoming, forgiving and loving one another, as Christ has loved and accepted us.”

The rank-and-file made themselves heard on this issue. Notice that the floor adopted the minority report. Interestingly, the photo accompanying this story shows a picture of weeping delegates whose preference was defeated.

Divestment in Companies Doing Business with Israel:

United Methodists have rejected attempts to have the denomination endorse divestment from some companies that do business in Israel as a way of addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The actions occurred during General Conference, the church’s top legislative body, meeting April 23-May 2 at the Fort Worth Convention Center.

A number of petitions, including five from U.S. annual (regional) conferences, were folded into one petition on "divestment" that called on the denomination’s pension board and finance agency "to review and identify companies that profit from sales of products or services that cause harm to Palestinians and Israelis and begin phased selective divestment from these companies." That petition was rejected May 2 by General Conference delegates as they voted on a special consent calendar.

Support of the People of Tibet, Taiwan, and The Sudan:

United Methodists have officially affirmed support for “the people of Tibet and their struggle for independence and autonomy.”

A new resolution on Sudan called “Sudan: A Call to Compassion and Caring” was part of the consent calendar approved on April 29. It advocates for justice for all Sudanese, calls upon United Methodists “in every country” to encourage their governments to aid development of a more just economic system in the Sudan and asks church members to “examine all methods of protest and solidarity before undertaking them” to ensure that none of their actions cause violence.

Also approved by consent was a petition reaffirming the denomination’s support “of the democratic aspirations and achievements of the people of Taiwan." Church members are encouraged to become educated about contemporary issues related to Taiwan and the “One China” policy and promote the rights of Taiwanese “for stability, security and self-determination of its own status in the family of nations.”

Abortion:

The United Methodist Church will continue to “sit at the table” and retain its 35-year membership with the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

In a May 2 vote of 416-384, the 2008 General Conference affirmed continued membership of the denomination’s Board of Church and Society and the Women’s Division of the Board of Global Ministries in the organization.

Notice how close was the vote: if 17 votes out of 800 had changed to pro-life, then the outcome would have differed. Perhaps as the liberal wing declines in numbers, and the conservative wing grows, we can anticipate a different outcome in four years.

For other news articles see here.

I have written often concerning Religion and Public Policy. At greatest length in a series here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

If the topic of Religion and Public Policy, or, how Religion can operate in the American political process, interests you, then I recommend this article from the most recent Princeton Seminary Bulletin by John R. Bowlin, the Professor of Reformed Theology and Public Life at the Seminary.

His most provocative thesis is this: our nation has had, and will have again a religious establishment. Following Thomas Aquinas, he asserts that human beings naturally link politics and religion into a self-supporting whole--religion supports the order of rule and vice versa whithin a public piety. Our nation, historically, has had unofficial religious establishment(s). Our last one was the Cold War linkage of mainline Protestantism with true Americanism that came apart in the late 20th century. We now are in what he regards as a temporary period between religious establishments. The question: what will the next religious establishment be? He doubts it will be some variety of Christianity.

For myself, some claim that our current multiculturalism/ religious&moral relativism supported with postmodernist philosophy and expressed in an ironic ethos is itself a religious establishment. One certainly can define "religion" broadly enough to encompass this milieu. But it would not surprise me to see a more explicitly religious establishment arise. And it would not surprise me if it were post-Christian.

Last night as I was setting our clock radio, I caught these words from Dr. Dean Edell over WBAP Dallas/Ft. Worth. He was commenting on something the pope said about science, and made this statement (close to a quote, but maybe not exact) : science deals with things that are real, religion deals with faith. Let's think about this assertion.

First, science deals with things that are real. Leaving aside the fact that for a time science dealt with "ether" rather than a vacuum between planets and stars, he seems to imply that everything real can be dealt with by science. Really? Science can deal with what our senses can perceive directly or indirectly, and our minds comprehend and theorize about. But is that all there is? In other words, it is a statement of faith to believe that there is nothing real beyond what science can deal with. A challenge: prove, by scientific method, that there is nothing more than what science can deal with. Can't be done. A good scientist who understands the philosophy of science would not claim that all of reality can be comprehended by science.

Second, religion deals with faith. Yes it does. But, religions make truth claims. In so doing, religions make claims about reality. Now this reality may or may not concern things that science also can investigate, but nonetheless, statements are made as facts, not simply as opinions. And who said that science is the only allowable method of checking truth claims?

