The Rock from Which We're Hewn: Remembering

I can't let this day end without adding to this blog a note in memory of my uncle, Henry C. Lindsey. He was born today in 1918.

I didn't appreciate my father's older brother and what he meant to my life sufficiently during his lifetime. My mother preferred her family to my father's, and exerted much influence on her husband and children, in determining which members of what family they would see at any given time. Though for a good part of his career,my uncle and his family lived near us, we saw these family members only rarely.

There were also sub rosa tensions between my father and his older brother, tensions never fully articulated and somewhat mysterious to me as a child. I suspect they had much to do with the fact that my uncle was what people used to call biddable--a biddable son, who did what his parents expected and made them proud. My father, on the other hand, was the proverbial bad boy, the rebellious son who gave his parents grief by refusing to obey, and who would grow up to inflict similar pain on his wife, by his refusal to be curbed by family obligations he preferred to ignore.

Still, as I grew up and chose academic life as my vocation (or was chosen by that life, might be more accurate), I grew closer to my uncle, who was also an academic. He had earned a doctorate in speech and drama, and spent the initial years of his teaching career in that field, heading speech departments and publishing a number of plays.

Early in his academic career, however, he got tagged for administrative work--just as happened with me. In both of our cases, the tagging had little to do with our wishes or, truth be told, our inclinations and talents. Neither of us had much much interest in the details of administrative work, though, like me, my uncle exerted much effort in trying to attend to them conscientiously. Both of us worked to be organized and detail-oriented, and both paid a price for doing so.

What my uncle had going for him in the area of academic administration was, however, his strong sense of people--his obligation to people, to making their lives better when he was able to do so. As his sister, my father's sister Helen, told me towards the end of her brother's life, he was offered one job after another as an academic vice-president in church-related colleges (a career I found myself pushed into in church-related colleges, as well) because he was simply exceptionally kind, fair-minded, able to get people working together even when faculties were riven by strong divisions. As Aunt Helen told me, her brother had been adored at each institution at which he did administrative work--adored, in particular, by faculty who reported to him.

I saw those character traits always in evidence in the family circle, where my uncle was often patient to a fault, constantly good-humored--and downright humorous, with a playright's ability to turn a phrase, a witty (and sometimes mildly wicked) ability to spot people's foibles and to mock them gently, and a powerful story-telling ability. What I know of the history of my father's side of my family owes much to his interest in collecting family stories and artifacts and passing these on to me. He told me many priceless anecdotes about my great-grandparents that I did not hear from my father, who was less interested in handing on those stories--to me, at least. I would give much for his ability to mimic others, an ability my father and his sister also had.

I very much miss my uncle. He has been on my mind all day, though I did not know today was the anniversary of his birth until I looked at some record that contained that date. I always run across pictures of him or biographical information about him in books I happen to pick up or on the internet with a start. He left more traces of his life than I would have expected as I grew up, since I knew nothing of the details of his varied and successful career as an academic administrator until I was grown and entering on my own academic career.

I often think of the last time I saw my uncle Carlton. (In professional life, he went by the name his wife preferred, Henry; in the family, he was called, as he had been in childhood, Carlton.) That last visit was to the hospital, where he was declining quickly from a form of diabetes that was very aggressive and destructive to his entire body.

His sister Helen was with me. Her brother looked shockingly bad, but neither of us showed our feelings about that--or, I hope at least that I didn't betray what I felt on seeing him in such a state. Though he was having episodes of temporary blindness due to quick small strokes at that time, he was jovial, and even tried to entertain us with funny family stories.

When we left the room, my aunt sat on a bench and cried bitterly. I sat beside her and held her. With her nursing background, she knew that her brother's life was rapidly coming to an end. She said to me as she cried that it was horrible to see him in such a state, because she knew he was suffering in ways he had disguised as we visited him. He was the last member of her immediate family. I feel certain that she also knew that, in facing his death, she was facing that final, obdurate orphanhood of the sole member left of a family in which everyone else had died.

I owe much to my uncle. In my last academic administrative position at Bethune-Cookman University, I proudly kept his picture among the diplomas on the wall behind my desk. I did so to remind me of what the work of an academic vice-president is all about, when it is done right, as he did it: getting people to work together, making people feel valued so that they are able to put their best foot forward, and adhering to the core values and mission of the institution. And making the lives of those he served as an administrator better when one is able to do so . . . .

Cooking to Save the Planet: New Year's Notes

Cooking tonight's supper--in the middle of today--has made me think about how we cook as an act of cultural choice, as a commitment to core values. I'm including in "how we cook" the foodstuff out of which we choose to make our meals.

