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This was originally posted on my own blog and then posted here in the comments section.  I thought for ease of those who read and comment here I would simply repost  it here for your comments.

In Christ,

+FrG

My post on the implication for the Orthodox Church of Novak’s understanding of capitalism (for the original post, click here)  has inspired an interesting, if not always edifying, conversation over at the American Orthodox Institute Blog where I cross posted the piece (for the post and comments, click here).

As I mentioned on the AOI blog, my interest in Novak’s work is not a technical interest (I am not primarily interested in how his understanding compares with who other scholars view capitalism) but on the anthropological vision that he says  contributes to the extraordinary success in capitalism (or a free market approach to the economy) is raising the standard of living for the vast majority of people on the planet.

This all came to mind when I read Matt Cavendon’s post (“Sowell and Benedict XVI on Economics and Culture“) on the Acton Institute‘s blog, Powerblog.   Continue reading →

An interesting post on First Things by Michael Novak, “ Caritas and Economics.” Novak discusses the different understandings embodied in the six different Latin words for love.

In anticipation of some of my own work looking at private property in light of the tradition of the Orthodox Church, my attention was drawn to Novak’s definition of capitalism. I think he is correct in his assertion that, “ Especially in Europe, capitalism is a term supposed to be spoken with faint—or not so faint—moral disapproval.’ He continues that, at least among those who are self-appointed and anointed right thinker, “It is what all are supposed to be opposed to, not only by Marxists, who spent more than a century vilifying (and misdefining) the term, but also by humanists, poets, playwrights, churchmen, journalists, and all sensitive spirits.” The key to his criticism of the critics is, I think, the charge that most of those who reject it do not understand capitalism. While he doesn’t say this, in my own experience I have found that many opponents (and not a few proponents) of capitalism base their views on a straw man. So, let me turn the stage over to Novak and his answer to his own question “What do I mean by capitalism?”

It is not a term accurately defined by (a) private property, (b) market exchange, and (c) private accumulation or profits. That is the way Marx defined it, and that definition applies to virtually every economic system in history, even in biblical times. It is not sufficient to distinguish capitalism from the pre-capitalist systems that prevailed everywhere until the end of the eighteenth century and still prevail in most of what is called “the third world.” Max Weber, R.H. Tawney, and many others noted that something new entered the economic world some time after the Protestant Reformation. ( Post hoc, of course, is not propter hoc.)

Continue reading →

Both on the AOI blog and my own my post, “Pentecost, Lincoln and the American Experiment,” brought some very interesting and thought provoking comments. Your thoughts have helped me think a bit more deeply about the relationship between the Tradition of the Orthodox Church and the American Experiment. For this I thank you all.

And even more importantly, your words were very much in mind as I read Michael Baxter recent review of American Babylon: Notes of A Christian in Exile, by the late Fr Richard John Neuhaus.

As is no doubt clear from what I wrote, I do not see Orthodoxy and the American Experiment as necessarily in opposition to each other. Or maybe it might be more accurate to say, that the differences between Orthodoxy and America are certainly no wider or deeper than what one would expect between that between God and Caesar, between the City of God which is to come and the City of Man which is here and now.
Be that as it may, however, my interest in political philosophy is motivated by the intuition that—for better and worse—the City of Man conditions the pastoral situation of the Church until the Kingdom which is to come. Continue reading →

One of the things that interests me a great deal is the relationship between the Tradition of the Orthodox Church and the founding political philosophy of the American experiment. At the risk of appearing overly critical, or even dismissive, I think the failure of Orthodoxy in America is our not having engaged theologically and critically the American experiment on its own terms. Instead we have been willing to use America without necessarily seeing ourselves as obligated to contribute anything to her.

In this the Church has allowed herself to become merely one interest group among others. The Orthodox Church has not engaged the American experiment as yeast in the dough. We have contented ourselves instead merely to fit within the broad, and decadent, framework of modern identity politics.

This failure is more than simply a matter of our presenting ourselves as an ethnic, albeit religiously themed community. Even when the religious character of the Church is focal, it is often the religion of mere morality.  Not without cause have some complained that some in the Orthodox Church seem to want to put the Church’s patrimony at the service of the political and social agenda of the Religious Right.

These criticism I think are rather beside the point however.

The moral tradition of the Church is, in the main, no different then the classical moral teaching of Western Christianity. I suspect the attraction of some Orthodox Christians to the Religious Right reflects more a love of this shared tradition and a real concern for the moral health of American society than a grab for power as such.  Further I suspect that those Orthodox who criticize their brethren’s  involvement in conservative politics do so from a desire to see the Church support (if only passively) their own more left leaning politics. But whether from the moral, cultural or political, right or left these criticism are, to repeat myself, are different then my own concern.

The American experiment is I think best expressed by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. Reflecting on the horror of the war tearing at the fabric of the country, President Lincoln looks back to the historical and philosophical founding of the Nation: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The challenge facing the United States in Lincoln’s time (and ours) was not war as such, but whether the American “nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Reading over the years the work of the late Catholic theologian and political philosopher John Courtney Murray, I have come more and more to appreciate the wisdom of Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg. Unlike other countries that are united by land or blood, a shared culture or language, America and Americans are, or should be anyway, united by an idea, the fundamental equality of all human beings.