As for what the Pope said, I am not sure what Dr. Edell referred to. Perhaps some of the critiques of science made by Benedict XVI, the philospher-bishop, such as this from his 2007 encyclical In Hope (in extended section. Or, more probably this address.

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This story from Britain is now a bit old, but the issue will not go away.

Scientists are mixing human and animal DNA to produce hybrid organisms.

The government says that the scientific advantages of allowing the creation of hybrid embryos for research purposes could help millions of people to recover from illness or disease.

Religious leaders, however, have argued against the bill, with the leader of Catholics in Scotland, Cardinal Keith O'Brien, using his Easter Sunday sermon to brand the bill a "monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life" which will allow experiments of "Frankenstein proportion".

I have expressed myself already on this issue here and here. Basically, I think that

One of the foundation stones of our culture has been the idea/belief that humans are unique. We hold ourselves to standards we do not apply to animals--a dog may be put down for killing a person, but will not be put on trial. A man may be charged with killing a dog, but it will not be a murder charge. We may protest the construction of a new dam on a river, but will not hold a protest at the site of a beaver dam. If while driving, the only two choices are hitting an animal, and having a head-on with another car, we run over the animal. If we are stranded with another person and a dog, and have only enough food for two persons, we feed the other person and let the dog starve, or eat it. And so on.

Animal-human hybrids raise profoundly disturbing questions. But, science has no mechanism within itself to consider whether or not something that can be done should be done. Science cannot ask or answer "should" questions. We must turn to philosophy and religion.

Q & A here from the Pew Forum.

Some excerpts:

Does anything that has happened so far suggest evangelicals will rally around a single Republican candidate?

It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s possible that it could. There are at least two candidates in the race besides Mike Huckabee that have, at one point or another, drawn significant evangelical support. One of them is Mitt Romney and the other is John McCain. Here is where a little history is helpful.
. . .

There has been much discussion and speculation about how evangelical voters might respond to Romney’s Mormon religion. Can we come to any conclusions yet?

Well, the polling evidence from last year very clearly indicated that Gov. Romney faced a challenge with evangelicals. And a lot of the things he’s done in his campaign, including his prominent speech in Texas about religion in American politics, clearly have been aimed at meeting that challenge. In the early going, we see some evidence that he did successfully meet that challenge. In Michigan, which is in some sense his home state, he won the evangelical vote. He has gotten significant portions of the evangelical vote in some of the other states, which suggests that he has been able to meet that challenge.

But he didn’t do very well in Iowa or South Carolina. And if one looks at the county-by-county breakdown of the vote for Romney and Huckabee in those states, counties with a lot of evangelicals gave Romney very few votes. In those states, Romney did well in counties that had relatively few evangelicals. Additionally, in Iowa, Romney did well in counties that had a lot of Catholics. So at least in those two states, there is some indication that the concerns about Romney’s Mormon religion had an effect at the ballot box.

Reciprocity, or, thoughts on being an idolatrous infidel

What he said.

Link from Instapundit.

Being just and righteous and even being Christian is not exactly the same thing as being "nice."

Read the Gospel of Mark straight through at a sitting (it's not that long). Now, decide just how the word "nice" applies to Jesus. For an online version click the link.

One of the common modern heresies is that Christians never should give offense, should be "nice." B*llsh*t.

"It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism." G.K. Chesterton in "Three Foes of the Family" found in the collection of his essays The Well and the Shallows.

Conservatives in the United States tend to equate Capitalism with THE WAY GOD INTENDED THINGS TO BE, and think it A NECESSARY ECONOMIC EXPRESSION OF FREEDOM. Since Conservatives also tend to think that THE FAMILY IS THE BEDROCK OF SOCIETY, few conservatives see any necessary conflict between Capitalism and the Family. But, one of the great Conservatives of the Anglosphere--G.K. Chesterton--believed that Capitalism was doing the family to death in the modern age. We would do well to listen to him.

Since his thought will seem strange to contemporary American conservatives, I have taken small, slow steps toward Chesterton's quote given above. Previous posts in this series:

An Introduction to Chesterton, the British author, Roman Catholic, and curmudgeon.

An Introduction to Chesterton's economic thought: Distributism--placing and keeping ownership of the means of production in as many hands as possible; in effect, an economy of small farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans.

Chesterton's view that Market Capitalism estranged people from God's creation by turning everything into a commodity.

Brief historical overview of American evangelicals gradual embrace of capitalism.

