Three Peas in a Pod?

I note this week an editorial in our local rag that linked Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jerry Falwell. What do they have in common? They were divisive.

Hey, that puts me in the same category. I've been labeled divisive at times. Plus, all of us had noses. What do you know - I didn't realize I was in such august company.

Since 'divisive,' like body parts, doesn't really denote any significant similarity amongst people, I'll propose something that does: dignity. The first two men sacrificed their lives to raise the dignity of their fellow human beings; the last was an instrument of an institutional prejudice and oppresion that serves to crush the dignity of those made society's scapegoats.

Right after Bishop Robinson's consecration, vestry meetings in our parish were quite lively events. During one, an African-American woman, in an interracial marriage, spoke up. She was highly emotional, hard to follow, but I believe the gist was she had known real discrimination, and what Gene Robinson had endured wasn't it. I was new to vestry, awed and intimidated by the governance process, so I didn't raise points for clarification. I've thought much about it since and regretted my silence.

If I still could, I'd ask her, that if she believes being gay is a choice, is it similar to her choice to enter into an interracial marriage? If she denies being gay is a matter of choice, is there no similarity to the discrimination she endured as an African-American woman? It's not illogical to assume her situation, either way, might have rendered her sensitive to the plight of gays and lesbians. Apparently, it had the opposite effect. I'd like to understand why.

I wonder if she'd be influenced after reading what happened in May in Pakistan as reported by the AP: both partners of a same-sex couple who'd sought protection by the courts from harassment by relatives were sentenced to three years in prison for lying to a judge that transsexual surgery had transformed one partner into a man. They said they wed to protect one partner from being sold into marriage to pay off her uncle's gambling debts. They admitted they lied because they were in love and desired to live together. After the judge pronounced their sentence, they clasped each other, before police led them away, separately, to serve their sentences.

It was only forty years ago in Virginia that my fellow vestry member would have been jailed for the choice she made of who to marry.

Over the past three decades in business, I've cheered on women who've broken the glass ceiling in our office. Some, however, upon reaching the pinnacle of power, act in the same troubling ways as they men they've replaced. I expected more, although perhaps a dysfunctional system consistently requires the same methods to reach the top, regardless of gender. Does it always have to be as Pete Townshend of the Who sang in the rock opera Tommy: "meet the new boss, same as the old boss," or can the chains of excessive ego and self-interest ever be broken?

A few weeks ago, I noted a Spectator article critical of the election of a Zimbabwean as chairperson of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development despite that Government's horrendous record in this area. I note this week a response to the article in the Banjul Daily Observer.

The piece exposits that President Mugabe "is a product of the criminal 19th century Cecil Rhodes conspiracy against the Ndebele and Shona people; the product of the 20th century British colonial policy; and a product of the illegal white-state of Rhodesia established in 1965 by the racist outlaw Ian Smith." All of that is certainly undeniable - I recall in my own family when my mom cut off communications with a crochety aunt who lived there after receiving letters containing the racist vile of superiority.

The writer recalls after Ian Smith's rule had come to an end, in 1979, that "Mugabe strode to the Conference Hall like a victor, "a cold austere figure bent on achieving revolution, threatening that Ian Smith and his criminal gang would be tried and shot." The comparison was made that "Mugabe is the Founding Father of Zimbabwe just as much as George Washington is the Founding Father of the United States."

Perhaps, like the editorial in our local rag, you might say that Mugabe and Washington were both divisive. They also both had noses. Mugabe still has one. I haven't yet, however, identified any text where Washington called for loyalists to be shot after the Revolution. Rather, vengence gave way to reconciliation, just as it did in South Africa after apartheid.

Dr. King's immortal language continues to inspire millions: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Bonhoeffer taught us: "There remains an experience of incomparable value...to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled...in short, from the perspective of those who suffer...to look with new eyes on matters great and small."

Falwell's legacy lives on in the person of the current Polish Minister for Children's affairs who, like her mentor, said of the notorious Teletubbie, Tinky Winky, he "has a purse, but I didn't realize he's a boy; at first, I thought that must be a bother for him. Later I learned that there could be some hidden homosexual undertones."