I don't usually put a lot of thought into what I cook on any given day. We cook and eat seasonally, so that tomatoes in January are out of the question, unless they're canned. Cabbage and other greens like collards, mustard, or turnips might show up often on our table, however, since they're plentiful (and good) at this time of year.

What I choose to cook at any given time also has much to do with what's there--in the icebox and pantry, in the baskets holding fresh vegetables, fruit, and nuts around the kitchen and in the sunroom. I look around, I think about what might go well together or how these ingredients might be turned into that dish, and I prepare.

And as I did that today, it occurred to me that there's an entire history of cultural information in the background of that act of choosing food for a daily meal, and of the act of preparing food. No one cooks in a cultural vacuum. We have taken in--from family, from friends, books, and other cultural influences--a vast library of knowledge about how various foods taste, about their nutritional value, and about how to prepare them.

And that knowledge is being transmitted only intermittently, I suspect, to the next generation. That's definitely the case in my family. And it's worrisome. It's worrisome, because people have to continue cooking and eating, if they want to live. And much depends--for their own health and for the health of the planet--on whether they do so well or badly.

A case in point: our meal tonight will center on two dishes, a salad of lima beans and a dessert of rice pudding. It will center on those ingredients because they were there, already cooked and in the icebox from previous meals. When we cook dried beans (and we do so often), we almost always cook enough to have one or more subsequent meals of the beans in question--as soup, as salad, or as another main dish of beans matched with cheese or grains.

Beans because . . . well, because they're a primary foodstuff in my cultural heritage. I can remember my mother's sister Pauline saying that she had grown so tired of pinto beans and cornbread during the Depression, she vowed to herself as a girl to eat steak every day when she grew up. Instead, she learned to love beans and cornbread and almost never had steak.

As was the case with my family as I grew up. Steak was not something I even relished, since we had it so rarely. Beans and cornbread were the stuff of everyday life, and delicious stuff at that, with relishes like chow chow to point up their earthy flavors, and with other vegetables to round out the meal, give it eye appeal, and fill in the corners. Meat was, for us, what Jefferson said it should be: a condiment to season vegetables. Not the main dish.

Beans are everyday fare. They should be everyday fare, a wide range of pulses, far more than they are in most of our households. In a nation in which we worry about too much consumption of fat, we seldom think about how meats themselves provide the majority of the fat we eat on any given day--and an unhealthy source of fat both for our bodies, when eaten too frequently, and for the planet, since production of meat usually requires an enormous amount of grain and other vegetables, which could feed us as well or better than the meat we believe is essential to our diet.

Beans, and, in particular, the instinctive rightness of combining them with grains and thus complementing their amino acids to make a high-quality protein, also connect us, our American tables, to the cultures of many other nations. A frequent summer supper for Steve and me is a dish of pinto beans cooked and mashed up with some garlic and salsa, and perhaps some olive oil--refried beans, to be precise--served with tortillas, grated cheese, more salsa, chopped lettuce or cabbage or cole slaw made with vinegar and oil, chopped onion, cilantro. We spread the tortillas with the beans, add the toppings we like, and that's our main dish.

And it's a meal whose inspiration and ingredients come to us by way of Latin America, where the virtue of consuming beans with corn has long been known. And where fresh vegetables and fruit, particularly tomatoes, chiles, cilantro, avocado, limes, are added for piquancy and additional nutrition.

Because of our African heritage, we in the American South are also fortunate enough to know of and consume routinely a wide array of other dried pulses that came to us from Africa. These legumes include black-eyed peas, cowpeas, and the numerous other beans and peas that fit into that large category of cowpeas or field peas. It was also probably Africa that taught us, along with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, to combine beans with rice to make a nutritious main dish.

For tonight's bean salad, I took a dish of about two cups of large white lima beans (dried beans before we cooked them) we had cooked for new year's day, and mixed them with several slices of onion chopped fine, two stalks of celery and one bell pepper also minced fine, and some finely chopped garlic and parsley. I then took two carrots and sliced them lengthwise, slicing them across into half-moon shapes, and parboiled those a minute or so to take away their rawness.

To these ingredients, I added wine vinegar in which I had steeped several sprigs of dried thyme, from fresh thyme in a pre-Christmas food basket we bought from our local food co-op. When I saw that we weren't going to eat all the fresh thyme quickly enough, I put the uneaten sprigs in a black skillet that I placed over one of the stove pilots (we cook with gas, and that makes drying things like the thyme easy). When it was dry, I then heated wine vinegar, put the thyme into a bottle and poured the vinegar over, and let it sit. To flavor salads . . . .

After I mixed the vegetables with the vinegar, adding salt and pepper to taste and taking care not to break the soft beans up, I then poured in a good bit of olive oil, tossed, and arranged in a colorful bowl. To be served over beds of mixed spring greens, with five-grain toast . . . .

