Tuesday, July 11, 2023
In bed by 10, awake at 5, and up at 5:14. 69℉, expected high of 72, AQI=31, Fair, with W wind at 3 mph and gusts today up to 18mph, a possible thunderstorm, sunrise at 5:22, sunset at 8:32, 15+10.
Started the day coming upon an article in Discourse on Catholic 'integralism" and another on C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man which I read and enjoyed many years ago. It reminded me of his metaphor "men without chests" and how the metaphor reminded me of legal education with its emphasis on being able to able both sides of any question, the subordination of 'right and wrong' to 'legal and not legal,' and the speech I delivered to the St. Thomas More Society on "The Ethics of Legal Ethics" and another on "The Practice of Law as an Occasion of Sin." “A persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment... It is not excess of thought but a defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” It's no wonder that some students (and others) really disliked me. I was gifted some pretty nasty comments on some anonymous student evaluations. I got to the point where I stopped reading them; there was something dehumanizing about the whole process. One part of it was the simplistic comparative quantifying of various aspects of the teacher and the course ('rate this on a scale of 1 to 5) and the other was the 'comment' section where some evaluators would praise and others would heap scorn. I'm reminded that during the earlier years of my teaching career that was a tremendous antagonism with the student body toward the faculty, a real antipathy. The law school was a hostile learning environment, due in large measure to the dominant senior faculty member who liked to remind students that the law school's doors open out, or, if you don't like it here, leave. Many did just that after the first year, transferring to UW. Most of the faculty and administration were very Republican and Establishment-favoring at a time of great distrust of the Establishment after Vietnam and the civil rights crises. In those days, I was generally popular with my students, perhaps because I was closer in age to them and decidedly not Republican and not pro-Establishment.
Once upon a time . . .
Summerfield United Methodist Church has closed its door. Alas. The congregation consists of precisely 11 members, none younger than 65. Situated on the corner of Juneau Avenue and Cass Street, just down Juneau from our condo at the Knickerbocker and up Cass from Sarah's old apartment on Cass, Summerfield was one of the reasons I have loved the Knickerbocker neighborhood since I first became familiar with it while delivering Milwaukee Sentinel newspapers in it in my senior year of college, 1962-63, It is a neighborhood of great old churches, including Summerfield, Immanuel Presbyterian on Astor Street off Juneau, All Saints Episcopal Cathedral at 818 E. Juneau, and St. Paul Episcopal Church on Knapp Street between Astor and Marshall Streets, with its famous Tiffany stained glass windows. Summerfield was an active ministry. Geri attended yoga classes there when we lived in the Knickerbocker. The congregation was founded in 1874 and claimed to be the oldest Methodist congregation in the state of Wisconsin. The church building was constructed in 1904 to replace the original building. Summerfield was the birthplace of Goodwill Industries of Wisconsin and held some of the city’s first Narcotics Anonymous meetings. For the past dozen years, members served hot meals several times a week to the homeless and hungry. Almost 120 years old, the church building required extensive repairs (estimated costs of $1,200,000) and ordinary maintenance costs that the small congregation couldn't handle.
I was shocked to learn in reading the article about Summerfield that Kenwood Avenue Methodist Church shut down 5 years ago. When Anne and I lived on Newberry Boulevard, our next-door house was the parsonage for that church and we were friends with the minister and his family, especially Lance and Marianne Herrick and their 2 daughters, Sarah and Kirsten, who were the same ages as our Sarah and Andy. The church building is now the home of ZAO MKE Church which promotes itself as "Jesus-rooted, justice-centered, and radically inclusive. We explicitly affirm the life, value, and worth of LGBTQIA+ people and the Movement for Black Lives." When Kenwood Avenue closed down, some members moved to Summerfield but clearly not enough to keep that congregation alive. John Wesley must be weeping in his grave.
Jesus and Solzhenitsyn. David French had an interesting essay in Sunday's NYT entitled "Who Truly Threatens the Church?" He quotes Jesus and G. K. Chesterton: "But there’s a contrary view [to Christian Nationalism and the need to protect Christians from 'the Left], one that emanates from the idea of original sin, which Chesterton argued was “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” The doctrine of original sin rejects the idea that we are intrinsically good and are corrupted only by the outside world. Instead, we enter life with our own profound and inherent flaws. We are all, in a word, fallen. To quote Jesus in the book of Mark, “There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” All manner of sin and evil comes “from within, out of the heart of man.” I'm reminded of Solzhenitsyn's "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an un-uprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person." The Gulag Archipelago.
This is a curious commonality and I don't make too much of it. Solzhenitsyn was hardly Christ-like. He reminds me of Putin in some significant ways, including a desire for a Mother Russia that included not only Russia but Ukraine and Belarus, all embracing the common faith in the Russian Orthodox Church but I don't make too much of this commonality either. Solzhenitsyn was a complicated guy, to say the least. Nonetheless, William J. Burns, now our Director of the CIA, was George W. Bush's ambassador to Russia from 2005 to 2008. He visited with Solzhenitsyn in 2008 and reported that Solzhenitsyn had some admiration for Putin. ""Solzhenitsyn positively contrasted the eight-year reign of Putin with those of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, which he said had 'added to the damage done to the Russian state by 70 years of communist rule'. Under Putin, the nation was rediscovering what it was to be Russian, Solzhenitsyn thought." It seems like another variety of [Orthodox] Christian Nationalism.
Hawking Manliness. Christine Emba has a long thoughtful essay in this morning's WaPo entitled "Men Are Lost; Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness." She writes about Contemporary Man's loss of Identity. What does it mean to be a "man" today? She writes: "[M]illions of men lack access to . . . power and success — and, downstream, cut loose from a stable identity as patriarchs deserving of respect, they feel demoralized and adrift. The data show it, but so does the general mood: Men find themselves lonely, depressed, anxious, and directionless." She focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on young men who have been outdone in terms of upward mobility and social accomplishments by their female contemporaries for some time, certainly since the rise of Feminism, Equal Rights, the Sexual Revolution, radical changes in family structures, Me Too-ism, etc. She opines that there are indeed identity or role problems facing men, especially young men, today but notes that there is significant resistance on the Left to addressing those problems for fear of offending women. [Example: "When news circulated in 2022 that President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure act would likely create thousands of jobs for working-class men, MSNBC pundit Joy Reid dismissively called it a “White guy employment act.”] The traditional life path for a man was to get some training or education, get married, raise, provide for, and protect the family. Women needed men to fill these roles and women filled the complementary role as nurturer and caregiver and homemaker. Women don't 'need' a man for much of anything anymore, even to have a baby, raise a child, etc., and indeed many women are better than a lot of men at setting and attaining goals, negotiating the world, and protecting and providing for a family. Look what has happened in the urban Black communities where so many households are headed by a single mom, a result in part of AFDC and welfare benefits restricted to homes without a wage-earning father residing with the family, and the so-called War on Drugs and criminal justice reform programs that put so many Black men behind bars (and subsequently largely unemployable) for non-violent drug offenses. I'm rambling incoherently but Ms Emba ends her essay looking at solutions to young men feeling isolated and aimless by pointing to the commonness of fathers who are absent from their sons' lives, either physically or emotionally or both. I am reminded of course of my father and his PTSD and alcoholism after WWII, and of our lack of any close relationship until he was 75 and I was 55. I don't know how to conclude this note except to agree that probably the best solution to the need for a boy to have some sense of identity and purpose is to have a father, uncle, or some other close male person nurturing the boy's sense of self-worth, purpose, and identity. Someone like Andy.
Camille, Day 4
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