Beach Reads

I note this week when Connie and I were last home with my parents, we turned on an addictive little TV series called Surface. The best I can tell it that it had something to do with swimming dragons that grew rather large and conquered a flooded world, except for the nice one, that bonded with a teenager. A mother's thumbs-down review: "what do we learn from this?"

Mom's lecture explains all about why I'm never fated to carry a lusty blockbuster to the beach - a bestseller, say, by Harlan Coben, who's profiled this month in the Atlantic. What Coben produces is down to economics and schedule; it's not literary, not even mystery. The genre is thriller; designer paperbacks for airport racks.

Formulaic action drives a plot that purportedly launches excited readers on a roller coaster ride. I glanced at one in the store: short sentences, copious dialogue, few paragraphs, small chapters. He begins assembly of this year's model in January, completes manufacture in October; spends surplus time visiting Costco's directing product placement and auditing sales. Earns millions; displays a blue collar attitude - bully for him and his success. Samuel Johnson, after all, said anyone not writing for money is a fool.

As soon as an artist sells her creation, it's not art, it's commodity; I'm told the true artist creates for self only. I write weekly essays. There's no sales or readers to track; well, there might be a half dozen. There's one link to a famous blog (thanks Mad Priest). The local rag prints my rant to the editor once a month. Ergo, I must be an artist? --more likely just the fool.

Woody Allen says everything our parents told us was good for us turned out to be bad: red meat, sun, clean your plate; Dr. Spock, apparently, was teaching them in his little book about how to kill us, slowly, after they're gone; the perfect crime. Since it's encoded upon my dna like an allergy, to read for pleasure is sinful, it's discomforting to choose the books to tote in the beach bag. I break out.

There are strict rules to restore calm. Books are seasonal. Winter's for gulags, Russians, the linguistic philosophy I can't grasp (though not to understand it proves its point about language).

Autumn's theology - auspicious beginnings, new energy, like starting school.

Summer?

A pitcher of Lincoln on the front porch washes down like a cool lemonade. (This year: Team of Rivals, by Goodwin). I've always wondered why is it that America, after Lincoln, transformed itself from a country where anyone regardless of origin, can raise their station through hard work, on a level playing field, his cherished ideal, to one where the advantages and protection lies with those corporate interests that already possess the wealth. (Age of Betrayal, The Triumph of Money in America, by Jack Beatty, could make the trip.)

These tomes don't cover my address my usual far more gloomy obsessions. They're about fine tuning democracy; what constitutes natural rights and happiness; measuring the common good against private interest. The kind of down home American issues we can wrestle with and not schism. Too light for winter; yet not too heavy to travel to the beach.

Take vouchers: I note the state of California is opening a shop-around education web site that contains stats on after-school activities, drop-out rates, music and arts programs, etc. Should citizens back public schools for the common good or opt out for competitive private, or home, schooling, in their own best interest, if in doing so, it further hastens the decline of the common good of public schools? The NY TImes reports Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels views "privatization not as an ideological or partisan matter but as a strictly practical one." What's wrong with that? I instinctively sense something is but I might be convinced otherwise through the power of persuasive argument.

Tony Blair's rise to power was fueled by a concentration on small things; class size, hospital wait lists, trains running on time. In my section of Virginia, traffic fits such a bill. Should the taxes of mostly rural residents pay for pollution-conscious public transportation utilized exclusively by commuters to ride to a city that farmers will never visit? Most folks, around these parts, so far, say no.

Is all this the political equivalent of the theological Little Way? If I can't create affordable public housing, can I at least privately provide shelter to the person in front of me? If I can't resolve the large national issues, can I just cut down on daily annoyance? With sense of liberalism faltering, I could take Schlesinger's Robert Kennedy and His Times for inspiration, or better yet, Henry Mayer's superb All on Fire, a bio of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Ah, it's high summer, the heck with politics, let the good times roll. Maybe I'll take Jeffrey Kripal's history of Esalen along. Seems to fit - meditate on the Zen of tantric sex in a spring-fed hot tub; expand mind, body and soul. Woody let on once, though, that he didn't inhale; if he did, he said, he ripen, then rot.