Since I also found in the icebox about two cups of cooked arborio rice from a risotto I had made recently, I decided to make a rice pudding to go with the salad. I might at some other time have mixed the rice into the bean salad.

I went the pudding route today because, well, I don't really know: rice pudding just felt right on this winter evening. And there were those nice slices of preserved pineapple left from the Christmas sideboard, to give folks who found too much candy, pie, cake, and too many cookies cloying something else to eat.

I chopped them, added them to the rice, and mixed in a handful of raisins, a handful of chopped pecans, and some sugar, with a large pinch of mixed ground spice that was the tail end of a box of spices from Sri Lanka a friend gave us several years ago. I had baked with these until I had a hodgepodge in the bottom of the box, which I ground together to season this Christmas's fruitcakes. And, oh yes, come to think of it, I also added a packet of vanilla sugar that German friends who stayed with us winter before last had bought to bake with, and left behind when they returned to Germany.

Then I added to the fruit, rice, and spice several beaten eggs and a good bit of milk. Many people think they dislike rice pudding because they have encountered it only in the stodgy, stingy unimaginative form served at school tables: big wads of tastless rice stuck together with a tiny bit of custard and no other ingredients. Rice pudding should be a creamy dish, a pudding, that tastes rich without an abundance of fat: a dish in which a bit of cooked rice is suspended in a sea of well-seasoned custard.

So that will be it tonight: bean salad, rice pudding, some lettuce greens, nothing that stretches our budget to the extreme, nothing that radically depletes the earth of resources. At some level, I suspect we cook this way, in part, because we know it is earth-friendly to eat fruit and vegetables in contrast to meats and other products higher up the food chain. It is part of a commitment to live simply that we made long years back, which has us going to thrift shops for most of our clothes and many household items, using things others have discarded because they are still viable and good.

I suspect we also cook as we do because we've spent a good bit of our lives together making do, without a plethora of resources. Now, we don't even think a lot about saving or avoiding extravagance as a primary motive for how we choose food: we have just learned to cook with care for ourselves, the earth, and our pocketbooks at the same time. It makes sense to us to live that way, and not only for ourselves, but for others--for what we hope for others.

Nor is this really penurious cooking. We do not starve and stint. We eat very well, I fear. Even if we cook beans frequently, we buy the best quality of olive oil we can find, because we use olive oil so often--and nothing can substitute for good olive oil. Eating well towards the lower end of the food chain need not be eating like a Puritan who despises savor and gustatory delight.

But we also eat as we do because we have learned, from our families of origin and our families of choice, that choosing what we eat wisely and preparing it well is good for our bodies and souls--an expression of cultural heritages in which people made do with what the earth provided, and nonetheless managed to live very well. It worries me that the younger folks in my own family don't always seem to be learning that lesson--and that other younger folks may not be learning such lessons, because my generation is not taking time to pass the lessons on.

What, after all, can be simpler than beans and rice? And easier to acquire, cook, and talk about? And what might be more necessary in these hard time, particularly for younger folks and younger families struggling to survive?

Continuation of the Inquisition: New Penalties for Theologian Roger Haight

I began this day reading a posting by David Gibson on the Commonweal blog which says that the Vatican has added new penalties to those already in place for American theologian Roger Haight (www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=2644. Previously, he had been forbidden to write in the area of christology or to teach in Catholic institutions. He is now forbidden by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the contemporary embodiment of the Inquisition, to write about theology at all or to teach anywhere, including in non-Catholic institutions.

Roger directed my dissertation. Because of that connection, and the gratitude I owe him for the hard work he put into that arduous process (arduous for both of us), I feel what is being done to this good Jesuit at a deep level. I am, frankly, appalled and angry, and I'm not sure that writing out of the space of anger and disgust is wise. Most of all, I would not want anything I write to bring further harm to a man in his 70s whose vocational life has been well-nigh destroyed by church fiat.

Because I went to a Jesuit university, I know a bit about Ignatian spirituality. I have long admired the Jesuit emphasis on living for others, and on placing oneself each day in God's hands, in the hope that God will use one's heart, mind, and soul to serve good ends and combat bad ones. I pray the Suscipe prayer of Ignatius of Loyola at the start of each day, before I begin my work.

At the same time, as I say this, I have to say honestly that few Jesuits I have ever met impress me. Many of those who taught or tried to guide me at Loyola were, frankly, too enmeshed in the top-level social circles of New Orleans to make much impression on me. I was simply not in their scope of vision, a scope limited to those with money, power, and significant family ties. I remember sitting through an entire semester of a math class at Loyola taught by such a Jesuit, who never learned my name, but persisted on addressing me by the name Danny--the name of another young man in the class who fit the ideal this priest, whose unique vocation was to take well-heeled Garden District matrons to the Holy Land each summer, pursued.

