Spiritual Quote of the Day (Anthony Saldarini, on Arguments Among Religious Groups)

“What is at stake when religious groups and factions argue with one another? Why do Christians label each other orthodox and heretic? Why does strife over practice and thought break out regularly in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other religions? Some of the reasons are perennial. Human knowing is always imperfect and mutable, no matter how much we claim to have the simple, absolute, unchanging truth; and imperfect knowledge inevitably spawns disagreement. Permanent tensions in a tradition produce recurrent conflicts. For example, Christians have claimed that Jesus is both God and human for centuries and have argued for that long over how to formulate such a claim and interpret its meaning. In the contemporary West sharp debates continually break out between religious traditions and quickly changing culture. Modern science stresses progress and the inherent uncertainty of provisional scientific results, much to the dismay of religious traditions, which seek to maintain the stability of their revelation and traditions.”—Biblical scholar Anthony J. Saldarini (1941-2001), “The Uses and Abuses of Heresy,” Bible Review, December 1997

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Tom Holland, on the Bible)

“A history of the Bible…cannot just be a history of intellectuals. Its impact is immeasurable precisely because it was felt by soldiers as well as by scholars, and by down-and-outs as well as by dons. It is a book that has, over the millennia, inspired revolts and grandiose schemes of revolution and wars and pogroms and expeditions to different continents.” — English novelist, popular historian, and podcaster Tom Holland, “In the Beginning Was the Word,” The Financial Times, Apr. 13-14, 2019

Quote of the Day (C. V. Wedgwood, on the Past Quest for Certainties)

“Men wanted certainties, not more causes for doubt, and since the discoveries of science perplexed them with strange theories about the earth on which they walked and the bodies they inhabited, they turned with all the more zeal to the firm assurances of religion.”― English historian C. V. Wedgwood (1910-1997), The Thirty Years War (1938)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on Religion and Errors of Fact)

“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.” — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Song Lyric of the Day (Maggie Rose, on ‘Something Broken’)

“Life's full of broken things
Like hearts, homes, and dreams
We all come from something broken.”— “Broken,” composed by Patrick Russell Davis, Margaret Rose Durante (AKA Maggie Rose), and Corey Crowder, from Ms. Rose’s EP The Variety Show, Vol. 1 (2016)
 
On Sundays, I normally include a “Spiritual Quote of the Day” on this blog. But last night, while listening to several country music artists on a PBS station, I heard this song from Maggie Rose, a singer-songwriter I hadn't heard of before. 

It struck me that it is precisely “something broken”—call it original sin or just the human condition—that has sparked the need for so much religious consolation.
 
And so, I offer it here, and hope that anyone reading this finds what will mend anything broken in their own lives.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Harvey Cox, on the 'Religion of the Market' and Nature)

“I am beginning to think that for all the religions of the world, however they may differ from one another, the religion of The Market has become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is rarely recognized as a religion. The traditional religions and the religion of the global market ... hold radically different views of nature. In Christianity and Judaism, for example, ‘the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and all that dwell therein.’ The Creator appoints human beings as stewards and gardeners but, as it were, retains title to the earth. Other faiths have similar ideas. In The Market religion, however, human beings, more particularly those with money, own anything they buy and—within certain limits—can dispose of anything they choose. Other contradictions can be seen in ideas about the human body, the nature of human community, and the purpose of life. The older religions encourage archaic attachments to particular places. But in The Market’s eyes all places are interchangeable. The Market prefers a homogenized world culture with as few inconvenient particularities as possible.” —American theologian Harvey Cox, "The Market as God," Atlantic Monthly, March 1999, reprinted in Best Spiritual Writing 2000, edited by Philip Zaleski (2000)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Karen Armstrong, on When Religion ‘Put a Brake on Violence’)

“It is simply not true that ‘religion’ is always aggressive. Sometimes it has actually put a brake on violence. In the ninth century BCE, Indian ritualists extracted all violence from the liturgy and created the ideal of ahimsa, ‘nonviolence.’ The medieval Peace and Truce of God forced knights to stop terrorizing the poor and outlawed violence from Wednesday to Sunday each week. Most dramatically, after the Bar Kokhba war, the rabbis reinterpreted the scriptures so effectively that Jews refrained from political aggression for a millennium. Such successes have been rare. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative.”—Religious scholar Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014) 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (David Brooks, on 21st-Century ‘Globe-Spanning Holy Wars’)

