Year 247: In God We Trust

IMG_2609On a dank and dreary Independence Day Tuesday, I travelled to a neighboring town to attend daily Mass. The celebrant was a visiting priest – a kindly retired priest who was so old that he didn’t always exert enough vocal strength to be quite heard. In his homily, he spoke of the blessings of political liberty enjoyed by citizens of the U.S., and cautioned against the risk of taking our blessings for granted, since we’ve never really known any other reality.

But then he said something which really struck me. He called the congregation to remember the events of January 6th, 2021, and to think about how close the country came to falling to a military coup, and how quickly and easily it could happen. I immediately agreed with his statement, although I couldn’t be sure what he meant. I know nothing about this priest apart from his name, and had no idea if his thoughts reflected a belief in the manufactured narrative of an attempted insurrection by Trump’s rioting supporters, and the threat posed by that. Or, if it was a reference to the response to the riot by the Biden administration and their allies in law enforcement, the intel agencies, Congress, and the yellow press. The months-long barricading of the Capitol and deployment of National Guard troops certainly comes closer to at least looking like a military coup than does the violent temper tantrums of the selfie-stick armed crowd that were led into the Capitol on January 6th. However, in neither event was the regular military involved at all. So it’s hard to make heads or tails of his concern, and I really have no idea how he interprets the whole sorry thing.

Nonetheless, I realized that he was right concerning the fragility of the public order, and of the political and civil freedoms facilitated by that public order, and which too many of us – myself included – do in fact take too much for granted.

Like many, I don’t quite recognize my country anymore, all of a sudden. The spirit of freedom which for two centuries grounded this nation – the Spirit of ‘76 – seems to have sputtered out in the long nightmare that was the Covid-19 panic. We traded our freedom for safety, and ended up with neither. Instead, “safety” is now invoked as a claim to justify suppression of uncomfortable ideas. We’re all being asked to collude daily in lies by dishonest language police. It is increasingly difficult to find trustworthy people.

The fabric is fraying. Old Glory has seen better days. I’m not optimistic about American society, at least not in the short run. Without trust, there can be no order in civic life. And it’s awfully hard to know who can be trusted these days. In God We Trust, sure, but… who else?

At the Heart of Liberty is the Right to Encounter and Know the Truth!

Be holy. Be perfect. Be children of your heavenly father. The spirit of God dwells in you. You are the temple of God…

The various liturgical readings this week come together around a common thread concerning the necessary holiness of the Spirit-filled disciple, and of how that holiness is manifest as a reflection of the loving-kindness of God. Can the sudden mad rush to post-human or trans-human existence we find Western civilization engulfed in be enlightened by reflection on this call of God to be holy/perfect/complete?

7th Week in Ordinary Time, Year A:

  • 1st Reading: Leviticus 19:1–2, 17–18: “Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy.”
  • Response: Psalm 103:8a: “The Lord is kind and merciful.”
  • Psalm: Psalm 103:1–4, 8, 10, 12–13: “He redeems your life from destruction, crowns you with kindness and compassion.”
  • 2nd Reading: 1 Corinthians 3:16–23: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.”
  • Gospel Acclamation: 1 John 2:5: “Whoever keeps the word of Christ, the love of God is truly perfected in him.”
  • Gospel: Matthew 5:38–48: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

In the Leviticus reading, God commands loving one’s neighbor as oneself as an antidote to vengeance, and explicitly identifies such love with Godliness. When He says: “Be holy, for I, the LORD, your God, am holy”, He is saying: Be Godly, for you are God’s. And to be Godly is to practice loving-kindness.

In the Responsorial Psalm, we spend a few minutes reflecting on that very thing: “The Lord is kind and merciful.”