A few Jesuits I've met have, however, significantly impressed me, and have made a dent on my hard-hearted hell-bound heart. One of these was my undergraduate professor C.J. McNaspy, who embodied the Jesuit ideal of wide learning and catholic sympathy for everybody and, in particular, those on the margins. C. J. was a Jesuit, a person for others, par excellence.

As is Roger Haight. Roger worked his rear off to teach graduate students. Not a single other professor I had in grad school prepared for class as assiduously as Roger did. No other drew from students the response Roger did--a response out of the depth. In his classes, what one thought was not so important as how one thought, as the basis on which one made theological judgments. Knowing the theological literature, being able to cite it fluently, being persistent about pursuing its arguments and capable of defending one's own arguments: these were what counted in Roger's class.

As a result, even when I took classes in 19th-century theology from him in the fairly moderate 1980s, in a fairly moderate graduate school in theology, there were strong reactions against Roger. Because he pushed students to think and not to parrot.

One of these, I recall, came from a California nun with whom I took a class, and who was the first right-wing Republican nun I had ever had the misfortune to meet. This sister was not to the right in terms of lifestyle. Indeed, she dressed in expensive, tailored clothes and had immacuately coiffed hair. She moved among and expected to continue to move among highly placed Republicans in her home county, Orange Co., California.

Her reactionary views were political and theological. With Roger, she was persistently at daggers drawn for reasons murky to me. It was clear she was on a crusade--to purify the church and make it safe for her sort. She relegated the rest of us, her fellow students, to the sidelines in class, where we were expected to enjoy the privilege of listening to her rail at Roger for his christological heresies. Yes, that was the term she used--in the 1980s, in a theology class: heresies.

She would not be challenged to think or defend. She preferred to parrot, to repeat the creed and to point out that, in her humble opinion, Roger's christology from below did not conform to the words she was reciting from the creed. She preferred to hobnob with the rich and powerful in both church and society. A christology from below made her uncomfortable, because it said something about those with whom she stood in solidarity socially and politically.

It was also clear to me that Roger was not supported by some of his fellow Jesuits in Canada, though I could perhaps cause trouble for him by telling all that I saw in that respect. Some of these Jesuits were staunch anti-communists from Eastern Europe, with a penchant for "reporting" to the authorities anyone they suspected of being less than orthodox.

One of the first articles I sought to publish in graduate school got panned by a Jesuit in that network, who happened to be at Fordham at the time, and who had whited out his scathing critique of my work on connections between peacemaking and economic justice so badly that his name was still legible on the letter encouraging the Jesuit journal to which I had submitted my essay not to publish it. Fortunately, a more progressive Catholic journal took the article gladly when I sent it to them.

There was also among Roger's confreres in the Jesuit community in Toronto a priest who has been made bishop, and who is, in my view, hardly distinguishing himself by some of the pig-headed and theologically dubious actions he has taken to earn a name for himself as defender of an orthodoxy willing to butt heads with the Canadian government. He is a John Paul II appointee, the kind of priest being made bishop under the current regime.

I interacted with this priest a number of times as I went through graduate school. I wanted to wash my hands each time I shook his--and mentally, want to wash them even today, as I think about him. I am fairly certain that he has played a big role in bashing his Jesuit brother, who to my mind, far more faithfully embodies Jesuit ideals than he, the big bishop, does. This bishop is also a big old gay basher, to boot--a quality that helps rather than hurts, if one wants to be appointed to office in the church of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Reading some of the comments on the Commonweal blog defending what the CDF is doing to Roger Haight infuriates me even more than I am already angered by the cruel, unjust action of the Vatican towards Haight. One respondent suggests that the CDF never undertakes actions like this without "due diligence" and abundant evidence. Just trust the big papa at the top . . . .

Really, I want to say sarcastically to him? Really? The way the Inquisition undertook actions against witches in the past, with due diligence and abundant evidence? Witches were never burned at the stake until their inquisitors proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were witches: by neighbors who had seen them cavorting nude on mountaintops with the devil, or riding across the sky, or casting spells that caused harm to others. Neighbors and relatives who often benefited economically by accusing the witch of witchcraft. Witches were not ever condemned until the Inquisition had gathered as much evidence as possible to prove the heinous crime of the witch--evidence gathered under torture, if needed.

Really? Trust the authorities? Give ourselves and our minds over to a doctrinal-purity commission that carries on the Inquistion, that does its work in secret, that will not allow the accused to know who has accused him or her, or of what he or she has been accused, so that he/she may defend himself/herself? Everything the Catholic church and other churches have done is worthy of trust?