Since I'm genetically incapable of Coben-ization, there is another sort of happiness, of which to turn, likely mother-proof. In last month's Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, from a 1951 reprint, wrote: "One of our former companions, a Spaniard who lived in a Franco concentration camp for years, and spent his youth in civil war, said that what this country, this United States lacked, was joy. He was expressing a Catholic truth that our prosperous America has lost sight of. That is, it is only in suffering, only in the Cross, the symbol of suffering, that we find joy," and dear reader, it is only I, a true mother's son, that, at long last, can find true happiness through the Joy of Suffering on a long weekend at the beach.

So I'm incapable of what passes as normal happiness. I'll be laying on a beach blanket with friggin' Abe Lincoln. I'd rather ingest some Coben, but what do we learn from this? Thanks, ma.

What We're On About

I note this week an editorial called, "Baby boomers, it's time to get out of the way," by Lisa Bornstein, whose byline reads 'entertainment reporter.' She claims folks like me "spent the 60's changing the world but weren't all that effective." I can't totally dispute the charge, but, hey, it was worth a try. She also wrote, despite an avowed anti-materalism, we "spent the '80's making ourselves rich."

Neil Young has a response: "were we overrated? Compared to what? Generation X - what the hell does that mean? It's not distinct enough to make fun of - where's their mark? They didn't leave one. They left an X." So there.

Maybe all Lisa's rancor is intertwined with her career choice; her report carries the depth of an Entertainment Tonight interview -- to Neil, that's part of the problem. He says when he thinks of 60's icons like Hendrix, Joplin and the Airplace, "it wasn't the entertainment industry. They were part of a movement: the music was believable, and the people believed it."

Neil's jibe isn't targeted just at Ms. Bornstein; the quote was published in the 40th anniversary issue of Rolling Stone. A tad ironic: as a charter subscriber of the original newspaper edition, it's apparent the Stone itself has morhphed into a pretty slick little rag. It's not exactly radical these days; at most, radical chic. It's gulity as charged; it no doubt makes some former revolutionaries very rich. Once in a while, though, when it looks over its shoulder, a wistful vibe still manages to lean over a walker and hobble up an old familiar road.

If not content simply to entertain, can popular art drive culture? (I know, smarty pants, who's Art?). When Rolling Stone asked Director Martin Scorsese what he thought was missing from his days as a student activist, he replied, "the idealism of really making a change." Bobby Weir, of the Dead, offered, "What we had then, was timeless. It comes and goes; ebbs and flows. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It just has to be there, to provide enough juice for enough people to coalesce around and work together, to bring about fundamental change. We still have that forward thrust."

A few weeks ago, I wrote how Bill Moyer's Genesis program sparked by Christian conversion. He himself journeyed from a place of power, as LBJ's press secretary, to one with the power to create change through his art and craft. It worked for me. From his perspective today, he captures the 60's soul as "an alternative conscience at work, a conscience that could be moved without self-interest by the consequences of official decisions."

Everyone believes everyone else acts without self-interest. I'm not even sure if it's possible to act on any other level, even if you're not aware of it. It's my theory, though, that when it comes time for a community to make a decision, 10% vote for something, 10% vote against, and the rest are carried along by a riptide current dominated by the old guard of customary power.

Jimmy Carter describes this in his Stone interview. He recalls the time at his church in Plains, GA, when out of 250 members, 56 families voted to extend segregation, 2 voted to end it, and many of the rest called him afterwards to say they were also against it but didn't want to speak out. Did those who voted for it, against it, and didn't vote at all, act with the same degree of self-interest? Perhaps - yet only a very few actively voted with the courage to stand against the domineering tide.

I had a similar experience a few years ago when our parish took a vote on whether to move the church from a neighborhood rapidly turning Latino to an enclave out on the affluent suburban parkway, where we were told by 'experts' that church members would be more effective evangelists if they were lodged alongside people who were more like them. The ayes carried the day; yet, as the only vestry member to audibly vote nay, I was approached by many afterwards who whispered, "I was against it too." I also suspect an inaction of a silent majority in the face of a domineering tide was in play when it came to the later vote of the parish to secede from TEC.

