Summum Bonum

From GlobalPost, a story about overeducated young people with few opportunities. While Greece is an extreme example, this syndrome is everywhere in the West, including the U.S.

It’s not as evident or complained-about here, for several reasons.

One is the U.S. culture of personal responsibility and entrepreneurship. Those with degrees in non-demand areas get on with freelancing or making new careers for themselves,without whining too much. In American culture, it’s acceptable to complain about the hard times only as an obstacle on the road to self-transformation. After you’ve made it, you can talk about how tough it was.

And the more flexible U.S. economy offers more opportunities than closed, sclerotic, crony capitalist hothouses like Greece.

Our universities attract foreign students who major in the math, science and business fields that are still in demand. Many stay in the U.S. to start companies and generate jobs.

Still, education elites (and parents) here haven’t seemed to grasp yet that a college degree for everyone is not the answer.

At Slate, Lee Smith (quoting the columnist “Spengler”) thinks the whole idea of Obama’s addressing “the Muslim world” is a mistake:

“By addressing the ‘Islamic world’ from Cairo,” writes Goldman, “Obama lends credibility to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other advocates of political Islam who demand that Muslims be addressed globally and on religious terms.” In other words, the American president is playing into the hands of those who seek to bring down the U.S.-backed order in the Middle East.

I’m not sure about this. I don’t think the notion of the Muslim umma needs Obama’s endorsement, or will somehow weaken if the U.S. ignores it. And al-Azhar University does have a long history as an intellectual center in Islam, not just Egypt.

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Dear readers,

The following is from a moral theologian and colleague of ours. We asked him to write about the Christopher West “approach” to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. We think this is the best comment to date by any theologian, Schindler included. This is a must read.

The American Recusants 

Brad Gooch’s new biography of Flannery O’Connor has sparked a new surge of interest in her. By now, O’Connor’s place in American fiction is secure. But, as always, non-Christian critics have to struggle with what to make of her Catholicism. The results of their struggles usually say more about them than about O’Connor, and the same is true of Christopher Benfey’s New Republic review.

“Like others before him, Gooch overestimates O’Connor’s theological sophistication….The truth is that O’Connor liked the Catholic Church because she didn’t have to think about it….

Attempts to find this or that Christian idea embodied in her stories are doomed to failure, or to tedium at best. Who wants to believe that the interpretive key to her stories lies in the earnest theological musings of Jacques Maritain or Thomas Merton? She wanted to escape what she called in her essays ‘determinism,’ the notion that ‘the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man.’ She was all for mystery and freedom, which she thought the Church–at least the thirteenth century Church–made room for, but she found them in Hawthorne and Faulkner as well.’ “

Benfey seems to mean here simply that O’Connor accepted Catholic doctrines. I suppose not challenging them amounts to “not thinking” for someone like Benfey. But it is certainly NOT a true statement that she didn’t think deeply about them, or that one can’t find them in her fiction.

O’Connor presents the truths of Catholic theology as fundamental realities, almost like physical facts, rather than like a set of beliefs. Spiritual realities as Catholic theology presents them are real for everyone, believer or not, in O’Connor’s fictional world. They certainly impinge themselves on her characters, even if they don’t understand or react in bizarre ways.

One of her characters, for example, walks miles with rocks in his shoes because he feels he has to “pay.” His own church doesn’t provide him a ritual of penance, so he has to improvise. His felt need for sacramental realities is a part of obervable human nature for O’Connor.

Indeed, many of her short stories are exquisite explorations of the differences between Protestant and Catholic doctrines. No one who has read and understood O’Connor’s last short story, “Parker’s Back,” which is about Catholic versus Protestant understandings of the Incarnation, should be capable of making such statements.

But secular critics no longer believe in the importance of the distinctions O’Connor was writing about, or perhaps have lost the ability even to see them.

The fact that O’Connor “also” found mystery and freedom in Hawthorne is not surprising, given that the New England writer was so sympathetic to Catholicism that his daughter converted, founded an order of nuns, and is a candidate for canonization today.

Paul Samuelson on why the press’s abdication of its role is bad for America.