Nothing I can say will ever change the minds of such folks. And, sadly, those who "think" like this are now at the very center of the Catholic church--again. There may have been a brief moment in the 1960s and 1970s, when Steve and I foolishly headed off to study theology, in which it appeared that a window had opened.

John Paul II and his henchman Ratzinger, the current pope, decisively slammed that window. And for many of us, what the church is doing to people like Roger Haight does not elicit trust. It provokes deep anger and alienation. A church whose leaders behave with such conspicuous lack of justice and charity has an uphill battle in trying to convince many folks that it stands for justice and charity.

Morality and Power Arrangements: John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt"

Steve and I are under the weather as the new year arrives. As I mentioned a day or so ago, we have come down with a post-Christmas bug.

To give ourselves relief from the gruesome sight of watching each other snuffle and down yet another glass of throat-cauterizing scalding liquid laced with lemon, we went out yesterday afternoon to see John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt”—not the play, but the new movie starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And I’m glad we did so. The movie is outstanding. Meryl Streep plays the role of Sister Aloysius with an empathetic brio that is absolutely convincing, even when she carries the character gloriously over the top—as she does at times.

Before I comment on the movie, I should warn readers who haven’t yet seen it that what I say below will contain spoilers. If you intend to see “Doubt,” please proceed at your own risk.

The demographics of the audience were themselves interesting. In a fairly full theater in the middle of the afternoon on new year’s day, we were the sole males present. The audience consisted of couples of women, middle-aged for the most part—not, I imagine, paired couples, but women at loose ends on the holiday, on an afternoon outing with friends.

I was also fascinated by several comments I overheard as we left the theater. One woman turned to her friend and said, “I liked it until they pulled the rug away at the end. They didn’t give us anything certain to take home with us!” Another said to her friend, “All those attempts to trip him up, and she still admitted she didn’t know if he was guilty.”

Both comments surprised me. Though the dénoument does leave room for doubt—was Sr. Aloysius, after all, a vengeful harpy intent on finding an innocent man guilty because she had an animus against him?—the preponderance of evidence, of moral weight, is clearly on her side as the movie ends. Why, then, the need to wrap the plot up in a neat package that is unlike the mess we experience in everyday life, as we approach moral dilemmas? And why did some of the women in the audience read the story as a sordid tale of female vengeance on an innocent man?

In my view, the doubt with which the movie left us to contend is a significant part of the story, of what the story wants to teach us. This is how it is in life: we never have the clarity of moral vision that allows us to transcend conflict. We are never beyond the point of doubt. There is always the obligation to weigh one more bit of evidence that might decisively shift our outlook, if we are intent on remaining moral agents open to a truth we can never entirely own and control. Anyone hellbent on being right, as Sr. Aloysius was, has a strong moral obligation to seek weighty evidence to counter her tendency to certainty, in the absence of eveidence.

And, more to the point, Sr. Aloysius was left with doubt—even when she knew that she was correct, beyond the shadow of a doubt, in her assessment of Fr. Flynn—because that is all the church of her period allowed women who challenged the men who ruled them. It is an . . . unmaking . . . experience to go against those who have absolute authority over you, who have made and who maintain the symbols by which your life and theirs is regulated. It is impossible not to doubt when every authority symbol, every reality-making symbol, in the world around you tells you that you do not have the right to make a moral judgment that runs contrary to that of your betters.

“Doubt” is, in key respects, a parable about moral insight in a church in which power is radically maldistributed on the basis of gender. Throughout the film, Shanley adroitly juxtaposes scenes of clerical license and conventual repression. The camera scans seamlessly from a meal at which Fr. Flynn and his confrères sit at a dinner table laden with bloody roast beef and glasses of beer and wine, around which they sit laughing uproariously, to one at which prim, silent nuns sit eating messes of God knows what, as an equally silent maid pours milk from a pitcher into each of their glasses.

Men with power jubilating. Women with no power at all—no institutional power, no ability to make anything effectively different—chewing in silence.

When Sr. Aloysius finally confronts Fr. Flynn and provides him with such evidence as she has that he is a serial abuser of boys, he reminds her of the rules of the game they are playing, as priest and nun: you report to me, I report to the bishop, the bishop reports to the pope. It is your job to receive, not to initiate the process by which significant information is transmitted. It is your job to listen and obey. Not to speak and command.

Sr. Aloysius stands by what she knows—by what she has seen out her office window, by what she has learned as a nun in other assignments in which priests made advances on boys in Catholic schools. She knows that she is right in her assessment of Fr. Flynn and her determination to remove him from the school and from further contact with the boys in the school.