How can we tell, then, if the boomers weren't, indeed, all that effective, or if they still carry that forward thrust. I note this week Columnist Froma Harrop writes that a clue can be found in a picture. It's quite an ordinary photo; grandparents "proudly holding their new grandson - with the same starchy older-generation pose had the other parent been a hairy-chested airline pilot named Chuck." It wasn't Chuck. It wasn't even close to a Chuck. The mother's name is Mary. The other mother's name is Heather Poe. The grandparents are Lynne and Dick Chaney.

In Mystic Chords of Memory, Michael Kammen writes, "To be successful, a reform ordinarily must propose modes of change that seem consisent with a society's values. Non-traditional change is likely to be regarded with suspicion, as threatening, or even revoluntionary." I ask, what's more ordinary than grandparents sitting for a portrait with their new grandson?

In 1967, in America, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. In 2007, the issue of an interracial marriage is running for President. So is a woman. The Presiding Bishop of TEC is Katharine Jefforts-Schori and the Bishop of New Hampshire is an openly gay man. My parish priest is female. The sitting Vice-President of the United States has a daugher living in a committed lesbian relationship raising his grandosn. You're going to tell me we weren't all that effective?

Ah, but you say, that's all about secular change. Can anyone tell me the meaning from a Christian perspective?

I can.

Lights please.

"As many of you were baptized in Christ, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise."

That's what being a boomer and a Christian is all about.

We believe in the promise. We keep faith in it. We live by it, and act on it, for today, and for tommorrow.

Before the Reformation, England was witness to the rise of the great landowning families. The first action many took as new gentry was to demolish the parish church, and build a new one, often just a few yards away. This had nothing to do with who owned the property. It had everything to do with who owned the history. Where it began, who claims it today, and for the future.

So it is with the ecclesiastical law suits in Virginia. It's not who owns the property, so much at stake, it's who owns the history, past, present and future. Anglicans who temporarily occupy TEC churches, representing a local domineering current, claim history belongs to the powerful who've always resisted change and the subsequent threat to their dominance; that the Church, the nation, the parish can't absorb any more without engendering great harm to their traditions and status quo.

Those profiled in the Stone, like myself, claim an American and Episcopalian history that enshrines change and progress, and that responds to the call of God by recreating an inclusion as revealed in the Word as the vision and ideal for humanity in the Garden. This is our history, past, present, and future thrust.

Lisa Bornstein, Generation X, says it's time for boomers to get out of the way. Aint gonna happen. The Who sang, "hope I die before I get old." That didn't happen either. We're still here despite copious amounts of self-abuse. When Lisa departs this mortal coil to hear St. Peter sing, All You Need is Love, to enter these gates, and she finally knows she can't escape us for all eternity, she's not going to like that very much at all.

What's the Rush?

I note this week Rian Malan's article in The Spectator concerning the election of one of Robert Mugabe's henchmen as chair of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. Let's examine the candidate's resume: 80% country-wide unemployment; 2200% inflation, so even if you had a job, you couldn't afford anything; millions facing starvation; 2 million deaths so far attributed to Mugabe's regime. Malan lets on that hyenas are developing a taste for the human flesh dumped in garbage pits. He concludes: "It seems to me that last week's events in New York render a terrible verdict on well-intentioned do-gooders and the climate of impunity they create for African dictators."

Do-gooder is a harsh label. I felt the sting when I was called one by the manager of a homeless shelter that catered to families after I opened one for addicts, ex- and future con's, plus assorted miscreants who aren't welcome in 'decent' shelters. To this day, I don't know myself if the charge might not be true; juding by our mortality rate, not millions over a decade, but 7 in two years, it's enough to make one wonder.

I do know that when of that name-caller's gentleman clients escaped to join my lot who live in the woods in tents, she called the police, demanding they shut down all of shanty-town so she could reclaim her prisoner, ooops, guest. You may, indeed, be able to count how many have died despite your efforts; there's no way to know how many lived - so, you do it anyway.