“Over the last several years something interesting happened: Authoritarians found God. They used religious symbols as nationalist identity markers and rallying cries. They unified the masses behind them by whipping up perpetual culture wars. They reframed the global debate: It was no longer between democracy and dictatorship; it was between the moral decadence of Western elites and traditional values and superior spirituality of the good normal people in their own homelands.

“The 21st century is turning into an era of globe-spanning holy wars at a time when the appeal of actual religion seems to be on the wane.”—Columnist David Brooks, “When Dictators Find God,” The New York Times, Sept. 10, 2021

Quote of the Day (C.V. Wedgwood, on Changing Reasons for ‘The Judgment of the Sword’)

“After the expenditure of so much human life to so little purpose, men might have grasped the essential futility of putting the beliefs of the mind to the judgement of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to fight for and found others.”― English historian C.V. Wedgwood (1910-1997), The Thirty Years War (1938)

With the signing of the second of two treaties, the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War, 375 years ago this month.

I suspect that the two proper nouns in the last sentence will bring a barely visible light to the eyes of many of my readers. They’ll be lucky to hear the dimmest echo of a high school or college world history class, or, if they’re real theater aficionados, they might remember it as the period in which Bertolt Brecht’s fierce antiwar play, Mother Courage and Her Children, is set.

Yet all of this deserves to be better recalled. The lengthy war that came to an end with the strokes of several pens and millions of sighs released resulted in the greatest loss of civilian lives in Europe until the Irish Potato Famine two centuries later.

I bring this up now because of the latest crisis engulfing the Middle East: Hamas’ coordinated terror attacks earlier this month from the Gaza Strip onto adjoining areas of Israel, followed by retaliation by Israel. In the three weeks since the fighting began, 1,400 Israelis and 7,000 Palestinians have already perished—and those totals are sure to climb as Israel prepares a full-scale war.

A couple of weeks ago, after intense exposure on the evening news to the anguish all too present in the region now, a relative of mine, though a regular churchgoer, said he couldn’t believe how much violence has been committed in the name of religion. His stunned disbelief was understandable, but also, in a larger sense, misplaced.

The Peace of Westphalia dealt with the religious elements in the war by instituting the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (each prince would have the right to determine the religion of his own state). But as C.V. Wedgwood noted above, rulers soon would alight on other motives for whipping up hatred.

The Hamas-Israel War has pitted Moslems against Jews in the Mideast, but the conflict goes beyond mere sectarian issues, with lack of a Palestinian homeland, class resentment, and superpower politics also involved. 

In much the same way, the Thirty Years War ostensibly arose from conflicts between Catholics and Protestants hub in Europe, but issues of national sovereignty and balance-of-power issues eventually complicated matters considerably. (Well along in the conflict, Catholic France supported the Protestant principals in an attempt to damage the Holy Roman Empire.)

At this vast remove, we’ll never know for certain exactly how many lives were lost in this protracted conflict, but historians estimate that somewhere in the neighborhood of eight million perished.

Human beings have accumulated a wealth of knowledge in the four hundred years since the Thirty Years War broke out, but have yet to ameliorate on a broad scale the tensions of suffering people and the exploitative instincts of their leaders. So it’s all too possible that the body count of the Thirty Years War can be exceeded in our time.

(The image accompanying this post, The Ratification of the Treaty of Munster, was painted in 1648 by Dutch painter Gerard Ter Borch.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Ann Patchett, on Religion and Storytelling)

“I suppose my ability to tell a story came from my good nature and a desire to keep everyone [in the family] together. Catholicism also was the perfect prep. Religion, in general, is story-based and teaches you to believe in what you can't see, and I did.”—American novelist and bookstore owner Ann Patchett, quoted by Marc Myers, “House Call: Ann Patchett—A Late Reader, She Made Up Stories,” The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 25, 2023

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on Humanity’s Confounding Children’s Game, ‘Cheat the Prophet’)

“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called ‘Keep to-morrow dark,’ and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) ‘Cheat the Prophet.’ The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.