In the Gospel reading, Jesus famously expands upon the command of love for neighbor to include even the love of one’s enemies, challenging his followers to be more Godly than tax collectors and pagans, who undoubtedly share love for those already close to them. He concludes the teaching by calling his followers to perfection, but it is a perfection, like the holiness called for in Leviticus, which serves as a reflection of (and participation in) God the Father: “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

The Greek term being translated as “perfect” is a derivative of telos, the term used to refer to the “end” or purpose or final destination of something. It refers to perfection insofar as that entails completion, and a lack of nothing necessary to becoming fully its true self. For those with the knowledge of the faith revealed in Christ, the perfection or end or destination or telos of the human person is known to be eternal life in Christ Jesus. That perfection is thus Godliness, or holiness. Yet, in the parallel passage of this teaching contained in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells us: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” (Lk 6:36, RSV2CE). So again we are reminded that the perfection of holiness is manifest in loving-kindness: first in God, then in those who would be His. In its primary terms, this was couched in the Law as loving one’s neighbor as oneself. And in Christian revelation it is couched as accepting and manifesting one’s own destiny in the holiness of God. Today’s Gospel Acclamation insists that such a destiny is arrived at in clinging to Christ: “Whoever keeps the word of Christ, the love of God is truly perfected in him.” (1Jn 2:5)

Countering this teaching of becoming all that God has created us to be, however, is the modern craze of self-repudiation, seen in everything from bodily defacing tattoos to vain cosmetic surgery to the embrace of homosexualism as an “identity” to what one can only hope would be the final absurdity of deluded self-creation encountered in gender transition ideology. This refusal to see the meaning of one’s life (or of life itself) in the divine giveness of existence also lies at the heart of much of the moral argument for abortion: the fiction that a baby doesn’t exist unless and until her mother wills her to be a baby. Self-repudiation and self-creating might appear to be opposites at first blush, but they are only two sides of the same coin: that of rejecting the givenness of being, the rejecting of reality and instead demanding assent to the falsehood that one possesses the power to establish and define oneself.

Indeed, this rejection of reality is precisely what grounds the notorious assertion made by Justice Kennedy in Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Kennedy’s logic is completely perverted. What the light of faith and enlightened reason instead reveal is that at the heart of liberty is the right to encounter and know the truth concerning existence, meaning, the universe, and of the mystery of human life – and the right to act upon that truth.

The reading from Paul’s 1st Letter to the Corinthians provides both confirmation and warning concerning the importance of the free embrace of God’s gift of life among believers, who inherit not just the life of mankind (i.e. Adam), but also the life of God in Christ: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.” (1Cor 3:16-17) Our lives (i.e. our selves) are not our own, but are given as real gift from God, and the repudiation of the real gift in preference for a concocted imaginary substitute can ultimately be nothing but an act of self-destruction.

I will give you as a light to the nations: 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

First Reading:            Isaiah 49:3, 5–6
Psalm Response:       Psalm 40:8a, 9a
Psalm Versicles:         Psalm 40:2, 4, 7–8, 8–9, 10
Second Reading:       1 Corinthians 1:1–3
Gospel Acclamation: John 1:14a, 12a
Gospel:                      John 1:29–34

  • he says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” (Isa 49:6, NRSV)
  • To those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. (1Cor 1:2-3, NRSV)
  • the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.'(Jn 1:33, NRSV)

The NAB Lectionary reading from 1Cor 1:2 has Paul addressing those who are “called to be a holy people.” The implications of that particular calling had changed significantly from the earlier time of the Deuteronomic covenant, when the Lord had declared: “The LORD will establish you as a people holy to himself,…if you…walk in his ways…all the peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of you” (Deut 28:9f, RSV). But the people did not “walk in his ways”, and the curses associated with that covenant (Deut 28:15-68) began to fall upon the heads of the people, including the devastation and humiliation of exile.

Into such a scene stepped the prophet Isaiah, who today we hear prophesying of God doing a new thing, to restore not only exiled Israel, but to extend the restoration of salvation “to the ends of the earth” (Isa 49:6). Of course, it is Christ whom Isaiah is prophesying about, of whom the NAB Lectionary says God will “make you a light to the nations”. The work “make” here is usually translation “give”, and the traditional English Catholic Bible, following the Latin, has: “I have given thee to be the light of the Gentiles”. The traditional rendering better captures the element of gift from God, of the grace that is at the source of the light of salvation. It is precisely that grace with which Paul blesses the Corinthian believers, “called to be saints”, as he opens his letter to them in today’s second reading.

The NAB’s “holy people” translation in 1Cor 1:2 calls to mind 1 Pet 2:9 “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” (cf. Exod 19:6) The implication is clear enough: we as believers are actually the intended mediators of God’s salvation, the vessels of God’s fiery light. Not to be seen in the world so that “they shall be afraid of you”, but rather “that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5:16). John the Baptist “came baptizing with water…that [the Lamb of God] might be made known to Israel.” But now is the time for the continued revelatory ministry to the world of him who is the light given by God, “who will baptize with the Holy Spirit” and with fire. And only those who prefer the darkness need fear the fiery light of God’s appearing.