Woody Allen's Alvy Singer in Annie Hall admitted, "I may be biased, but it's for the Left." The celebrity quote contest winner of the week, John Lennon, of Liverpool, trumped Woody when he wrote, "If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow." I confess I'm a serial do-gooder, yet I condemn the actions of the UN and the shelter Nazi with equal vehemence as counter to the raft of a gentle liberalism to which I still cling rather than drown.

What is there to depend upon? Justice? Yuxin Zheng writes in an AP article about a survey of 60,000 people in 62 countries. 10% paid bribeds to judges in 25 of them; in some African and Latin American states, the bribe rate is double that.

Our American system isn't always so hot either. My track record over two decades for finding lawyers to perform pro bono work for shelter guests: 0%. If it wasn't for hardy staff persistence in calling and re-calling court-appointed attorneys, and escorting clients to court, the accused warrant no attention; most are told to cop a plea despite their guilt or innocence.

If the magisterial grandiosity of the world's justice system is a bit lacking, can't we at least employ a consistency in our justifications, rationalizations, and explanation's - all the best -tion's, really. I note this week an absence of same in regard to the Lambeth 2008 invitations when the ABC nailed Gene Robinson, Martin Minns and Nolbert Kunonga to the same uninvited mast.

Let's see: Robinson is a duly elected bishop of TEC; Minns was crowned by Nigerian AB Akinola to manage the American branch of an unincorporated firm unrecognized by any party other than itself, and that's seized the property of a Church its members once took vows to protect; AB Kunonga of Zimbabwe is the lucky beneficiary and contented new squire of two farms appropriated by Mugage from their owners. You might say something about being crucified between two thieves, but I couldn't possibly (with kudo's to the late, great Ian Richardson); I'll sit here, rather quietly, working on one of those Golden Book puzzles you find at the dentist's office, circling the item that doesn't belong in the picture.

Akinola writes, "The withholding of an invitation to a Nigerian Bishop elected and consecrated by other Nigerian bishops will be viewed as witholding invitation to the entire House of Bishops of the Church of Nigeria." By God, he's right for once; he's proved Robinson's case. Otherwise, toss the consistency of language in the same bin containing the moldly debris of the magisterial grandiosity of justice.

Backtracking to last week's notation of Memorial Day, the New York Time's Adam Cohen traced the holiday's history. It started as a day to honor Union soldiers who paid the ultimate price for the abolition of slavery. By 1877, the NY Herald captured a new mood: "all the issues on which the war of rebellion was fougt seem dead." They do? Already? Oh, that's because both sides had a vested interest in discounting the civil rights of the new competitive labor force. By 1913, President Wilson proclaimed a "quarrel forgotten," moving ahead a week later to sign an order segregating Treasury Department bathrooms. These days, Memorial Day honors the sacrifice of Americans in preserving a mostly undefined generic sort of freedom.

Cohen ends, "Memorial Day began with the conviction that to properly honor the war dead, it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they fougt. The only honorable way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commenorate them out in the open, and to insist on a true account."

Connie predicts if a prompt Episcopalian-Anglican reconciliation occurs in our parish soon after a court-ordered property settlement, I will transfer out. I hope it's not true yet I can't discount the posssibility. As much as I once loved the people who've temporarilty displaced us by seizing a property we once held in common, if we re-unite without establishing the justice of the cause that created the split, elegized in the appropriate language, aren't we condoning the actions of the Anglicans by default; that if we are willing to resume our friendships, despite not granting inclusion, equality and civil rights to gays and lesbians, isn' that just as it was for those emancipated, no more than two decades after the Civil War?

I'm a bureaucrat by trade; let's look to the patron saint of office workers, that wily Church-builder, St. Cyprian of Alexandria. During ancient days of Christian persecutions and martyrdom, there were some who said, "I love the Lord and all, but being devoured by a lion.... a bit much, so would you mind terribly, if i ducked out for now, offered some 'Hail Caesars' up to the local Il Duce's, you know how they are, and catch up with ya'll a little later when things have cooled down?"

