Readings (18 June 2014)

Presbyterian Minister to Israelis: ‘Come Home to America’, from The Tablet. The peculiar demand that American institutions disinvest from the only democracy in the Middle East, from people not heard demanding such disengagement from a host of oppressive regimes, continues in the Presbyterian Church USA.

In a Facebook posting yesterday that was quickly shared and seconded by other Presbyterians, some of whom are currently attending the Church’s General Assembly, Grimm [Reverend Larry Grimm of the Capitol Heights Presbyterian Church in Colorado] patiently explained to Israelis that they ought to leave the historic Jewish homeland and “come home to America”:

America is the Promised Land. We all know this. Come to the land of opportunity. Quit feeling guilt about what you are doing in Palestine, Jewish friends. Stop it. Come home to America!

. . . [H]is proposal was quickly affirmed by others, one of whom noted that she wished to voice similar sentiments at the Church’s General Assembly that day, but concealed them for the purpose of political correctness: “I wanted to tell him that they should come and settle in the US. (But I did not. I needed to remain ‘respectful’.)”

Does Degenerate Art Turn Us Into Nazis?, also from The Tablet. Reviewing a show at the Neue Gallerie in Manhattan, Elizabeth Berkowitz argues that many commenting on the show have misunderstood the event. She concludes:

In attending Neue’s show, I, too, found it a task to refrain from anthropomorphizing National Socialist art and seeing Nazi brutality manifested on canvas and reacting in kind—instead of seeing style or technique or even an attempt at art that realized a political agenda. Marianne Hirsch, in her book The Generation of Postmemory, defines this intensity of hyper-personalized connection to a long-distant event as “postmemory”: the condition of approximating “memory in its affective force and its psychic effects.” With postmemory, a parent’s traumatic narrative becomes as real, or more so, in the mind of the child, even though the child may not have lived through the events in question.

In this way, “we,” as contemporary, enlightened placeholders for our 1937 counterparts, attempt on the victims’ behalf to take on the enemy, the Nazis and their accusations of degeneracy, and to treat them with the same contempt as they treated “us.” We try to see the world within their black-and-white binary, albeit with the roles triumphantly reversed. Perhaps with further historical distance, such reactions will be tempered. Until then, contemporary responses to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition will continue to adopt the position of winning easy victories in the never-ending battle against the past.

Why Koreans are Converting to Christ and the Japanese are Not, by Pierro Gheddo (contained in Sandro Magister’s column). Despite its history in Japan, the Catholic Church is not growing there, while continuing to grow very fast in South Korea. Catholics make up only .35 percent of the population in Japan, while since 1960 the percentage of Catholics in the population has grown .5 percent from to 10.3 percent, and Protestants from 2 to 17 percent. Father Gheddo, dean of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions in Milan, argues that the reason for the difference is cultural, with Christianity appealing to Koreans more than does Buddhism and Confucianism, which isn’t true in Japan.

King’s Ransom reports on a writer lucky enough to have her book confused with one of Stephen King’s and the unexpected income that followed.