Celebrating Christmas

Even the World Wildlife Fund had put out a statement Nov. 7 saying, “cutting a tree of this size in the midst of a climate crisis is a debatable decision,” which required “greater transparency.”

I saw a Catholic News Service (CNS) article in the Boston archdiocesan newspaper The Pilot several weeks ago (Nov. 18) describing a dust-up concerning the Christmas Tree planned for St. Peter’s square this year. The Vatican had planned on installing an impressive, 98-foot silver fir taken from the mountains of central Italy, until activists started objecting to a lack of “transparency” or of “environmental impact studies”. One activist even wrote to Pope Francis, appealing to the author of Laudato Si to practice what he preached, in avoiding any unnecessary human impact on the environment. Meanwhile, forest service rangers had tree cutting preparation work halted, to complete “documentation”, and the village donating the tree eyed an alternative tree growing in a different jurisdiction. It appears the Vatican got the tree they’d wanted, although follow-on details of the story are sparse.

It was hard for me to know for whom to root in this debacle. It’s easy to be contemptuous of the enviro-tyrants demanding an environmental impact study to justify cutting a fir tree from a mountainside. One could be excused for guessing that they’d want to conduct the study themselves- and get paid for it – in order to come to a predetermined conclusion that nobody can be allowed to enjoy themselves at the expense of “nature” – unless an adequate sum of additional money is provided to pay for vaguely defined reparations. Activist environmentalism is nothing if not a grift.

On the other hand, there is no lack of hypocrisy in the Laudato Si pontificate taking a tree like that from its living environs to construct an ostentatious display in the courtyards of Rome. It is superfluous and wasteful, not only destroying a 200-year-old tree, but using it to host burning electric lights in a winter in which many poor Europeans are suffering from the cold – due in no small part to the small-minded and self-righteous insipidity of the same phony environmental alarmism that seems to inform Laudato Si.

Of course, one can argue that the celebration of the birth of Christ justifies the extravagance – and we do well to recall that it was Judas Iscariot who complained about the “wasteful” outpouring of expensive nard on Jesus at the house of Lazarus to prepare him for his execution and burial. But it’s hard for me not to come to the conclusion that the public celebration of Christmas – even by the churches – has veered far too far toward elements that render it superficial, and weaken the ability of its witness to even tell the actual story unfolded in the Christmas drama. Buried under all the expendable presents lying under all the gaudy Christmas trees dotting the land this evening lies a humble truth of inestimable wonder and amazement which is all too hard to hear among the noise:

God has bridged the gap between Him and us, and has become one of us, so that we might become like Him. That’s astonishing. Merry Christmas.

Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’

The Gospel reading for the 2nd Sunday of Advent in Year A, taken from the Gospel of Matthew, contains a passage I think provides a key to understanding a different and controversial passage from the same Gospel.

When John the Baptist saw the religious leaders coming to be baptized, he challenged them to demonstrate their repentance in concrete actions, not just in playing “show and tell”. He then said to them: “And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.'” This criticism is reminiscent of a passage in Jeremiah where he warns the people of Jerusalem: “Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” (Jer 7:4). Again, being right with God is a matter of making faithfulness concrete, instead of assuming God’s favor based on empty words and practices, or on belonging to the right in-group: ““For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly execute justice one with another, …then I will let you dwell in this place” (Jer 7:5,7).

John the Baptist further underlines this element of the teaching by declaring: “For I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones.” (Mt 3:9). St Paul clarifies this teaching about the true meaning of the Abrahamic heritage at the beginning of chapter 4 of his Letter to the Romans, and again in chapter 3 of his Letter to the Galatians: the true descendants of Abraham are those who are faithful to God.

In the Galatians passage, Paul notes: “that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (Gal 3:14). This is also the meaning of the somewhat awkward closing passage in today’s 2nd reading, from the latter part of Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “For I say that Christ became a minister of the circumcised/ to show God’s truthfulness,/ to confirm the promises to the patriarchs,/ but so that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy./ As it is written: ‘Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles/ and sing praises to your name.’ (Rom 15:8-9), a passage which goes on to quote the final verse given in the 1st reading, from Isaiah: “The root of Jesse shall come, raised up to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope.” (Rom 15:12).