Chesterton's economic beliefs are congruent with his Roman Catholicism, putting into print the ideas laid out in Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor."

Now, let's turn to Chesterton's essay, "Three Foes of the Family."
(more below)

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Trying to understand the interplay of religion and public life in the United States? A great place to start would be this address by Wilfred McClay at the recent Pew Forum.

An excerpt:

So let me begin with two propositions. The first one is that in the American experience, the separation of church and state, which by and large we acknowledge as a rough-and-ready principle, does not necessarily mean the separation of religion from public life. Another way of saying this is that America has a strong commitment to secularism, but it is secularism of a particular kind, understood in a particular way.

Second, that the United States has achieved in practice what seemed impossible in theory: a reconciliation of religion with modernity, in contrast, as I say, to the Western European pattern. In the United States religious belief has proven amazingly persistent even as the culture has been more and more willing to embrace enthusiastically all or most of the scientific and technological agenda of modernity. Sometimes the two reinforce one another. Sometimes they clash with one another, but the American culture has found room for both to be present. I won't prophesy this will always be the case, but it's a very solid relationship of long standing.

And perhaps I should add-and I did this for my Turkish audiences [he had recently been on a speaking tour of Turkey]; it utterly baffled them, but it shouldn't be quite so baffling for you-that all this makes sense in light of the fact of [a] third proposition: that American institutions and culture are intrinsically and irreducibly complex-not chaotic, which is of course what they see-but complex.

The complexity takes a particular form: that politics and culture are designed around an interplay of competitive forces, which is, I think, the key to understanding a lot about the United States. The Constitution was based on the assumptions that in any dynamic society there would be contending interest groups, and [that] one could best counteract their influence by systematically playing them off against one another. That was the reasoning behind separation of powers. That was the reasoning behind the federal system. These different parts of the government are supposed to fight with one another. That's how the Constitution is supposed to work.

For the previous posts on this series click here.

"It cannot be too often repeated that what destroyed the Family in the modern world was Capitalism." G.K. Chesterton in "Three Foes of the Family" found in the collection of his essays The Well and the Shallows.

Today's post: Chesterton's religion and his economics.

G. K. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, and he took the doctrines and practices of his faith seriously, including their implications.

His explanation "Why I Am a Catholic" is reprinted here. Some excerpts:

The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that . . ." As, for instance, (1) It is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior; in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth; as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man; even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside; working through wills and not laws; and so on.

Or I might treat the matter personally and describe my own conversion; but I happen to have a strong feeling that this method makes the business look much smaller than it really is. Numbers of much better men have been sincerely converted to much worse religions. I would much prefer to attempt to say here of the Catholic Church precisely the things that cannot be said even of its very respectable rivals. In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth.

If you wish to pursue Chesterton's attraction to the Roman Catholic Church, see his work The Catholic Church and Conversion which can be found here.

One of the truths, or perhaps better, one aspect of the Truth, that Chesterton wrote he heard in the Roman Catholic teaching, was economic truth. To quote at length from The Catholic Church and Conversion:

We did not really like giving up our little private keys or local attachments or love of our own possessions; but we were quite convinced that social justice must be done somehow and could only be done socialistically. I therefore became a Socialist in the old days of the Fabian Society; and so I think did everybody else worth talking about except the Catholics. And the Catholics were an insignificant handful, the dregs of a dead religion, essentially a superstition. About this time appeared the Encyclical on Labour by Leo XIII; and nobody in our really well informed world took much notice of it. Certainly the Pope spoke as strongly as any Socialist could speak when he said that Capitalism "laid on the toiling millions a yoke little better than slavery." But as the Pope was not a Socialist it was obvious that he had not read the right Socialist books and pamphlets; and we could not expect the poor old gentleman to know what every young man knew by this time--that Socialism was inevitable. That was a long time ago, and by a gradual process, mostly practical and political, which I have no intention of describing here, most of us began to realise that Socialism was not inevitable; that it was not really popular; that it was not the only way, or even the right way, of restoring the rights of the poor. We have come to the conclusion that the obvious cure for private property being given to the few is to see that it is given to the many; not to see that it is taken away from everybody or given in trust to the dear good politicians. Then, having discovered that fact as a fact, we look back at Leo XIII and discover in his old and dated document, of which we took no notice at the time, that he was saying then exactly what we are saying now. "As many as possible of the
working classes should become owners."

Continued below.

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