“For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful.”—English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on the Religious Dissenting Spirit Behind the American Revolution)

“Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history. Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favour and every kind of support from authority. The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world; and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners, which has been constantly flowing into these colonies, has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.”—Anglo-Irish statesman and father of conservatism Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, delivered March 22, 1775

The separation of church and state was one of the most tangled subjects in contemporary debates about government—a fact underscored by the explosion of commentary from both the left and right, much of it unhelpful, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

It would be a stretch to say, as many on the right would have it, that America was founded as an explicitly “Christian nation.”

But habits of mind formed in Americans’ religious practice—principally, those related to resistance to “all implicit submission of mind and opinion”—lay at the heart of American colonists’ increasing alienation from England, and those instincts would make it impossible for the Mother Country to continue to impose punitive legislation on the colonists, warned Edmund Burke.

One month before British troops clashed with the Americans at Lexington and Concord, this father of modern conservatism cautioned the House of Commons about the futility of coercion. A key part of his argument against force was the temperament of the colonists in their environment. British North America, he noted, was disproportionately composed of "dissenters from the establishments of their several countries."

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Jack Miles, on the Three Great Vices, Fear and Love)

“Saint Paul in the First Letter to the Corinthians speaks of three great virtues—faith, hope, and love—but, he insists, ‘the greatest of these is love.’ The three vices to which these virtues are opposed would seem to be doubt, the opposite of faith; despair, the opposite of hope; and hatred, the opposite of love. But behind hatred, even ostensibly livid hatred, what you find so often is buried fear. Once we face down our fears, we discover at least sometimes that those we feared were fearful of us. And as the fear subsides on either side, it is—at least sometimes—as if the love that was always there, lying dormant, waiting for its chance, wakes up and starts to sing.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning religious author Jack Miles, “Lessons From an Unwritten Autobiography,” The American Scholar, Winter 2022

(The image accompanying this post, showing Jack Miles, was taken Aug. 24, 2016, by Louis Pescevic.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William Galston, on Religion and the ‘Heat-to-Light Ratio in Politics’)

“It is disconcerting that so many Republicans consider those who aren’t Christians to be less than fully American. But 35% of Democrats—most of them racial and ethnic minorities—feel the same way. While the Constitution imposes no religious test for citizenship and bars it for public office, American society does impose an informal if often tacit test for full membership in the community. Closing the gap between the American civic creed and public social attitudes might lower the heat-to-light ratio in politics.”—William Galston, “Alienated Republicans, Moderate Democrats,” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 3, 2021

The accompanying photo of William Galston was taken Jan. 8, 2012, at a Civics Ed panel at the Brookings Institution by Medill DC.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Freeman Dyson, on Science, Religion and Unsolved Mysteries)

“Science is exciting because it is full of unsolved mysteries, and religion is exciting for the same reason. The greatest unsolved mysteries are the mysteries of our existence as conscious beings in a small corner of a vast universe. Why are we here? Does the universe have a purpose? Whence comes our knowledge of good and evil? These mysteries, and a hundred others like them, are beyond the reach of science. They lie on the other side of the border, within the jurisdiction of religion.”—Physicist, tech visionary, and author Freeman Dyson (1923-2020), acceptance speech for the 2000Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, May 16, 2000

Spiritual Quote of the Day (William James, on ‘The Characteristics of the Religious Life’)

“The characteristics of the religious life…[include] the following beliefs: that the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; that union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end; [and] that prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof—be that spirit 'God' or 'law'—is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world." — American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910), The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Harvey Mansfield, on ‘The Contest Between Religion and Atheism’)

“In the contest between religion and atheism, the strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power, nonetheless, of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.”—American political philosopher Harvey Mansfield, “Atheist Tracts,” The Weekly Standard, Aug. 13, 2007

(Photo of Harvey Mansfield speaking at the Art Museum at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, Mar. 3, 2017, taken by Gage Skidmore.)

