The Royal Wedding–Sorry, I couldn’t resist

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Commentary on the nuptials:

From Theo Hobson:

I am a rather keen Christian. The tradition of my upbringing is the Church of England, the established church. But it became clear to me about ten years ago, that this tradition contained the hugest structural error. It shouldn’t be established: Christianity and establishment are incompatible. The case for disestablishment is probably too obvious to restate, especially for American readers. The interesting question, though, is how Anglicanism manages to dismiss this case, how it justifies its refusal to reform.

He concludes with this:

I wish William and Kate all the best: they seem like the nicest sort of posh folk. But I also want to tell this young man that his future job is religiously problematic, that his funny family is unwittingly stifling the renewal of Christianity in my land.

And did you know that Ms. Middleton had to get confirmed quickly?

I cannot help feeling that if Kate Middleton had been serious about her Christian faith, she would have been confirmed in the Church of England at a somewhat younger age than 29. Having attended such expensive private boarding schools as Downe House and Marlborough College, she would have been offered the chance of confirmation while still in her teens. Prince William, for example, was 14 when he was confirmed. Of course, I know nothing of Kate’s views on religion, but neither she nor other members of her family appear until now to have been regular churchgoers. And while sources “close to Kate” are quoted in the Daily Mail as insisting that she went through the ceremony in St James’s Palace because of a “personal journey” of a religious nature and not in order to avoid the awkwardness of being denied Holy Communion when married to a future Defender of the Faith, it is hard to relinquish the suspicion that she did it more for convenience than from conviction.

The relationship between educational level and religious involvement

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The Episcopal Cafe asks: More education = less religion? It points to a study of Canadian religiosity by Notre Dame economist Daniel Hagerman mentioned on Freakonomics.

But perhaps it’s not just higher education, but what one majors in. Rosalynde Welch concludes from another study that Humanities and Social Science majors are less likely to be religious after graduating than Science majors. She blames it on postmodernism, the encounter with pluralism, and methodological doubt. Of course, as one commenter on the Episcopal Cafe thread pointed out, members of the Episcopal Church are much more likely to have college and graduate education than the wider public, including the wider religious public.

Hell, continued

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The cover article in Time on Rob Bell and Hell stirred up some stuff in the blogosphere. Here’s Matt Yglesias’ response:

But without hell there’s no reason to think of good and bad, right and wrong as a question of getting over some hurdle of minimum standard of conduct.

Kathryn Gin on why hell still matters:

Whether or not we agree with the issues they champion, the majority of Americans who continue to believe in hell can’t simply be dismissed as fanatical relics of a bygone age. Controversies over hell keep recurring because to its believers, hell stands for more than fire, brimstone, and worms that never die. Hell also represents a backstop on the slippery slope to social chaos in a nation founded not on ethnicity or religion, but on the premise of a virtuous citizenry.

Ross Douthat’s “A Case for Hell.”

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

Atheism and Agnosticism–Some Links

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Martin Amis wrote an appeal to Christopher Hitchens that he should convert from atheism to agnosticism. In a marvelous essay that provides fascinatin detail about Hitchens’ life in addition to anecdotes about his skill as a debater, Amis attacks Hitchens’ atheism (as well as atheism in general):

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a “higher intelligence” – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Here is Mark Vernon’s response. His take:

For me it’s as much, probably more, the immensity of our inner, rather than outer, space that makes agnosticism so appealing. We are the creature who can plunge into the depths of existence; life at its most real comes to us as a troubling, glorious excess. It’s why we suffer and love. It’s surely something of that energy that Hitchens so powerful channels too.

A thoughtful review by Eric Reitan of Vincent Bugliosi’s Divinity of Doubt: The God Question. Reitan finds the premise of Bugliosi’s book lame: that we simply don’t know whether God exists. For Reitan, that’s obvious, perhaps especially to devout Christians who use language of faith rather than knowledge when talking about God’s existence. Reitan sees the interesting question to be: What do we do in the face of such uncertainty? Bugliosi doesn’t answer that question and Reitan marshalls arguments from Kierkegaard and James to argue his point.

An interview with A.C. Grayling, author of The Humanist Bible: How can you be a militant atheist? It’s like sleeping furiously’.

And then there’s this.

They took hold of his feet and worshiped him: A Homily for Easter Day, 2011

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April 24, 2011

“Oh God, take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, and take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen.”

“Alleliua. Christ is Risen!”

The Easter acclamation, the good news that the women shared with the disciples after their walk to the tomb, continues to resound across the centuries. We hear the words and repeat them with joy even as some of us might wonder whether they continue to ring true, in our lives or in the world. For all of the joy of Easter, we bring with us today lives that are burdened in all sorts of ways, living in a world that seems to be uncertain and defeated. Continue reading →

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! A Homily for the Easter Vigil, 2011

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 April 23, 2011


O God, as we celebrate the resurrection of your Son this night, we pray that, like the women at the tomb, we may encounter him in the proclamation of the word and at the Eucharistic feast. Amen

I remember well the first Easter vigil I ever attended. It was in Newburyport, MA and it was on a cold March night. In fact the weather that holy week was very much like the weather we’ve had this week. There was snow on Palm Sunday as I recall and although it warmed up through the week, Holy Saturday was chilly as well. What I remember most about that service, beside the wonderful readings, was the end. We were at St. Paul’s Church on Newburyport’s High Street, not far from downtown, but really in an area of the street that was dominated by Federalist mansions and a mix of nineteenth and early twentieth century commercial buildings. I remember that Fr. Cramer threw open the doors of the church at the end of the service and shouted loudly into the street—Christ is Risen! Continue reading →

Between Cross and Resurrection

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“… does the precise locus of this Saturday, at the interface between cross and resurrection, its very uniqueness as the one moment in history which is both after Good Friday and before Easter, invest it with special meaning, a distinct identity, and the most revealing light? Might not the space dividing Calvary and the Garden be the best of all starting places from which to reflect upon what happened on the cross, in the tomb, and in between? The midway interval, at the heart of the unfolding story, might itself provide an excellent vantage point from which to observe the drama, understand its actors, and interpret its import. The nonevent of the second day could after all be a significant zero, a pregnant emptiness, a silent nothing which says everything.” Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Eerdmans, 2001).

The Sacrament of Love: A Homily for Good Friday, 2011

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April 22, 2011

“There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus between them.” (Jn 19:18).

We come today to remember the death of Jesus Christ almost two thousand years ago. It is part of the central drama of our faith that takes us to the heart of our human existence and to the heart of God. We come here to hear the story again, to reflect, through word, music, and gesture, on the meaning of that event; meaning that eludes us after all these years. For us, as Paul says, the cross is stumbling and scandal, the foolishness of God. Continue reading →

Thou, who at thy Eucharist didst pray

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O thou, who at thy Eucharist didst pray
that all thy Church might be for ever one,
grant us at every Eucharist to say
with longing heart and soul, “thy will be done.”
O may we all one Bread, one Body be,
through this blest Sacrament of unity.

Words by William Harry Turton, 1881. Full text here.