The Bosque Boys

A marvelous essay in First Things by Joseph Bottum.

This is a long and thick essay. My suggestion, allow yourself a good half-hour to read it all at once. Read it with the discipline of trying to understand Bottum, and not allowing your mind to take off in arcs of thought inspired by his comments or allusions. Then, after thinking about it for a while, read it again slowly, in parts, with periods of silent contemplation, allowing your mind to reflect and critique.

Good stuff. Especially to those of us who think the turn away from metaphysics was bad, and who think that reflection upon traditional practice and literature is good.

This story from the Washington Post on the efforts of Archbishop Raymond Burke in St. Louis to enforce doctrinal norms.

These United States have been a challenge for Roman Catholicism since our founding. People living in a society of participatory government tend to move that assumption into church and want a voice. People living in a modernizing, and now postmodernizing, culture tend to bring that culture into church. People living in a society glorifying individualism tend to bring that attitude into church.

Of course, Roman Catholics are not unique in this. Christians around the world say that there is a reality called "American Christianity." We just have trouble seeing it here for the same reason that fish do not notice water.

I don't have enough context to comment, but this story is interesting--protesting to declare New Zealand a Christian Nation. Link from Instapundit.

Once again, the United Nations has shown itself incapable of living up to the hopes of FDR, and earlier Woodrow Wilson. The UN has proved incapable of stopping the genocide in Darfur. So, President Bush has announced that we will begin to take actions, beginning with economic sanctions. (Link from Gateway Pundit.)

As a general rule, nations operate by the law of the jungle--self-interest determines actions. The UN is a collection of nations each serving its own self-interest. (China has announced that they will continue to support the genocidal regime; they want oil and influence.) The surprise is not that the UN has been unable to stop the genocide in Darfur, the surprise is that the UN has ever accomplished anything positive.

The exception to the self-interest rule are democracies. If the voters possess some sense of idealism, then those nations may act in ways outside (rarely in contradiction to) their own self-interest. We have no real national interest in Darfur; our economic interest is served best by stable oil prices; our national self-interest probably would lead us to support the oil-producing government of the Sudan. The actions President Bush has announced are idealistic, not pure self-interest.

The time has come for us to move forward away from the United Nations, and toward a consortium of democracies. Most of the UN member states represent governments not accountable to their own people. Read the Declaration of Independence again, and the preamble to the Constitution.

By the way, the ongoing genocide in Darfur also demonstrates the humanitarian impulses of Arab governments (alert for the sarcasm impaired), and the inability of Europe to act in concert beyond its boundaries. (Though if The Sudan were a former French colony, action probably would have been taken unilaterally by France before now.)

Last Sunday I just walked in
To hear some Mainline preachin'.

Eloquent preacher sure enough,
seminary educated an' such.
But all I heard was politics and metaphor,
no hope beyond an' no Rock of Ages that was sure.

Chorus. Mainline churches goin' down. Mainline churches goin' down.
Sad news, sad news. I got them disappearin' Mainline Blues.

Other verses here , here , here.

Today I want to highlight two related causes of Mainline decline that are not directly related to liberalism.

First, a high value placed on education. The Presbyterian Church in my hometown now is a small congregation of mostly older members. When I was in high school in the early 70s it was a bit larger, with a high school youth group numbering 8-10. I think every one of these young people left our small town to attend college, and never came back. By the look of things, this church will close in about ten years. Members of mainline churches tend to value education for their families. As a consequence there are small town and working-class neighborhood congregations whose youth will not become part of their home churches as adults. They will have gotten a degree and moved to the suburbs. (In seminary I served a year as the youth pastor of Knox Presbyterian Church in Kearny, New Jersey, a working-class Scots-Irish town in north Jersey. The pastor and I joked that we were training tomorrow's suburban church leaders today.) Some of the mainline churches that will close in 2007 will be small-town or working-class churches whose children are no longer there.

Second, smaller families. Since mainline members tend to be middle-class and up, they have been choosing to have smaller families for the last couple of generations. I suspect that mainline churches have a less-than-replacement rate of births. Call it Shakerism at a slower rate.

Like roaches, Islamic terrorists pushed out of one place will pop up in another. This story on Bangladesh as the new exporter of terrorism.