This Day in Victorian History (John Henry Newman Shocks in Converting to Catholicism)

Oct. 9, 1845—Two years after leaving an influential religious post at Oxford over his growing doubts about the Church of England, John Henry Newman fell to his knees before an Italian missionary who had come at his request, and was admitted into the Roman Catholic Church.

The visiting priest, Fr. Dominic Barberi of the Passionist religious order, passing through England on his way to Belgium, knew Newman by reputation as “the most learned ecclesiastic in England.”

But after he showed up, soaked to the skin after walking through torrential rain, at Newman’s chapel in the village of Littlemore, Fr. Barberi encountered someone far more down to earth: “In my judgement, he is one of the most humble and loveable men I have met in my life.”

Over three decades later, upon being named a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, Newman took as his motto Cor ad cor loquitur (i.e., “heart speaks to heart”). That was the nature of his life as a spiritual counselor at Oxford and what he had looked for previously as he assessed a church he had come to identify with intellectually while still demanding to “see more sanctity in her than we do at present.”

If Roman Catholicism really wanted to convert England, Newman had noted, “let them go barefooted into our manufacturing towns – let them preach to the people like St. Francis Xavier – let them be pelted and trampled on, and I will own that they do what we cannot. I will confess that they are our betters far.”

That is what Newman encountered in Fr. Dominic, a cleric of frail health due to die within four years, but gifted with a deep, far-ranging scholarship and personal warmth that mirrored those same qualities in Newman.

“His very look had a holy aspect which when his figure came in sight in my circle most singularly affected me, and his remarkable bonhomie in the midst of his sanctity was in itself a real holy preaching,” Newman remembered years later. “No wonder then I became his convert and penitent.”

Years in the making, Newman’s embrace of Catholicism had been preceded by charismatic leadership of the Oxford Movement, a group of spiritual activists at the university who argued against the increasing secularization of the Church of England.

Yet, in examining the origins of Anglicanism, he had concluded uncomfortably that its crucial early document, the Thirty-Nine Articles, was not the “middle way” between Catholicism and Protestantism he had expected. Instead, in his Tract 90, he proposed, as noted by Michael J. G. Pahls and Kenneth Parker in their contribution to The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, “an Anglicanism that was genuinely catholic—at once true to its apostolic patrimony and at the same time solicitous of reconciliation with other portions of the true church.”

The publication, which Newman later saw as his last attempt to remain within the Anglican fold, led to a storm of controversy. In ambivalence and agony, Newman withdrew to the semi-monastic community at Littlemore, mindful to avoid junior colleagues he had mentored until he could resolve his own inner turmoil.

Growing Protestant suspicions about his continued beliefs dismayed Newman, even as he noted the swelling sympathy for him among English Catholics. While writing his Essay on the Development of Doctrine early in 1845, his doubts gradually fell away, until he finally made his overture to Fr. Dominic.

An incisive theologian, Newman, through his conversion, positively influenced the position of Catholicism in Britain to a degree it had not enjoyed since Henry VIII. “The shock [to Britain] was tremendous,” wrote Richard Altick in Victorian People and Ideas. “Even [Prime Minister Robert] Peel’s reversal of the Corn Laws the next year created no greater excitement.”

While the Roman Catholic Relief Act 16 years before had removed onerous legal restrictions in place since Elizabeth I, Newman’s impassioned preaching and deep friendships led roughly 250 ministers or theological leaders at Oxford and Cambridge alone to follow him into the Roman Catholic Church after his conversion, according to Earle E. Cairns’ Christianity Through the Centuries.

Even Victorian politicians underscored the wide cultural impact of Newman’s move. Prime Minister William Gladstone remarked, “I regard Newman’s concession as an event as unexampled as an epoch.” Gladstone’s great political rival for England’s highest political office, Benjamin Disraeli, went even further, seeing Newman’s conversion as dealing “a blow to England from which she yet reeled.”

Part of the stunning nature of the conversion came because of what Newman had come to represent in the dozen years before and how he had come to renounce his former views. As he later wrote, negative opinions about him after his shift were almost unavoidable “when a man, who had written strongly against a cause, and had collected a party round him by virtue of such writings, gradually faltered in his opposition to it, unsaid his words, threw his own friends into perplexity and their proceedings into confusion, and ended by passing over to the side of those whom he had so vigorously denounced.”

