Currently Browsing: Religion

La inmortalidad de la abuela, by Kiko Méndez-Monasterio

La religiosidad de un pueblo no puede extirparse como un tumor, como pensaba Azaña en su momento, cuando creyó que él podía legislar también sobre las almas y dijo aquella estupidez de que España había dejado de ser católica, para ver después como la propia historia le rectificaba con toda contundencia. El mismísimo Leninopinaba parecido, confiando en que su revolución acabaría con el opio espiritual, y que para ello sólo hacía falta tiempo: “Cuando mueran las abuelas, nadie recordará que un día en Rusia hubo una Iglesia”. Pero sucede que esa profecía laica se desmiente en cada generación, y que todos los esfuerzos por arrinconar y silenciar el hecho religioso nunca son suficientes.

Aunque nadie lo diría viendo la repercusión mediática, cada domingo acude muchísima más gente a las iglesias que a los estadios de fútbol, y el desprestigio de lo católico en ciertas élites culturales y políticas sólo muestra lo distanciadas que están de la sociedad real o, como dirían los anglosajones, lo sordas que son al clamor del contribuyente, que merecería más respeto por parte de los poderes públicos.

La nueva fiebre anticlerical que enardece a lo progre desde el zapaterismo también es parte de esa herencia que Mariano Rajoy se empeña en no rechazar. Muchos de los ataques que sufre la Iglesia son financiados con los impuestos vía subvenciones a grupos radicales o a espectáculos grotescos camuflados como cultura. Que la práctica sea casi tradicional en los gobiernos socialistas, no quiere decir que haya dejado de ser escandalosa, ni que sea inevitable para el gobierno popular, ni tampoco que el odio antireligioso vaya a conformarse con esto. Crece la hostilidad que sufren los fieles católicos, se interrumpen los oficios religiosos, se ha tratado de prender fuego a más de una iglesia, y ahora al cardenal Rouco lo maltratan en la calle, como en una versión feminista de la naranja mecánica. Más terrible, todavía, resulta comprobar como este clima de fanatismo cristianófobo es alimentado desde ciertos medios de comunicación que -en ocasiones rozando el ilícito penal- parecen querer convertir a la Iglesia en objetivo lícito de la violencia. Tampoco esto es nada nuevo, se empieza por deshumanizar a la víctima, en presentarla como enemiga de la libertad y del progreso, y se acaba por celebrar las fallas en las basílicas. Si hablasen de la religión judía en los términos en los que se califica a la católica en varios periódicos y televisiones, probablemente nos echaban de la ONU. Pero parece que contra Roma vale todo, y les crece el odio y la rabia por la persistencia de lo espiritual en el pueblo español, a pesar de tantos años de acción y propaganda.

La misma perplejidad asaltaba a los soviéticos en los años ochenta al contemplar como décadas de totalitarismo ateo no habían logrado extirpar la religión, y al tener que asumir que la Iglesia Ortodoxa renaciera con una -para ellos- exasperante vitalidad. Ante el sorprendente regreso de los popes y de las iglesias llenas, un miembro del Politburó se acordaba de las palabras de Lenin y no dudó en matizarlas: “En Rusia las abuelas nunca mueren”. En España, de momento, tampoco.

Published in www.intereconomia.com


A Scottish Remembrance of Russell Kirk, by Alvino-Mario Fantini

The Conservative Mind‘s author taught generations to re-enchant the world.

As an undergraduate, my first encounters with Professor Jeff Hart and The Dartmouth Review eventually led to my discovery of the works of Russell Kirk. Like William F. Buckley Jr., Kirk wrote about the need to raise, as historian George Nash put it, a “full-scale challenge to modernity”—in the arts, literature, religion, and politics. While both Buckley and Kirk enchanted me with their obvious love of language and mastery of words, it was Kirk who also managed to stir my spirit with an affection, kindness, and warmth that I did not find elsewhere. Here was a gentle, conservative aesthete.

But I’m not the only one who was affected in such a way by Kirk. And last year, to mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of his most famous work, The Conservative Mind, there were several tributes. Last summer, The University Bookman, which Kirk founded in 1960, published an on-line symposium discussing the book. In July, the Liberty Fund also published a tribute, along with three excellent rejoinders. In September, two more events took place: Lee Edwards at the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel with Matthew Spalding, Yuval Levin, and Peter Wehner to discuss the book’s impact; and a few days later, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The Imaginative Conservative, and the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal co-sponsored a one-day seminar at Houston Baptist University.

Scottish Celebrations

One of the more interesting commemorations took place October 18-20 in Scotland, where a distinguished group of students and academics joined members of the Kirk family and their close friends at the University of St. Andrews to discuss The Conservative Mind—and to remember, in Willmoore Kendall’s words, the “benevolent sage of Mecosta”.

Some people aren’t aware that Kirk was a doctoral student at the University of St. Andrews; in fact, he remains the only American to have received a Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) from that esteemed university. His dissertation, titled “The Conservative’s Rout”—later re-named The Conservative Mind in discussions with publisher Henry Regnery—is still on file at the university, and the anniversary celebrations in Scotland began, appropriately enough, with a viewing of the original dissertation on Friday afternoon.

Attending the weekend’s events were a dozen or so promising young Americans, all current or former Wilbur Fellows who, after working for Russell and Annette Kirk, went on to study at St. Andrews. It was impressive to hear the deep affection with which each of them spoke about the Kirks—and about the time they spent at his ancestral home at Piety Hill.