While it has not always done so well, or even at all, at its best what the American political experiment asks of us is not to surrender our language or culture. Rather as a nation of immigrants, we ask each other to put the riches of our respective cultural and ethnic heritages at the service of the common social good. Granted in our short history there are times when we have honored this idea more in words than deeds. But even when honored in the breech, if there is a unique American culture or mindset it is that enduring faith in the equality of all human beings and the centrality of committing ourselves to the common good of all.

Contrary to her critics harsh words our failure to be faithful to our own ideals is to be expected. It is to be expected not simply because we are sinners, but and again as Lincoln points out at Gettysburg, because the American experiment is always an unfinished work. Whether in times or war or peace, it remains for each generation to answer in the affirmative Lincoln’s challenge to his listeners on that not so long ago battlefield:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

So what does this have to do with the Orthodox Church? Two things I think.

First, internally, if the Church is to be a real, indigent Orthodox Church and not simply a pale copy of the Church in Greece or Russia, we need to take seriously the challenge of America that in the neither the City of Man nor the City of God do we have to lay aside language or (to the degree it does not contradict the Gospel anyway) our culture. Let me go further.

On Pentecost Sunday I reminded my own community that the work of salvation, while it is directed at human beings certainly, also results in the deification of culture. Just as Greek culture was Christianized and became the carrier of Eternal truth without losing its own character as either Greek (or so ontologically and historically contingent) so too American culture can be Christianized, become itself a means of communicating what is Eternal in and through the contingent and limited structures of culture and language.

Part and parcel of the Christianization of American culture is I think demonstrating, and this speaks to my second point, that E pluribus unum is not simply a political motto. It is also at the heart of all human community. More than that, it is also at the heart of Church.

We sing at Vespers on Pentecost:

The Holy Spirit gives all things: makes prophecies flow, perfects priests, taught the unlettered wisdom, revealed fishermen to be theologians, welds together the whole institution of the Church. Consubstantial and equal in majesty with the Father and the Son, our Advocate, glory to you.

The Church is a pneumatic community of unity and diversity not in opposition but in harmony. So too while at its best it falls short of this, this is what America aspires to be. The Church offers America a glimpse not only of  her own biblical foundations but of the Eucharist which is both a reminder of that towards which America aspires and the standard against which she must also evaluate her own actions, domestic and foreign.

The American Experiment is for me as an Orthodox Christian a real, if imperfect, icon of the Eucharist. Or to borrow from Hebrews, if the Eucharist is an image of the Kingdom which is to come then the American Experiment, seen in light of the Eucharist image, is a shadow of the image. And it is as a shadow, as something which points beyond itself to the image, even as the image points beyond itself to the Reality which is to come (see Hebrews 10.1) that Orthodox Christians can and should not only engage but wholehearted love and support the American Experiment.

If we have as Orthodox Christians have been seduced by the identity politics that has come to so mark  contemporary American political discourse on both the left and the right, this doesn’t mean that we have to remain bound by our shared failure. Rather we can, if we only decide to do so, return not only to ourselves but return in a way that we can serve the common good of both the City of God and the City of Man.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

It used to be that I would skip printed interviews in magazines and journals, and especially in newspapers. They seemed like rehashings of what the interviewee had already said–perhaps better–in print. As an editor, interviews also struck me as filler for slow issues. And so it went for years that I did not read a single interview even while enjoying interviews on television and especially on the radio.

What you could call my prejudice against print interviews was only broken by that maker and breaker of prejudices: experience. I read a couple of deft interviews, which appeared, strangely enough, in leftist publications like Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Slate (I have not seen many interviews, and especially many notable ones, in what could be called conservative or right-wing publications. If you know of some, please post them as a response). I say strangely enough since I had never thought that certain genres or print formats were more or less preferred by one side or another in the culture wars. After a little reflection on my last five years of reading, I concluded that whereas the left seems to run the gamut in its literary output, the right is mostly an article, book, and blog literary culture. I have joked with friends who sit on boards of right-leaning institutes that without the article, tri-fold pamphlet, monograph, and dinner-speech, western civilization would disappear. A more revealing comment may be what a not unrenowned conservative friend of mine told me “I just don’t have time for fiction,” he looked toward his vast library, “it requires too much self-disclosure.” There are notable exceptions, yet this seems fair, considering the temperament of many famous litarati of the right and left.

Be that as it may, printed interviews can do in a short space what an essay cannot, and this is its virtue and its temptation to vice. An interviewee can offer a collection of thesis statements, roughly argued, with implications and connections from and between them, without the reader thinking that too much has been said too soon.  Sometimes, when the interviewer is knowledgeable of the interviewee’s corpus, the questions can generate felicitous syntheses of the corpus, with strings strung between seemingly disparate subjects. In this way there is serendipity in the interview–a coming upon what was perhaps not thought before by the author, or understood by the reader. There is a dialectic. Yet, unlike live interviews, the printed interview is usually edited after the fact for content, with many things being restated. This allows the interviewee to hone what he said, and perhaps edit out what is sub par.

Recently, the Clarion Review, published by the American Orthodox Institute, began printing interviews by prominent European intellectuals. The first two were with Roger Scruton, Britain’s most prominent conservative philosopher, and Remi Brague, an influential French scholar and academic, who specializes in medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish theology and culture, and their interrelations.

I encourage you to read these provocatively titled pieces, certainly if you find yourself with my old prejudice against the printed interview. Continue reading →