The dramatic break in Newman’s life was not his first shift in religious adherence, but it was far more consequential for him. He had converted to evangelical views at age 15, only to relinquish them 14 years later.

Yet the shift to Catholicism meant he had to give up his position as Vicar of St. Mary’s. the University church at Oxford, as well as many of the friends he had made and the comfort of the established Church of England.

For all those who followed Newman’s lead out of the Anglican Church, he attracted an even more vociferous set of critics who could not abide either his shift or his growing prestige in the Roman Catholic Church. One critic, the clergyman and writer Charles Kingsley, published a blistering and erroneous attack 18 years later, claiming that “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy,” and that Newman had justified the need for falsehood.  

After being unable to extract from Kingsley either a citation of such an objectionable statement or an apology for the accusation, Newman responded with Apologia pro Vita Sua (“A Defense of My Life”), which has taken its place with St. Augustine’s Confessions and Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain as classic conversion narratives.

Complex, sometimes even paradoxical, Newman sought solitude and was so instinctively reticent that he recoiled at the prospect of controversy with Kingsley. But his pastoral concern led him to reach out constantly to other people, and he cemented friendships through his affability and kindness.

It is difficult to underestimate Newman’s importance in his own time or ours. Through his numerous personal contacts, he established a network of associates that would advocate for the Roman Catholic Church, both in England and Ireland, where he established the Catholic University of Ireland (an experience that inspired him to write the seminal Idea of a University). 

A poet of considerable power, he befriended a later Roman Catholic convert who published his own celebrated verses, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Most of all, in a prolific body of work now comprising 40 volumes, Newman wrote with an erudition and elegance of expression that marked him as one of the masters of Victorian prose.

During Vatican II, Newman was hailed as a forerunner of several concerns of the council, including ecumenism, concern for the laity, and doctrinal development.

Last year, Pope Francis canonized this theologian of extraordinary intellectual and personal gifts.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Benjamin Cheever, on Church as Sanctuary for Man, ‘The Homesick Animal’)

“I find it endlessly heartening to walk up the aisle, look into the pews, and see that when going up to take Communion, the men have often left their car keys unguarded, the women their pocketbooks. Church was once a sanctuary, a place where outcasts and even criminals could save themselves from the mob. And who among us is not a stranger in this world? Man is the lonely, the homesick animal. Homesick when he travels, and homesick when he stays at home.”—Essayist-novelist Benjamin Cheever, “Judge Not,” in Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, edited by Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke (1997)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (King David, on Calling Out to the Lord)

“The waves of death swirled about me;

    the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.

The cords of the grave coiled around me;

    the snares of death confronted me.

 “In my distress I called to the Lord;

    I called out to my God.

From his temple he heard my voice;

    my cry came to his ears.—2 Samuel 22:5-7

I saw a sign bearing verse 7 of this quote—the one about calling out to God— as I passed a local Baptist church yesterday morning, and it seemed perfectly chosen to reflect our nation’s—even our world’s—difficulties as we cope with the coronavirus crisis. 

The verses before what you read here describe this as the words to David’s song after God “delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul. These are lyrics of thanksgiving and praise, to be sure, but in this passage, the focus is squarely on David’s desperate straits. Our dilemma, unlike David’s, is medical rather than military, but for all that, no less existential.

It has not been just the varying amounts of difficulties associated with this medical condition (from physical discomfort to death) on display these past several weeks, nor even the fear of the many unknowns associated with it, but also everything that divides us as a society—politics, media, race and ethnicity, (dis)belief in science, and class divisions. 

The virus cannot be the product of a just God’s plan. At the same time, it reveals, nearly 3,000 years after King David erupted in lamentation, that the march of civilization has immunized us against the eternal self-doubts of the human heart, or of the need for God to provide us with solace and courage to face these multiple trials.

(The image accompanying this post shows Gregory Peck in the 1951 Biblical epic David and Bathsheba.)