Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square:

A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh

by Gassalasca Jape, S. J.

“The people swarmed on the public square
And pointed laughingly at me,
And I was filled with shame and fear.”

— Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov

Contents

• A Sea-Change or the Old Bob-and-Weave?
• Who’s Afraid of Alan Wolfe?
• Getting to Yes
• The St. Benedict Option – Classic
• The St. Benedict Option – Remix
• Cakes and Ale

But Littlefield’s great value was as a spiritual example. Despite his strange learnings he was as strict a Presbyterian and as firm a Republican as George F. Babbitt. He confirmed the business men in the faith. Where they knew only by passionate instinct that their system of industry and manners was perfect, Dr. Howard Littlefield proved it to them, out of history, economics, and the confessions of reformed radicals.

- Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

It is written, When the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch: wherefore, in such circumstances, may it not sometimes be safer, if both leader and led simply–sit still? Had you, anywhere in Crim Tartary, walled in a square enclosure; furnished it with a small, ill-chosen Library; and then turned loose into it eleven hundred Christian striplings, to tumble about as they listed, from three to seven years: certain persons, under the title of Professors, being stationed at the gates, to declare aloud that it was a University, and exact considerable admission-fees,–you had, not indeed in mechanical structure, yet in spirit and result, some imperfect resemblance of our High Seminary. I say, imperfect; for if our mechanical structure was quite other, so neither was our result altogether the same: unhappily, we were not in Crim Tartary, but in a corrupt European city, full of smoke and sin; moreover, in the middle of a Public, which, without far costlier apparatus than that of the Square Enclosure, and Declaration aloud, you could not be sure of gulling.

- Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

If you wish to study a granfalloon
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

- Bokonon

A Sea-Change or the Old Bob-and-Weave?

erhaps against the general inclination of their editors, recently the engines of conservative Christian opinion have been pulled in a Pantagruelian direction by contributors questioning the viability of a religious traditionalism that has agreed to cooperate with the dominant order of Liberalism. As Eugene McCarraher succinctly put it in Books & Culture: “Is liberal capitalist democracy now the horizon of the Christian political imagination?” When they are distracted by such inconvenient questions from their main task of cheering any signs of conservative Christian success on the political and cultural front, the editors of publications like Christianity Today, First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture typically shift into “oh, please!” or “circle the wagons!” mode. But perhaps a more honest and engaged bit of self-reflection and internal dialogue is forthcoming. The bandwagon has been accumulating baggage that needs to be attended to.

The Grain and the Weeds by Jim Janknegt

In the February 2004 issue of First Things, long-time editor James Nuechterlein announced his retirement. Nuechterlein explained that while he remained committed to the ideas present at the founding of First Things–a grounding in traditionalism that “had come through modernity, not around it” and a perception that First Things was “of the neoconservative persuasion”–he had recently seen “signs of ideological malaise” in the “increasingly familiar” quality of the arguments being submitted to the journal. One is left to wonder if Nuechterlein sees the political-ideological alliance between tradition and neoconservatism as a mistake.

Fortunately, not all contributions to First Things have a familiar ring. The January issue featured an essay by Christopher Shannon whose line of inquiry we hope will become further developed in the future. Shannon pointed out that in the dominant liberal discourse of the day, the Catholic idea of culture as something given and received “must give way” to the Protestant idea of culture as choice. “Tradition/Catholicism oppresses, modernity/Protestantism liberates: this simple opposition sets the limits of diversity in America for liberals and conservatives alike.” Shannon went on to argue that this habit of mind destroys any sense of a life ordered by Tradition and increasingly assimilates “American Catholics to the secular Protestant norms of middle-class American consumerism.”

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