Various Europeans also joined the celebrations—for, despite his focus on an ‘Anglo-American’ political tradition, many of Kirk’s published works are known across Continental Europe. Some have even been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian, and his ideas have influenced a range of European scholars. In Germany, Kirk’s contributions as a ‘conservative man of letters’ were recognized as so important, that he merited a lengthy entry (and photograph) in the Lexikon des Konservatismus (Dictionary of Conservatism), a 1996 work edited by the German noble, Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing. Today even young members of Sweden’sKonservativt Forum are wont to quote Kirk approvingly.

The always charming and energetic Annette Kirk was also present in Scotland, along with two of her daughters and their families. On Friday evening, she hosted a private reception and dinner at the cliff-side Russell Hotel, where guests were treated to a talk by André Gushurst-Moore, currently Director of Pastoral Care at Downside School, an institution attached to the Benedictine Downside Abbey in Somerset, England.

Gushurst-Moore elaborated on some of the principal themes in Kirk’s works, speaking of Kirk’s defense of humane learning, the moral imagination, and “the permanent things.” Not coincidentally, these are precisely the themes closest to Gushurst-Moore’s own work. In his recent The Common Mind: Politics, Society and Christian Humanism from Thomas More to Russell Kirk (published in 2013 by Angelico Press), he profiles 12 great ‘Christian Humanists’ through the centuries, including Thomas More, Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, Orestes Brownson, and Russell Kirk, among others.

His was an eloquent and respectful tribute, which many found quite moving. It was a testament of sorts to the impact that Kirk’s writings—and his gentle character—had on people. And nearly two decades after his death, Kirk continues to touch people with the evocative power of his words (the late Frederick Wilhelmsen said “Kirk was essentially a poet who wrote in prose”). What a reminder of those T.S. Eliot lines from Four Quartets which Kirk was so fond of quoting: “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


Why Vampires and Zombies are So Popular with Secular Humanists, by Timothy Gordon

The cultural phenomenon is undeniable: vampire and zombie phantasmagoria is in its heyday, especially among Gen-Xers and younger. The dis-ensouled human form, both the high (the vampire) and the low (the zombie), has swept the nation in movies, TV shows, books, graphic novels, and even spoofs. The vampire has become the golden boy for the New Humanism, the zombie its greatest scapegoat. From a religious point of view, these modern tales of alienation happen to tell far more about the soul of the culture which situates them than the lack of soul within the individual zombie or vampire.

First, a brief caveat: I disclaim no inherent immorality appurtenant to the consumption of this sub-genre. I’ve viewed some of these films myself, of course. Zomb and vamp flicks are not themselves immoral or perfidious. Rather, they reflect the abiding lack of morals and good faith–the nutritive supplements of the psyche–of the generation which authors and cherishes them. These creatures reflect the soullessness, in a word, of the culture that has embraced them.

In a secular age, a dis-ensouled human form like a zombie or a vampire becomes a natural item of fascination for the class of young, urban metrosexuals which has been immersed from the cradle in the day’s agnosticism (more pervasively than the older generations, who experience cultural apostasy as something of a sea change, even as they affirm it). Both the vampire and the zombie lack souls and, as such, seek constantly to fabricate existential meaning for their lives, ex nihilo. But the zombie does so in a flatly insufficient manner, seeking the taste of brains alone.

The irreligious youth recognizes the facially unfulfilling nature of the zombie’s quest and presupposes instead the veracity of the vampiric creed, out of hand: the “person” is seen no longer as composite body and soul, but rather as body alone; soulless, the individual is no longer directed toward anything; existence becomes painful loneliness, as love has become eros and no longer caritas. Genuine human communion is thus impossible; one creates one’s own private meaning. And meaning is most lucratively created when done at the expense of others, save for an arbitrarily chosen beloved, who is set aside as sacrosanct. The vampire’s otherwise Hobbesian modus operandi is suspended–without an articulable reason–for his beloved.

Unfortunately, I have just described the weekend mood of the average nightclub attendee, across this land.

Recall what Whitehead wrote about scrutinizing an epoch for its truest self: “look not to its suppositions, but to its presuppositions.” In short, stories of the vampire and of the zombie really represent the new, secular, anti-Aristotelian De Anima, both poles of the ontology of desultory soullessness. They constitute the secularist’s credo on the soul: the quandary arises on account of mankind’s lack thereof.

To a post-theistic generation and its cosmos, the vampire represents all that remains a secular desideratum, being “beyond good and evil,” physically virile yet delicate, outwardly attractive, atheistically immortal, intelligent without acknowledgement of the intelligible barriers to total behavioral license (except for an occasional moral whim). Androgynous and yet still anthropomorphically alluring, the “modern vampire” is the re-vamped (pun definitely intended) Nietzschean übermensch, a “brute, blonde, if pale, beast.” He can basically do as he pleases, act decently or not.

And yet, for all his attributes, still he skulks and ever wrings his hands. This is the secularist’s version of humility. The vampire has postmodern angst. He’s “emo.” In short, he is everything the secular humanists hold dear and have striven after for two centuries.

Okay, but then why the zombie? What has that rube got going for him? He has no existential inner conflict like the vampire. He’s not smart. He’s not handsome. He doesn’t attempt to nurture even the selfish, erotic love of the vampire.

Read the complete article in The Imaginative Conservative


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