It is this universal character of both salvation and of the true people of God that Jesus is alluding to later on in Matthew’s Gospel when, after criticizing the religious leaders for failing to practice what they preach, He says (among other things): “Call no one on earth your father; you have but one Father in heaven.” (Mt 23:9). This verse, mistranslated in some popular Protestant Bible versions, is often misconstrued to be prohibiting the use of certain words in salutation (the broader passage also mentions “Rabbi” and “Master”, or in some versions “Teacher”). Jesus’ point, however, is simply a call to humility and ecclesial unity, regardless of the terminology: “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted. “(Mt 23:12).

Of all the “Fathers” or “Masters” in history that those Jews might have been tempted to puff themselves up by claiming filial association with, Abraham was the most significant. So when John the Baptist tells the “brood of vipers” not to presume their superior positions by claiming Abraham as their faither, he is calling them to a humility both of faithfulness to God and of a recognition of the universal character of both sinfulness and salvation. We are all brothers, and have one Father, in heaven.

You know not on what day your Lord is coming.

Jesus’ depiction of the coming “of the Son of Man” stands in pretty stark contrast to popular ideas of how things might end, or at least of how the race my move into a new kind of future.

We largely live among the “don’t worry, be happy” crowd – many of whom do not believe a word of the testimony concerning the last things, while others of them accept some notion of Divine judgment and some version or another of eternal or “heavenly” life, but who are at least implicitly and often explicitly convinced that such eventualities are of no real consequence, on the assumption that “everybody goes to heaven”, an assertion informed by a conviction that a loving God would never condemn one of His beloved children to eternal damnation. Ironically, these latter will often admit of particular exceptions to the “nobody goes to hell” doctrine (such as, guess who!!), although its far from clear how they avoid having to reconcile that with their “no loving God would do that” principle.

No small number of them seem to believe that there is a corresponding (and more urgent!) mission to build heaven on earth by advancing peace and justice in all the various communities of the world – and those who reject the “religious” framework of such a worldview very often satisfy their need for moral self-respect by aiming for a utopian future built on even thinner gruel. Either way, whether it is characterized as heaven on earth, or as a final state of social justice wrought from a conflict to overthrow “the patriarchy”, the goal of human history and the struggle it ensues, for quite possibly a majority of the people populating the contemporary Western world, seems to consist of a human-engineered and executed utopia – or near utopia. Jesus doesn’t seem to see it that way.

In the passages immediately preceding the text of today’s Gospel, he spoke of the expected persecution of the Church, and of terrible tribulations in the world, and in today’s reading he tells us that the Son of Man’s coming will be sudden and unexpected; that it will interrupt the normal events of daily life. He also says that some will be “taken” and some will be “left”, and admonishes his followers to remain “awake” and “prepared”. It’s not entirely clear to me what it means in that context to be “taken”, but to be “left” sounds nothing like living in utopia, as Jesus compares that day to the day of Noah, when the unprepared people were not awake to the judgment of God, and “They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away.”

What “the world” builds of its own accord is not heaven on earth, but a poor substitute that invariably folds like the house of cards that it is. The goal of the Christian should not be to vainly attempt to turn the earth into heaven, but simply to strive to be, oneself and collectively, the presence of heaven on earth. So, walk in the light of the Lord, which is our armor!

Let Us Go Rejoicing

Sunday Readings

Thirty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time / Christ the King (Year C)

  • First Reading                    2 Samuel 5:1–3
  • Response                         Psalm 122:1
  • Psalm                               Psalm 122:1–5
  • Second Reading               Colossians 1:12–20
  • Gospel Acclamation         Mark 11:9–10
  • Gospel                              Luke 23:35–43


The liturgical year culminates this week in the celebration of the joyous and triumphant solemnity of Christ the King. In the Entrance Antiphon, the Church echoes the cry of the numberless host of heaven, witnessed to in the Revelation to St John, acclaiming in loud voices the worthiness of the Lamb that was slain (Rev 5:12). In the Collect, She prays “that the whole creation, set free from slavery,” might ceaselessly praise God – thus joining in with that same heavenly host – and locating within the realm of God-given freedom, having been “delivered from the power of darkness and transferred…to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col 1:13), the universal acclamation expressed in the following verse from the Apocalypse: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, everything in the universe, cry out: ‘To the one who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor, glory and might, forever and ever’.” (Rev 5:13). The Responsorial, too, repeatedly intones the joy of praising God: “Let us go rejoicing to the house of the Lord.”

