The Narnia Connection

A recent “New Yorker” review of the big-budget, special-effects-laden retooling of C.S. Lewis's "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" goes far beyond commenting on the film and is, in effect, a review of Lewis himself, and of his unorthodox approach to orthodoxy. Some illuminating passages about his relation to J.R.R. Tolkien (and to Tolkien's frustrations with Lewis truculent refusal to accept Catholicism) make it interesting reading for anyone who enjoys the discourse here on Detente.

Since this blog grew out of a series of peripatetic discussions, here's a relevant excerpt:

The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large: "It was through the intervention of the secretive and personally troubled Tolkien, however, that Lewis finally made the turn toward orthodox Christianity. In company with another friend, they took a long, and now famous, walk, on an autumn night in 1931, pacing and arguing from early evening to early morning. "

Blogging Through Transitions

Sitting here, blogging, in the customer lounge at the Pontiac dealership in Berlin, VT. There was a recall of the ignition-something-or-other in my car and here, as our last days in Vermont wind to a close, I'm running final errands and mulling the idea of certain samenesses that we carry now from place to place. We move with the little (but vital!) community that is our family to new places, new broader communities, but we also inhabit some communities online as well, and these follow us -- along with our e-mail addresses, our Web pages, our bloglines accounts, our Flickr galleries, our cell phone numbers, etc., etc. One of the things I've always found lovely about the Catholic Church is that no matter where you go in the world, you can attend a Mass, and even if the language is different, you know all the core elements being tapped, touched, experienced, are the same: transubstantiation transcends language, place and time and you are present at the same event all people in all places and of all times have been present at. Now I'm not at making any specific comparison to the way the Web creates so many contiguities across distance and time for us and the way God does ... but there's some vague sort of relationship tickling the back of my mind. I welcome others' thoughts on whether there's a real analogy hiding somewhere in this muddle...

Hunter S. Thompson, Catholic Perspective

Speaking of Godspy.com, the pub ran (last May, I guess, though I didn't see it until tonight) an interesting piece on Hunter S. Thompson that looks at his work and suicide through a Catholic filter... "In Thompson's case, his self-abuse obscured that side of him that was most praiseworthy and unique, his apocalyptic vision—that the swine would ultimately be separated from the upstanding. But like some hubristic protagonist of a Flannery O'Conner short story, Thompson believed the only chance the meek had of inheriting the earth was if they organized a mob, crashed the gates of the Pentagon, captured the top brass and put them on trial for their crimes."

What To Make Of This?

Came across this ad on Godspy.com and I have to say, I can't decide exactly what to make of this: The Bad Catholic's Guide To Good Living.

From the site: "In 1950 Pope Pius XII announced the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven—some seven years before Stalin’s Sputnik program put a Soviet into space. Do you think this was an accident? Oh, you are SO naïve…."

According to the Editorial Reviews on Amazon, the book is, "A zany but ultimately reverent look at the saints, doctrines, customs and folklore of the Catholic Church, with recipes for food and fun from all over the world, and crackpot, delightful party ideas. Written by a Catholic journalist and a four-star chef, it’s an entertaining guide and guerilla catechism, wrapped up in one hilarious package."

Testimonial quotes include the publisher of Godspy.com and, interestingly for Food Network fan like me, Mario Batali.

What do you think ... order a copy or ... ummm ... wait for the movie?

New Republic Writer: Supreme Court Pick Shows Evangelicals Relying on Heft of Catholic Intellectuals

In a provocative article at The New Republic Online, Franklin Foer looks at the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel Alito, the potential Catholic majority his confirmation would create, and speculates: "...the emergence of the Court's Catholic bloc reflects the reality of social conservatism: Evangelicals supply the political energy, Catholics the intellectual heft. " I don't have enough data to agree or disagree with Foer's idea on a lack of intellectuals among evangelicals, but I toss it our here because it seems to tie in with something Rick (the evangelical half of the Detente blog) wrote during a discussion a few posts back. I post it here, and apologize for not recreating the entire context of his statement. (You can read that here.)

Rick wrote: "There are a number of reasons why there might be more intellectual or scholarly converts from Evangelical camp to the R.C. People tend to grow more conservative and authority-focused as they age. The average intellectual would tend to quickly soak up all the literary oxygen in the typical E. church, simply because it's not an intellectual body. It's more based in community, emotions and instincts. Birds of a feather flock together. Bookish Christians will be attracted to the church with the biggest and oldest books. "

Now back to what Foer argues, which he refines later in the story: He says that evangelicals looking to build political coalitions to advance socially conservative agendas "didn't just need Catholic bodies; they needed Catholic minds to supply them with rhetoric that relied more heavily on morality than biblical quotation."

Finally, Foer concludes by pointing out that there are some problems that arise for Catholics out of this recruitment by socially conservative evangelical politicians ... "At the same time Catholic conservatives joined the evangelicals in battle, they have simultaneously waged a war against their co-religionists in an attempt to alter the Church's traditional preference for a strong state--a preference that led Catholics en masse to FDR's party and yielded a generation of Democratic politicians (see the Kennedys and Tip O'Neill). Led by Neuhaus and the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, these conservatives want to realign papal teaching with support for an unrestrained market. As Neuhaus, the editor of First Things, has put it, 'Capitalism is the economic corollary of the Christian understanding of man's nature and destiny.' Of course, this requires some impressive intellectual gymnastics, since the last Pope and many of his predecessors were potent critics of capitalism. "

Thoughts on intellectual experience in either or both faith traditions?

All Saints and All Souls

The feasts of All Saints and All Souls usually pass by for me with the obligatory Mass attendance, prayer and thoughts about my grandparents, but I don't tend to really dwell on them or feel the shift of internal tectonic plates as they pass. This year, however, I was really struck by the power of these two beautiful feast days – the knowledge that every person who has gone to heaven is part of the same organism as little old me, and that I could ask that many holy people to pray for me, my family, the world, all at once is both mind-boggling and beautiful.

The idea of this web of connectivity (and if you think about existence outside of time, we are all potentially saints right now, even as we also muddle along trying to get it right here on earth) is both comforting (we're not alone in our struggles) and challenging (so much to live up to!).

Came across two great quotes on these feast days:

Feast of All Saints (Via CatholicGreetings.org)

The challenge of sainthood
is to go
where love takes me.

—Prayer for Daybreak and Day's End, Volume II

Feast of All Souls (Via the AmericanCatholic.org Saint of the Day newsletter)

“We must not make purgatory into a flaming concentration camp on the brink of hell—or even a ‘hell for a short time.’ It is blasphemous to think of it as a place where a petty God exacts the last pound—or ounce—of flesh.... St. Catherine of Genoa, a mystic of the 15th century, wrote that the ‘fire’ of purgatory is God’s love ‘burning’ the soul so that, at last, the soul is wholly aflame. It is the pain of wanting to be made totally worthy of One who is seen as infinitely lovable, the pain of desire for union that is now absolutely assured, but not yet fully tasted” (Leonard Foley, O.F.M., Believing in Jesus).