When he confronts her with the inescapable reality of the game rules they both follow—of his power and her powerlessness—she informs him that she will go against all the bishops in the world and even the pope, if she has to do so. To achieve what she knows to be right, even when it is impossible to obtain evidence to support her moral insight, in a world in which the evidence is controlled by those in whose hands power lies.

And to safeguard the boys entrusted to her care.

I’m surprised that, having seen this social world with its radically unequal power dynamics sketched so sharply throughout the film, anyone leaving the theater would expect Sr. Aloysius to have anything other than doubt, even when she knew she was correct in her moral judgment and vindicated by Fr. Flynn’s decision to resign and not to fight her. Doubt is all that is left to those who have to unmake themselves, in order to stand up for what is right. Doubt is all there is, in the end, for those who have to challenge every authority in the world—including those who make the moral rules—to do what is right.

After all, when Sr. Aloysius succeeded in unseating Fr. Flynn, what happened? She went to the monsignor in authority over her, as the system required her to do. She told him what she had seen and heard.

Fr. Flynn then resigned. And an announcement came from the bishop’s office: he had been made the pastor of another parish (i.e., he had been promoted). And his pastoral charge included a parish school. Where, Sr. Aloysius knew, Fr. Flynn would be free to replicate the pattern that had come to mark his ministry: a pattern of preying on minors who turned to him as a religious authority figure for support.

The dynamics Shanley is describing in this film are, sadly, ones known all too well to anyone who has studied the crisis of sexual abuse of minors by clerics in the Catholic church. Priests who have abused youth have, for generations, been protected and promoted—from the top of the church. They have been transferred from parish to parish and permitted to replicate the abuse to which they are prone, as bishops and religious superiors refuse to inform parishioners of the priest’s history.

Those who have tried to blow the whistle and to stop the replication of abuse have become the victims. They have been told that they are troublemakers intent on destroying the church. They have been punished for speaking out. Those who experienced abuse by priests as youngsters who muster the courage to make their stories public often find themselves attacked by parishioners who will not believe that their priest is capable of wrongdoing, and who accuse the victim of having elicited her or his sexual abuse.

Adult victims of childhood sexual abuse by priests almost always find that bishops to whom they seek to tell their story will not meet with them. They are the enemy. When they press the church for any recompense—even an apology—they almost always find themselves confronted with lawsuits in which diocesan authorities take off the gloves, try to smear their reputations, use ruthless top-dollar attorneys to snare them in legal tangles.

Nuns like Sr. Aloysius have often found themselves in the situation the film sketches, when they dare to challenge the male authority figures of the church and seek to protect youngsters entrusted to their care. When they have tried to speak out, they have been silenced. When they have asked that the welfare of children be taken into account, they have been vilified. They have been reminded that their place is to obey and to pray, not to ask questions or to take moral stands.

“Doubt” is a parable about what happens when those who do not make the moral rules seek to live by those rules—and call the rule-makers to accountability to the moral rules they have imposed on others. The film is a story about the price one pays when one seeks to do the right thing, and in the process, disturbs the taken-for-granted power relationships that obtain in the culture in which the moral challenge is mounted.

“Doubt” is a story about what happens to women who stand up to male authority. In a world in which even women watching this movie can leave the theater still wondering why a kind, jovial, plump pastor (can anyone say Rick Warren?) would be beset by a harpy in black intent on bringing him down, with not a scrap or evidence on her side. With only her ravenous female need to be right . . . .

The Lion, The Lamb, and Rick Warren

I forget which liberation theologian wrote some years back something like the following: When you invite both the lion and the lamb to your table of inclusive dialogue, how will you assure that the lion doesn't eat the lamb?

It may have been Gustavo Gutiérrez who wrote an insightful comment to that effect. Or perhaps Juan Luis Segundo, or another Latin American liberation theologian. I don't recall, and would have to search years of back journals with no indexes in order to find the source of the observation.

What I have always admired about the liberation theologians is how their outsiders' perspective into the shell games of our liberal political worldview exposes what's really going on in those shell games. We pretend that, in trying to include everyone, we truly welcome the voice of everyone.

Without admitting that some of us are lions and some are lambs. Some have voices that count and some have voices that will not be heard at the table of "inclusive" dialogue. Some have power and others don't.

To host an "inclusive" table at which the power dynamics of domination and submission are not overturned reinforces those dynamics in a purportedly "inclusive" context in which we ask the lamb not to protest as the lion eats him, because protesting is bad form, unwelcoming behavior in an inclusive society.