My Great-Uncle Elmo was a WW1-era veteran. Armistice occured before his unit shipped from the States. Each Memorial Day he made it his mission to place small American flags by the grave of each veteran at several cemeteries near his rural home. (He was active well into his 90s.) As he grew older, he worried about who would place the flags after he was gone.

This weekend the American Legion Post in the county seat of his home county had its annual breakfast meeting at Hardees. Over coffee the men divided up cemeteries among themselves, then left in their cars and pick-ups to place flags by the veterans' graves.

I am not aware of any connection between my great-uncle and the current practice of the Legion Post, but I like to think he rests easier.

I call these people the Armies of Memorial Day. Citizen volunteers who see to it that local veterans are honored, not forgotten. Like so much of what is good about America these are not government employees doing a job; these are citizens doing what needs done.

America will be great so long as this spirit of citizenship is strong. My great-uncle did not sit back and complain that someone should do something--he simply, without fanfare, got it done. The Legion members traveling the streets and roads of their county, without reimbursement, are not waiting for a government program, they are getting it done.

Next time you think, "Why doesn't someone do something?", just get it done.

The Disgusting Fight for Political Position on the War continued yesterday (Saturday) with the President's weekly radio address and the Democratic response.

The President hit the usual and expected notes: "From Valley Forge to...Baghdad...."

In what is becoming SOP for them, the Democrats trotted out an unknown soldier and activist (Elliot Anderson, this time) to testify passionately against the war and the President and all the uninformed Americans who think they are supporting the troops by supporting the President:

"But I know I speak for many of my friends overseas when I say that the best way to honor the troops is to responsibly end our involvement in Iraq's civil war. As long as President Bush stays committed to the same policies that aren't working, it won't be easy. But I am proud to see Democrats and now some brave Republicans standing up to him."

Coverage from CBS News here.

This "old wrinkle" is becoming tiresome. Moreover, straight reporting of soldiers against the war and for the Democrats who want to end it conveys a message that the troops have soured on the war. Is this true? That is not what I hear, but I cannot know for sure. Shouldn't the mainstream media follow up on this?

My suspicion is this: if it were true, we would see an avalanche of these stories on every MSM outlet--not just some random politically interested fellow every once in a while on special occasions.

I know there are servicemen out there in our reading community--let me know your thoughts, if you can.

Another View.

I am inclined to think that the soldiers and marines in harm's way in Iraq are more like the ones Pam Hess described to Brian Lamb on C-SPAN back on 9 March, after she returned from a tour with the troops (back then I called it the "most remarkable piece of reportage and analysis I [had] seen in years").

With her voice breaking and fighting back the tears, Ms. Hess, the UPI DOD correspondent, described the "incredible idealism" and "incredible humanity" of our soldiers in Iraq. Trying to explain their "optimism and dedication," she described the "incredible savagery and violence" they confronted. Describing the shooting of a twelve-year-old boy, her emotions overcame her. Apologetic for her "unprofessionalism," she blamed the fatigue of the trip. "But you have to understand," she said, "they guys are up against real evil."

For these guys, she said, this was no longer about US national security, it was about the sense of personal responsibility our men felt for saving humans one at a time, one day at a time.

Pretty damn heroic.

I stand by my original characterization of the clip. It is available in part on YouTube here. I recommend you watch.

-----------------------------
Transcripts:

The President here.

Elliot Anderson here (transcript via Fox News, which was the only one I could find).

TEXARKANA, TX.

Explanatory Note: I am on the road and working from a laptop. Fat fingers. Small keyboad. Short sentences.

Plenty of stories on the departure of Rosie. Good Riddance.

Big Picture: Virtually no meaningful impact on the View or outside the View. Notwithstanding, it will be nice to have Rosie off her bully platform for a few days.

One telling point: I contine to see stories like this one from ABC News (here), which merely alludes to a statement that Rosie made, "when O'Donnell commented on the number of Iraqi deaths and was accused of insinuating U.S. troops are the real terrorists in Iraq -- a claim she vehemently denies."

Obviously, ABC News has a vested interest in this--but come on.

For the record, here is the question Rosie asked and refuses to answer:

"I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?"

Deal with it.

Arlington Cemetary is too far away for most of us to visit in person this Memorial Day Weekend. But, thanks to the internet, we can make a virtual visit. Official Arlington Cemetery Site.