You know you have a problem when Saint Francis is remembered primarily as someone holding a rabbit, preaching to birds. Holding rabbits and preaching to birds is a good thing, but you can forget that he was about reforming the church by challenging the presumptions about wealth. I am reminded of Dorothy Day’s response when it was suggested to her that she was saint: “you are not going to get rid of me that easily.”
Stanley Hauerwas, in conversation with Romand Coles, in Christianity, Democracy and the Radical Ordinary
Author: Justin DaMetz
Father of Julian and Evelyn, Husband of Tabitha, Christian theologian, writer, 5th grade teacher, book addict, displaced Middle-Earth resident
Excerpt #31: orthodoxy
The first thing I need to say is that I defend “orthodoxy” because I think the hard-won wisdom of the church is true. Too often it is forgotten that that, for example, that the canon of the Scripture is “orthodoxy.” If the church had not decided against Marcion – that is, if the church had followed Marcion in eliminating the Old Testament and the Gospels because they were too Jewish – then we would have appeared more coherent, but we would have lost the tension that is at the heart of the Christian faith: Christians worship the Lord of Israel. It is too often forgotten that “trinity” names a reading rule that demands that Christians read the Old Testament as “our” scripture. That means we can never avoid the challenge of Jewish readings to our readings. So “orthodoxy” is not the avoidance of argument. Orthodoxy is the naming of arguments across time that must take place is we are to be faithful to Jesus.
Stanley Hauerwas, in conversation with Romand Coles, in Christianity, Democracy and The Radical Ordinary
What do such conservatives wish to conserve?
The curious thing is that many agriculture specialists and “agribusinessmen” see themselves as conservatives. They look with contempt upon governmental “indulgence” of those who have no more “moral fiber” than to accept “handouts” from the public treasury – but they look with equal contempt upon the most traditional and appropriate means of independence. What do such conservatives wish to conserve? Evidently nothing less than the great corporate blocks of wealth and power, in whose every interest is implied the moral degeneracy and economic dependence of the people. They do not esteem the possibility of a prospering, independent class of small owners because they are, in fact, not conservatives at all, but the most doctrinaire and disruptive of revolutionaries.
Wendell Berry, “Margins” in The Unsettling of America
I’ve written in this vein before, and I’m glad to get some confirmation of this feeling from Wendell: today’s conservatives are anything but conservative, in terms of the policies and priorities they put forth. There is nothing conservative about wanting to radically tear down or alter institutions and programs. Many so-called conservatives today are instead radicals, driven by an ideological commitment to capitalism and nationalism. In fact, as I wrote recently, everyone is a radical now, on all sides. And there are a few of us, moderately inclined (tempermentally) who are taking up the task identified by William F. Buckley half a century ago of standing athwart the on-going social media fights and political games, yelling “stop!”
On a unrelated note, this is the last of my posts recently detailing the things I wanted to pull from Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? and The Unsettling of America. Onward to new obsessions!
Justin DaMetz 