Readings (10 July 2014)

The papers from the 2014 Orientale Lumen conference, by Kallistos Ware, Father Robert Taft, S.J., and others. A conference sponsored by the Society of St. John Chrysostom giving (according to the conference website) “an opportunity for Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Eastern Catholics to gather, discuss and learn about their respective traditions.”

The Theology of ‘Jurassic Park’, by Gabriel Sanders, from The Tablet. Despite their obvious differences, “the film and Chabad [the Lubavitcher movement] nonetheless share a number of preoccupations: messianic figures, the revival of the dead, and the creation of heaven on earth.”

How the Liberal West Turned on Israel, by Sol Stern, from Mosaic. In a review of two books by Joshua Muravchik, Stern writes that:

Israel’s unforgivable sin, in Muravchik’s telling, lay in winning the 1967 war and then occupying some of the aggressors’ territory. Succeeding Israeli governments waited for the Arabs to negotiate for peace and discuss terms of future relations—which is exactly how the European wars of the 20th century ended. But the Arabs’ adamant refusal even to recognize the Jewish state left it, by default, in the role of “occupier.” That marked Israel as the guilty party. In short order, it went from being admired by much of the liberal world as a plucky little David to being regarded as an increasingly ugly Goliath.

What’s Wrong with Fiddler on the Roof, by Ruth Wisse, also from Mosaic. Everyone enjoys the play and movie, developed from  (and distorting) Sholem Aleichem’s stories, writes the Harvard professor of Yiddish, but they removed the real drama, which depends upon Tevye’s commitment to being a Jew.

Sholem Aleichem’s concerns were all about the collapse of Jewish confidence from within: flight from Jewish responsibility, erosion of Jewish language, the snapping of the chain of Jewish transmission. Evidently, by the time we come to mid-century America and Fiddler, Sholem Aleichem’s talented adapters were all too ready to assume that the past was truly past, and that the problems of the Jews, like the “Jewish problem,” had finally been solved.

. . . Guaranteed rights, freedoms, and civic obligations were the great gifts that America offered its Jews, and these, combined with upward mobility, were surely enough to be grateful for even when marred by discrimination. Toleration came somewhat more gradually, but faster to Jews than to “people of color,” and the lure of assimilation was correspondingly stronger among Jews than among many other ethnic and religious groups. Indeed, many liberal Jews became so wedded to the universalist ideal as to become intolerant of fellow Jews who wished to stay identifiably Jewish.

This illiberal form of liberalism, practiced by Jews as well as non-Jews, has always objected to the nexus of religion and peoplehood that has historically defined the Jews and their civilization.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider: ‘We are in the fourth great crisis of the Church’, from the English newspaper the Catholic Herald.

In his interview, Bishop Schneider said the “banal” and casual treatment of the Blessed Sacrament is part of a major crisis in the Church in which some laity and clergy, including some in positions of authority, are siding with secular society. At the heart of the problems, he believes, is the creeping introduction of a man-centred agenda, while in some churches God, in the tabernacle, really is materially put in a corner, while the priest takes centre stage. Bishop Schneider argued that this situation is now coming to a head. “I would say, we are in the fourth great crisis [of the Church], in a tremendous confusion over doctrine and liturgy. We have already been in this for 50 years.”

My thanks to Shmuel Ben Gad and William Tighe for links.