The question for Old Cyp, and the Council of African Churches (ironically), at their Lambeth, back in 251, was whether or not, and how, to welcome returning apostates when they popped their heads back in the narthex.

The Council decided they'd give it a shot, adopting these rules: the applicant completes a form (in triplicate, duly witnessed and notarized) and turns it in by the established deadline. When the pile of forms stands tall enough to make it worthwhile, the Council will go TDY (standard N. African per diem rates apply). The bishops don't gather too often, but their strategic plan calls for once, at least, every 3 years, pending the odd Barbarian invastion or fall of an empire.

This is very important: for those 3 years, applicants must sit in the last row of pews (I always wondered where Episcopalians picked up that habit) and look very penitent. If they get ahead of themselves, network, or otherwise try to pull a few strings, their application form goes to the bottom of the pile, and the whole process starts over. This is why Cyprian is my hero of the week - someone in the office once asked if it was my job to say no to everything. My response: "no."

As a minimum, reconciliation requires some acknowledgment, some pentitence, that pays attention to the suffering instigated by the separtists, but much more, first and foremost, secures a lasting peace by instilling a united invioable will for full inclusivity and equality; invokes a mandatory vow to never again tolerate intolerance; establishes for all time that we do not have to agree on doctrine to dwell in the house of God in good fellowship.

We don't prove ourselves Christians by rushing a reconciliation that doesn't incoporate the tenets of the struggle, and that signifies at the expense of the victims that it wasn't worth anything beyond reuniting people who just want to be friends again. Traditionalists who've plotted more authoritarian pathways for the Church will be gratified by the application of St. Cyprian's ancient patristic remedy for apostasy. Remember, above all, love the sinners of secession, hate the sin.

Go West, Young Man

I note over the Memorial Day weekend Connie and I ventured out on another exploration of the Virginia Northern Neck. The featured roadside attraction was the mountain laurel in bloom. There was so much along Route 17, it looked like one long white hydrangea hedge.

Our goal was Urbanna, famed for an oyster festival, rumored to be quaint. A general goods store in an old brick building on main street exemplifies the way it was to shop before the big box era, though with jeans selling for $38 a pair, I can't see why I'd patronize it other than to preserve a small-town institution (sorry, too cheap).

Hanging startingly out of place in another store, though, was a t-shirt with quite a profound message: The Journey is the Destination.

That, indeed, is why we explore regions like the Northern Neck. It's the gist of this message, along the winding way, that ended in baptism, at age 43. That journey began with a Bill Moyers TV program called Genesis. Christians, Muslims, Rabbi's, professors, men, women, writers, poets, turned the stories of Eden, Abraham, the Flood and Exodus, upside down, right side up, in such compelling ways, it kindled a desire to know more. The desire to know became the desire to be; here I am, 10 years later, a veteran of the Christian wars.

I was reminded of Genesis this week when I accessed the transcript of a conference of scholars and journalists that was sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a philanthropic foundation. The kernel was Anglican schism. The exchange delivered much more, raising foundational questions as to whether the split is compromised of parties of temporary pragmatic alliances or whether the underlying causes will generate permanent West-Global South alignments, conservative and progressive. Will an interconnected world split down the middle into the two camps?

In some denominations, an influx of millions of Global South converts has already set the tone. The Seventh Day Adventists, for one, are now comprised of 1 million Americans and 14 million non-West newer adherents. The U.S. Branch is inclined towards female ordination; it's not going to happen now under a dominant culture that favors patriarchy.

I've read one third of U.S. CANA parishes are native Nigerian; will the same type of cultural gender class occur? One African Archbishop has been quoted: "Westerns think when these Africans get out of their grass huts and get some education, they'll be just like us. The more Africa develops, the more Africans will be about asserting African values."

Can a tactical alliance of outnumbered American conservatives, who turned to the Global South, for the numbers they needed to claim a majority, survive, in the long-run? If Global South members, for example, start to preach redistributive economics to their allies, could laissez faire Western free-market captialists stomach the radicalism, even after they've won or lost on domestic property issues, and don't need their new comrades as much any longer?