This liberal use of the language of inclusivity, of bringing everyone to the table, of just all getting along, is obscene. It refuses to recognize the essential point, if inclusion is not to reinforce domination: that is, that power is distributed very unequally in our culture, and bringing everyone to the table without changing the power dynamics only allows those who already dominant to dominate even more fiercely, at the table of inclusion.

This liberal use of the language of inclusivity overlooks the intent of inclusivity and of bringing everyone to the table. It allows the dynamics of domination and subordination to continue in a new guise in which the lamb has even less protection than she ever had before, because now her very protest against being eaten will be taken as an act of ill grace at the inclusive table.

Why does the invitation of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation at the start of a new administration dedicated to change we can all believe in cut some Obama supporters to the quick?

If you want to know the answer to that question, you must ask the lamb. Not the lion.

Questions about Birds

And, as a gift to anyone reading, a new year's poem. This one has a winter theme, and I've entitled it "Questions about Birds":


Soon, when cold comes,
No bird will sing.


That red cardinal fussing now--
There! You see!--
Outside the window here,
At that sleek-furred squirrel
Astride the tree's limb,
Bloody feathers spiked with rage,
Flight more fury and more flutter
Than buoyant sweep of wing on air:


What will come of him?


Where does he sleep when snow flies?


What incommensurable hole
in the world's heart
will his death tear?

Shifting Moral Minds in a Society as Unfinished Task: New Year's Reflections on Women'

Talking about the changing moral mind of social groups and the shifting moral consensus of a society may cause some who hear this theological language to assume that social groups have monolithic social and moral minds. That’s clearly not the case, and is not what the social gospel movement meant in using this concept.

The insight that social gospel theology sought to capture in developing the concept of a social mind is that social groups do sometimes generate new perspectives on moral issues previously taken for granted as resolved. And when that happens, when a new consensus develops with sufficient sway to draw in the center of the social group in question (with the all-important assistance of leaders who recognize that social problems commonly involve moral aspects that cannot be ignored if we want to solve those social problems), the new moral consensus of the group is then enshrined in legal changes that create a new moral mind in the practice of the society in question.

The step of legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not necessarily mean that all groups within a given society endorse the moral shift that has taken place in their culture. In fact, there remains, in many cases, considerable resistance to any new moral consensus of a society enshrined in laws protecting that consensus. In many cases, groups actively resistant to the changes that have taken place—groups intent on removing the legal protections in place to safeguard a new moral consensus—coalesce around their goal of resistance.

I used race and gender issues as the framework for a reflection about how societies change their moral minds yesterday. To say that our society has changed its moral mind about race and gender does not mean that we have eradicated racism or misogyny. Resistance to racial justice and reconciliation and resistance to women’s rights remains very strong in our culture. And this resistance is often fueled by contemporary manifestations of the same religious viewpoints that initially resisted the enactment of laws to abolish slavery or eradicate segregation, or laws to provide equal rights to women.

The key point to be emphasized here is the point about legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus—of a new moral mind—of a society. When that occurs, the moral mind of the society in question can be said to have shifted decisively. But such legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not mean that everyone in the particular society has changed his/her own mind about the morality of the issues under consideration. Much work remains to be done in our own society around issues of race and gender, even after we have made breakthrough shifts in how we perceive those issues, sufficient to generate new legal protections for those affected by racism and misogyny.

As this new year begins, I’m thinking, for instance, of how far we’ve come (and how far we still have to go) in the area of women’s rights. Of women’s freedom and self-determination. Of recognition of women’s full personhood.

My thoughts about these issues today are framed by a post-Christmas conversation with one of my nieces. This is the big-city, glamor-girl niece who has the job of her dreams in New York, a first job right out of college. We are very happy for her. She worked hard to have the right to earn enough money each month to pay, just barely, the horrendous rent for a tiny shoebox apartment in Manhattan. We are proud of what she’s accomplishing.

This is an opportunity not one of us would want to see my niece denied, even as the social pressure for young women to marry and have a family remains strong, and as that pressure predicts that a young woman living on her own and pursuing her dreams will one day wake up feeling unfulfilled, and will realize that she needs a man and a family in order to achieve “true” fulfillment. My niece is creating her new adult life with full awareness of those siren voices which remain so strong in our culture, and which seem particularly strong in many of our churches even today: voices that prophesy doom for women living on their own, paying attention to themselves, seeking self-fulfillment and the right to live dreams. Voices that would never prophesy doom for men (well, straight white men, at least) seeking any of those things.

My niece and I spent the evening of the day after Christmas talking about this. One of her concerns now is a relative of hers who seems (from an outsider’s perspective, at least) to be locking herself into a set of grim options for the future. This relative has a circle of friends in which several of the young women, all at the end of high school, have become pregnant and married.

