MAILBAG PART II: Second and last in a series. In this episode: mysticism; body snatchers; DC; book recommendations; and a funny economist. Readers are in bold, I’m in plain text. Emails requiring a more complicated response will be dealt with separately… eventually.

Christopher Jones: The claim that mysticism became “peripheral” to orthodox religion after the suppression of Gnosticism is more than “a bit odd”; it’s preposterous, and betrays total ignorance of what orthodox Christianity is all about. Your counter-examples from the Roman Catholic tradition are spot-on, and the counter-examples from Eastern Orthodoxy are legion. Just a few:

St Ephraim the Syrian (4th Century)

St John Climakos (6th Century)

St Maximus Confessor (7th Century)

St Symeon the New Theologian (10th Century)

St Gregory Palamas (14th Century)

St Seraphim of Sarov (19th Century)

An excellent (though difficult) reference on the centrality of mysticism to orthodox Christianity is The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, ISBN: 0913836311)

This is what I get for forgetting that “orthodox Christianity” includes, uh, Orthodox Christianity. My bad.

An anonymous reader, re “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”: Boy — not to sound condescending, but it’s interpretations like the ones you cite that make me glad I didn’t grow up in the US. I love and look up to your country (and I’ve even lived in DC!), but must y’all always polarize like this?

The standard interp. I’ve read of the movie incorporates both the points of view you mention without taking sides quite so blatantly as they do. It suggests that the pod people represent Americans’ understanding of communism and the way it could destroy human individuality. The terror of the isolated non-podders, and of the people who take up their cause, is like the American terror of communism.

If you accept this view then you can begin to argue instead over whether the movie is meant as a criticism of anti-communist hysteria, or is itself warning against the evils of communism. I don’t think, myself, that there’s really much doubt…

Mike Jacobs: Recently, you had a bit on your blog named MORE ON D.C., PLUS TWO CORRECTIONS, where you quote someone about merging the voting of DC with Maryland to give DC congressional representation. well, according what I once heard on WAMU’s DC hour with Kojo Nnamdi and Mark Plotkin, Plotkin mentioned that when DC was first established, the resident continued to vote as if they were residents of the state the land was originally from, i.e. MD side with MD, VA side with VA. only after 10 years or so (I forget the actual number), during a change in the home rule laws, did their voting rights somehow disappear. according to Plotkin, there was a group trying to have their voting rights restored on the grounds that they were taken away unconstitutionally.

I’ve never heard this, but if someone else knows more about it, please email.

From Charles Murtaugh, expressing shock that I’ve never read anything by David Lodge: You really ought to — he’s the funniest writer alive today, and his early novels wrestle very productively with Catholicism and sex. His last novel, Thinks (2001), is also the best novel about science that I’ve ever read.

I would recommend you read:

1. Small World — maybe the funniest novel I’ve ever read, albeit somewhat light on the Catholicism

2. Paradise News — moving, funny, lots o’ God

3. Souls and Bodies — ditto

4. The British Museum is Falling Down — lots o’ Catholicism, and also a hilarious parody of other writers’ supposed masterworks

And here’s a funny site. The page for Keynesians is especially recommended.