Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

Despite Everything, It is Easter

When I confessed last week that I had for much of 2020 struggled against the sin of despair, my confessor replied: “I’m struggling with it myself. 90% of the confessions I hear these days include that one. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m shocked.”

Christian Soteriology Proper Forestalls Specious Holiness Spirals

We can’t work our way into Heaven, for finity is incapable of infinity. Indeed, we cannot achieve anything greater than ourselves, whatever; but only, rather, what is lesser than we. So, Heaven is given to us gratuitously. Our work consists only in accepting its invitation; in wu wei.

So then, there is a difference between interior holiness spirals and exterior holiness spirals. The former are done in secret, and in service of true spiritual ends, so as to accept the invitation of the Logos; whereas the latter are done publicly, and for purposes of social advantage. As essentially worldly, exterior holiness spirals partake the Arms Race to the Degenerate Bottom. They are motivated by the urge to be accepted and approved by the mob. So do they accept the conditions of the mob, and instantiate it.

The Pharisee is an agent of the mob.

The Pope’s Commission

A guest post by Orthosphere commenter PBW:

Faithful Catholics are expected to accept that, although the Pope is elected by the Conclave of (eligible) Cardinals, the One who really selects the Pope is the Holy Ghost Himself: the cardinals are His catspaws, so to speak. It is a grave offence to leak the proceedings of the Conclave (which is why such leaking is so rare), but if the preceding is to be accepted, the machinations in the Conclave are irrelevant. Therefore, I can appreciate both the smile and the squirm of orthodox Catholics who, in these very pages, see the so-ordained Pope described as … ahem … Pope Fruit Loops I.

How to Tell a Weenie

Reading a book of evangelical theology this afternoon, I realized that there are a few reliable ways we can be sure that an author is a liberal weenie, and that the text he has written is therefore ideologically driven, ergo tendentious (whether witly or not), and probably wrong in its arguments. It is very simple, at least in books of theology. We can be sure that an author is a weenie if:

• He uses “impact” as a verb.
• He uses “image” as a verb.
• He avoids using masculine pronouns in referring to God.
• He uses “gender” to indicate sex.
• He uses “gender” as a verb.

If furthermore there is ever in a writer about ancient texts anything like environmentalism or feminism, egalitarianism or communism, relativism or nominalism, we can be sure that he has read them anachronistically, and therefore wrongly. We can, in short, be pretty sure that he is a hopeless idiot, and what is worse, not even therefore much useful to his sinister god.

What can we take from this? That we should never, ever, ever in a million years commit any such howlers.

Probably I have missed a few. I welcome correction of any such omissions.

A Bishop Bears False Witness

In response to sanctions imposed on the Episcopal Church by the Anglican Communion, Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry had this to say:

“I stand before you as a descendant of African slaves, stolen from their native land, enslaved in a bitter bondage, and then even after emancipation, segregated and excluded in church and society. And this conjures that up again, and brings pain.”

This was in the way of defending the Episcopalian policies that elicited the sanctions, namely acceptance of homosexual clergy and solemnization of same-sex marriages.   According to Bishop Curry, these policies do not violate biblical teaching, but rather fulfill the New Testament promise that God’s house should be “a house of prayer for all people,” and that Christ is a condition in which there are no social distinctions. As a descendent of slaves, he was, he said, acutely sensitive to the pain of exclusion.

He is not, however, acutely sensitive to the Eighth Commandment, for his witness here is decidedly false. (This is the Ninth Commandment for Reformed and Orthodox.) A glance at Mark 11:17 show that the word (in all translations) is “nations,” not “people.” The difference in meaning between these words is great, and the substitution of one for the other is dishonest. The Bishop’s abuse of Galatians 3:28 is too common to require comment.

Duffers and Fanatics

I do not know what Islam is “all about,” and this is one respect in which I differ from most journalists, politicians, chiefs of police and U. S. military officers. Unlike me, a great many of these deep thinkers are confident that they know what Islam is “all about,” or at least what it is not all about. The basis of their claim is not clear, although it does not appear to involve study of Islamic scripture or immersion in Islamic practice.

When Tolerance is a Painted Strumpet

Tolerance is very likely the supreme liberal virtue. It is the virtue in which liberals themselves take the greatest pride, and it is the virtue of which they say their enemies are most deficient. Yet in all other moral systems that I am aware of, tolerance is, at most, a minor virtue. Indeed it is a suspect virtue because it is so often a sham, a fraud and a cheat: a painted strumpet flouncing about in cheap finery.

Unclean Food

I teach at a large, public university in the Bible belt. It has a reputation for conservatism, and there are said to be many Christians among its students. As a public institution it is, however, rigidly secular in its outward appearance and official pronouncements, so this is one place where it is not beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

We do have a thirteen-foot menorah on the principal public plaza, though; which was raised last night with the assistance of the President (a Mormon), and is presumably slated to remain in place for the duration of Hanukkah. As I was in the neighborhood, I strolled through the plaza this morning, to see the menorah, and to see any other symbols that might have been raised to mark the holiday season.

There weren’t any.

Nihilism and the Neighbor from Beyond the Hill

Is Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” really a reproof against borders? To read modern journalists, one would certainly think so, for they can hardly type the phrase “border fence” without feeling an inspiration to add, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

When this happens, we should remember that a close reading of the poem shows that there is also something that does. Love a wall, that is. Frost’s neighbor from “beyond the hill” loves walls very dearly—so much so that he more than once remarks, “good fences make good neighbors.”