My niece is concerned about the same thing happening to her relative, given her relationship with a young man who seems to fit well into that circle of teens. As we talked about that, my niece said to me, “I want to say to her, ‘Really? You mean people still do that? Get knocked up at 18 and feel obliged to marry the father? Really? That’s still going on?’"

As my niece talked, I realized that she is baffled that “that’s still going on” because she herself has moved into a different world than the one in which her young relative lives. This is a world from which there is no turning back. It is the world in place now that the women’s right’s movement has opened doors for young women, through which one goes to find a place radically discontinuous from the old place of female proscriptions: a world in which women have a right to choose, to pursue their dreams, to reject societal expectations that imprison women, to ignore moral imperatives based on the idea that biology is destiny, and that the biological destiny of women is to live in a reproductive prison.

At the same time, I realized as we talked, the world in which she lives is not the world taken for granted by her young relative—or by many other people in Western cultures today. And that despite the accomplishments of the women’s movement and the enshrinement in law of protections of women’s rights.

Society has changed its moral mind, in the West at least, about the place of women in the world. But persuasive subcultures within the overall framework of Western culture have not moved in the same direction in which cultural consensus has moved, re: these issues. And considerable reaction to women’s rights still exists, particularly in religious groups, many of which would encourage my niece to return to the world in which her young relative lives—to look for a man to fulfill, support, and control her.

The life my niece is living is one lived against the backdrop of those church-based expectations for women. On one side of her family, only two generations ago, a female ancestor lived precisely the script she now fears small-town church-based society is writing for her young relative.

This ancestor became pregnant several years before she was 18. She hid that fact up to the day on which she disappeared onto her parents’ back porch, delivered her baby by herself, and walked inside with the newborn in her arms, to announce to her mother and step-father what had just happened.

She did the right thing. She did what her town and church expected her to do. She married the father and raised two other children by him. She quickly learned that the young man who had impregnated her was far from perfect—that he drank heavily and could be abusive when drunk.

When the children were approaching high school age, her husband died suddenly in a tragic accident. Left a young widow with three children and few means of support, this remarkable woman went to college and completed not one, but two, masters' degrees in education. With those, she was able to provide for her children in a time and place in which single mothers struggled merely to put food on the table.

My niece knows this story. The woman to whom it happened chose to make it public when my brother and sister-in-law married. I am glad she made that choice, since the story provides one among many lenses through which my niece can now view her life as a young woman in the 21st century, and can consider the options available to her.

To our discredit, though the women in my family were strong-minded and assertive—and though they chose careers for themselves when women were expected to be housewives and mothers—my family would have suppressed such a story. We have no base-born children in our family—not even the ones who, a few generations ago, walked down the streets of my family's small town in their mother’s tow, bearing the name of the male member of our family who fathered them, looking just like him. They didn’t exist. To us, at least.

My niece does not want the fate her ancestor endured to be revisited on her young relative. She wants the passing of generations to mean something different for women—new possibility, if nothing else, for those who want that possibility. She does not want her relative trapped, as so many young women in the church-dominated town in which she lives are trapped, in a world of unhappily married wives who join Facebook groups called 100,000,000 Christians Worship God, or Jesus 2008.

If the relative wants that world, fine. But if not, there should be options for her—options like those my niece has had, options to have a life of her own, and not the life imposed from outside. The precious option to have a self in a world that denies a self to women, or makes women pay an enormous price for seeking themselves.

Not much has changed, one might think, when one hears this story. And yet a tremendous amount has changed, when it comes to women’s rights. Even though the moral mind of society may not have changed everywhere to the same degree, it has changed substantially and decisively enough to provoke a shift in our laws, so that the laws of Western nations now recognize the right of women to the same self-determination men enjoy.

Still, the task of developing a new moral mind in a society is an ongoing task, because the fragile consensus on which new moral minds are based is always tenuous and always subject to attack from groups that have a strong interest in undermining a new moral consensus. The fight to preserve and extend a new moral consensus is an ongoing fight. It requires continued activity on the part of those convinced that the new path a society blazes for itself re: an issue of human rights is worth keeping there, keeping open, keeping accessible.

Because in any society there will always be those who want to close off paths that permit more people more liberties. In any society there will be those who see the liberty of a group previously hedged about with moral and social prohibitions as a threat to morality itself: allow those people—people of color, women, gays—such liberties, and who else will want freedom from oppression? And how to draw moral lines, when we cannot do so across the backs of those whom we have kept in subjugation for that very purpose?

Such battles continue, even in 2009. They continue because the resistance to human rights—to human rights for all—remains strong, even at the very center of many Western cultures. And no leader who leads from the center in Western culture today can afford to ignore that fact, if he or she truly wishes to lead with change in mind.