In the first reading, situated in the immediate aftermath of the fiasco that was the end of the House of King Saul, all the tribes of Israel and their elders came to David, King of Judah, that David might consent to be king of a restored nation. They plea in language reminiscent of Adam’s delight upon first seeing Eve and realizing their fundamental unity: “Here we are, your bone and your flesh” they say, appealing to a shared familial bond in seeking peace and restoration. The place was Hebron, also known in the Bible as Kiriath-arba and as Mamre, where Abraham dwelt and built an altar to the Lord (Gen 13:18), where the Lord made a covenant with him (Gen 15), gave him the sign of the covenant: circumcision (Gen 17), appeared to him in the form of three men (Gen 18), and is where the patriarchs are buried (Gen 50:13).

Young David responds to the appeal by taking them all under his wing. In the liturgical reading, the NAB tells us that he “made an agreement with them there before the LORD”, but this is a pedestrian rendering: the Revised NAB, like the RSV and others, tells us that he made a covenant with them. It was an oath taken to bind them to each other. The Hebrew word is berith, which is cognate to a word for the provision or consuming of food. It describes a conjoining at the level of a fundamental unity: “your bone and your flesh”. And then, “they anointed [David] king of Israel”, where “anointed” translates the word from which in English we get “Messiah” from the Hebrew, and “Christ” from the Greek.

The Gospel passage paints a very different picture. As the anointed king is hanging on the cross, the rulers (i.e., elders) want nothing to do with him, and sneer at him. The Roman soldiers likewise jeer at him, and he is even reviled by one of those sentenced with him to die. Remarkably, the Jewish elders seem to know that he had “saved others” – presumably at least Lazarus (cf. Jn 12:9-11) – yet they appear to either doubt his ability to save himself, or suppose that he just might take himself off the cross, if he is indeed “the Christ [Anointed] of God”. It’s hard to believe they would be sneering at him if they thought there was any real possibility he was in fact the “chosen one”, so we can only conclude that, despite their empty words, they refused to believe the miracles that were witnessed by thousands of their own people, some of which they had previously taken as fact in order to accuse Jesus of violating the Sabbath laws. The level of cognitive dissonance displayed in this scene by the elders is astonishing.

The soldiers, too, seem to assume that Jesus could save himself if he were indeed the King of the Jews. How would they come to such an assumption? Had there ever been a king of any people that could save himself from such a predicament? Did they – or anybody else – actually expect that the King of the Jews, as the Chosen One and Anointed of God, would be divine, or possess divine power? Or did the soldiers just mindlessly join in on the mocking they were hearing as a kind of psychological defensive mechanism to take their attention off the horrific evils they were engaged in inflicting on a man whom everybody surely recognized as innocent?

One of the other condemned criminals likewise appears to mock Jesus’ claim to be the Christ, again seeming to assume that the real Christ of God could overcome the predicament of crucifixion, on behalf of both the innocent and the guilty. But this mockery is rebuked by the third condemned man as hypocritical: the guilty deserve their punishment, but the innocent do not. That honest penitent then makes one of the most amazing requests in Scripture: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” This brigand, himself in the throes of death upon a brutal instrument of torture, recognizes that Jesus, dying on the cross beside his own, is in fact the Chosen One of God, about to come into His kingdom. It is a remarkable confession of the Christian faith, which strictly speaking didn’t even exist yet.

Jesus’ reply rings down through the ages as the promise undergirding the hope of all penitents: “Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Thanks be to God.

Close to the Edge at 50

Yes’ seminal Close to the Edge was released 50 years ago this month, on September 13th, 1972. I was twelve years old, having just started seventh grade at Coolidge Junior High School, and I was oblivious to the music of Yes, with the exception of their hit song from earlier in the year: “Roundabout”. It would be another couple of years before I was introduced to this work, but once I was, it became my favorite album, and the one I would measure all other contemporary music against, to this day.