On the other side of the aisle, can American, Canadian and English progressives, aligned with world-wide liberal theologians, overcome the cultural divides? (I'd bank more on the progressives since modern liberalism is inherently inclusive, but nothing is certain; the New American Left fell apart when it wasn't able to contain economic, racial and gender differences.)

I note this week an editorial from the Dallas Morning News by Rod Dresher called How can we live with our roots cut off? He contrasts Russell Kirk, dean of post-War traditionalist small government conservatism, with Camille Paglia, a professor and writer, who happens to be, an atheist libertarian sexually-pagan Democrat, and that's just for starters. Dresher avows Kirk has more in common with Paglia than with the Urbana-busting statist coporate lobbying presumably conservative ilk of the day. "Kirk knew that culture was more important than politics," and "that reviving the moral imagination, meaning re-engagement with the art and literature of the West's cultural patrimony - in the face of the disaster of modernity, was vital to saving our civilization."

Paglia, in turn, writes, "I remain concerned about the compulsive denigration of the West and the reductiveness so many leading academics in the humanities have toward their own tradition - they reduce it all to the lowest common denominator or racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia. That's an extremely small-minded way of looking at culture and a betrayal of the career mission of these educators, whose job is to educate students in our culture." Knowing her background, Paglia can't help but mean to say while she doesn't dismiss all those -isms as denominators, she doesn't attribute all the knowledge to be gleaned from the humanities to be all about them; there's also a larger contextual canvas upon which these are but some of the paints.

What better time than Memorial Day to reflect upon the broad panorama of Western values? I believe in an American exceptionalism; not promulgated and enforced from the tip of a gun, but, like Paglia, where educated citizens, schooled in the liberal arts, expect these values to naturally transcend the -isms as part and parcel of the general forward progress of humanity.

Like the progress represented by the happy-ending story of Gramoz Prestreshi of Kosovo who was granted political asylulm in the U.S. Wny? He was outted as gay by a family member, then beaten. He was forced to live in safe houses secretly leased by gay organizations. When he ventured out on New Year's Eve with his friend Lorik, they were beaten. The police taunted them; the hospital wouldn't treat them. After the story was leaked to the press, Lorik was beaten. He killed himself.

Gromoz Prestreshi's journey was filled with horror; for him, the destination of America was the destination. I have the luxury, otherwise, of living an American life where The Journey as Destination is possible and real.

How can an exclusive Christianity co-exist within a Western-American pluralism? A Scottish theologian, name of Lesslie Newbigin, may have an answer. In, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society, he writes of three ways:

-exclusive in the sense of affirming the unique truth of the Revelation in Jesus Christ, but not in the sense of denying the possibility of salvation to those outside of the Christian faith.

-inclusive in the sense of refusing to limit the saving grace of God to Christians, but not in the sense of viewing other religions as salvific.

-pluralist in the sense of acknowledging the gracious work of God in the lives of all human beings, but not in the sense of denying the unique and decisvie nature of what God has done in Jesus Christ.

I note this week that Bob wrote in an email, "Think about this: as a result of the splits, there are Episcopal and Anglican parishes worshipping in Presbyterian, Methodist, Seventh Day Adventist, etc., churches. Why couldn't Anglicans worship in Episcopal churches and vice-versa? Sounds too easy. I must be missing something."

I'm only able, frankly, to accomodate the former and not the latter. Progressive parishes are inherently inclusive to diverse viewpoints; so it's no problem to welcome Anglicans.

I can't attend services, though, in Anglican parishes, where presence is implicit support for one view, one to which I'm diametrically opposed. I'm not sure what that says about me; perhaps more veteran Christians could overcome such qualms.

We all live within the gray of an unfinished high-stakes struggle. Yet it remains mostly within the province of Western values to sustain progress in preserving and extending human rights. I'm more than anxious for the rest of the world to catch up. It preserves the soul of America to offer sanctuary to those like Gramoz. Would attending an Anglican parish for services compromise this? Yes.