In my mind, nothing over the now many years ever did quite measure up to it, with the exception of Yes’ Relayer album, released at the end of 1974, about half a year after I’d first heard CTTE. I’m hardly alone in my judgment, as CTTE seems to be, while not the consensus pick for best prog rock album in the genre’s history, at least a pretty clear majority pick. The album’s three songs embody everything interesting that was going on in music at the time, from the wildly frenetic polyrhythmic opening of “Close to the Edge” to the competing strains of minimalism, folksiness, and quasi-symphonic bombast of “And You and I”, to the more straightforward, syncopated rocker “Siberian Khatru”, its main theme consisting of a gentle repeating keyboard melody in triple triplet stabs played over a snappy fifteen-beat boogie.

In retrospect, Yes had a pretty short heyday. The arrival of guitarist Steve Howe in 1971 elevated them to a different level, but by the time they regrouped after the hiatus they took to record solo albums in  1975/1976, they seem to have somewhat lost the muse, and began producing considerably less adventurous music, for the most part. Yes was not the only prog band to lose the muse at that time, as the movement seemed to fizzle out as an artistic trend by the end of the decade. I’ve long pictured Steve Howes’ pedal steel guitar outro to “Awaken”, the last song on Yes’ 1977 album Going For the One, serving as the denouement to the original progressive rock project.

Especially by the 1990s, bands would come along attempting to rekindle an artistically serious species of rock – new permutations of Yes included – and while some of them are successful enough on their own terms, the pinnacle of the genre seems to be permanently located in the early 1970s – specifically in 1972, according to a plurality of prog fans. What I find most interesting about that is how it defies the assumption behind the genre itself: the notion that music can be taken to greater and greater heights through building on itself in a process of progression – as if music is just another technology to be mastered by degrees. Quite evidently, that is not the case; the “progressive” music movement flamed out in about a decade; its leading artists reduced to producing albums like Tormato, Duke, and Camera Camera. And in the music world more generally, the apex of musical genius appears – at least for now – to have taken place in the period before the rise of democracy and Romanticism; music is not getting better since then, even at the highest levels.

That’s not to say there’s not good music being made today. There’s even still good rock music being made today. Steven Wilson’s 2015 album Hand. Cannot. Erase. is the best rock album I’ve heard since 1974. But it’s an outlier. We’re on the cusp of seeing the pop music world dominated by musical content product produced by artificial intelligence algorithms. Serious composers and musicians will find some way to survive, and hopefully to thrive. And maybe someone will someday craft a rock album even better than Close to the Edge. But if it happens, it will be an organic development from a place of deep artistic insight and impulse, not an attempt at improving upon what was done before in a self-serving game of one-upmanship over the past, which was (and is) essentially the conceit of progressivism.

The Banned Books Scam


“Banned Book Week” is September 18-24, and my local public library (the Morse Institute Library) has let its freak flag fly and got out ahead of the curve by starting its promotion early. The display was promptly praised on a local Facepalm™ group, where it received an overwhelmingly (though not entirely) positive response. I had to admit to finding it rather embarrassing. “Freedom is reading a banned book” sounds like the philosophical musings of an over-indulged 14-year old planning a coup out at the vacation house to overthrow the patriarchy, just as soon as the Che Guevara sneakers and t-shirt show up from Amazon Prime. It also smacks of disingenuity. Neither the sample books on the pre-fabricated display nor the entries being filled in by the engaged public seemed to me to be very “banned”, and I had my doubts the folks driving the campaign have in mind overturning the decades old decisions remove the Bible from public school curricula.

Between the QR code printed on the display and the library network’s webpage for “Books Under Threat”, I was let to two different lists of suppressed works. The first list was topped by a New York Times #1 bestselling book, which has not only generated immense sales, but has explicitly been promoted for curricula use in public schools, despite having been filleted by historians of all political stripes for being riddled with serious falsehoods, some of which have been surreptitiously edited by the publisher!

The second list was topped by a work of social science fiction written almost 40 years ago that has subsequently been adapted as a movie, a television series, and an opera, and which is widely used in AP English curricula – in other words, it is often required reading for top high school students. This despite the work being nakedly bigoted against Christianity, and being pornographic to boot.

These books are neither “banned” nor “under threat”. They are propaganda vehicles used to hawk worldviews and values that many people object to and do not want their children being required to read. This should not be controversial, and public libraries should not be in the business of undermining the authoritative roles of parents in the lives of their children.