Yorba Linda Sky

7:53 p.m.

New Modes Of A Great Tradition

Gary Hall, the new dean of Washington National Cathedral, on Episcopal future:

[I]f the Episcopal Church is to thrive in the 21^st century, it must do three things. It must develop a clear, missional identity. It must project that identity outward and invite people into it. And it must take seriously the needs and concerns of those who come toward us and adapt to the new life and energy they bring.

Does that mean that we will no longer continue to worship in our stately Anglican ways? Of course not. But it does mean that we will need to find new modes of liturgical, musical, and theological expression to complement the great traditional strengths we already have. And this is not new behavior for Anglicans. Queen Elizabeth I forged a pragmatic consensus between Catholics and Protestants in 1559. Bishop William White of Pennsylvania led the first General Convention of the Episcopal Church to a uniquely American way of governance in 1789. The church opened itself up to the sacramental ministries of women bishops, priests and deacons in 1976. We have always been a pragmatic, evolving tradition.

Hat tip to Rich Straton

What's A Little "Enemy" Between Friends?

I love the can-do optimism that usually pervades the Economist. In this case, I hope its correspondent is right in blaming a crude boilerplate denunciation of Israel on Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood men instead of him:

[T]he apparent immovability of seasoned officials still running the lumbering bureaucracy can prove embarrassing. When Egypt’s embassy in Israel responded to a Happy Ramadan note from Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, with a faxed thank you letter in the name of his Egyptian counterpart wishing peace upon the people of Israel, Mr Morsi’s office swiftly denied he had communicated in any way with what the Brothers regard as “the Zionist enemy”.

"Tossed, Turned, And Tangled"

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center / USGS
The Arkansas-Mississippi border, photographed from NASA's Landsat. The square shapes at left are fields and towns. More here, thanks to Discover.

Hot In The Kitchen

Writing anonymously, a gay Chick-fil-A employee who had opposed the boycott of the company takes an angrier view after experiencing Chick-fil-A Day:

I remember thinking, under stress, “I hope they choke.” That’s not true. Even though I did my best to make the salads and wraps extra-gay, I don’t want to harm the customers. (Otherwise I may have been moved to spit on their food. I didn’t, because that’s going too far.) The only thing that kept me going without screaming or storming off was simply knowing that I’m right. These people won’t choke on their food—I wouldn’t wish that, just as I wouldn’t wish anyone go hungry—but they will end up hurting. It’s going to be a long fall from the saddles of their high horses, once we do have equal marriage rights. Their descendants will be ashamed of them, just as I’m ashamed of my grandparents’ support of segregation. When their children and grandchildren ask, “How was it possible to be Christian and oppose equal rights?” their own words will choke them. They don’t need food to do it for them.

The Customer's Not Always Right

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was especially hard for some of its franchises' gay employees.

Pressed Chicken

Every Aug. 1, Christians who have lashed themselves to the liturgical calendar commemorate a member of the Sanhedrin, Jerusalem's council of Jewish elders, who issued a minority opinion on whether to persecute Jesus to death. Joseph of Arimathaea is famous not only for his defiance of majority rule but for giving up his own tomb to make sure that Jesus would get a proper burial.

Joseph is a patron saint of doing the right thing. What can his diligent discernment teach us on his feast day, when one of the questions before the American people was whether to feast at Chick-fil-A?

If the Foster Imposters really had their feathers set on giving their lives to be boneless breasts, this may have been their chance. At some Chicks-fil-A, white meat and tempers were sizzling. In the wake of CEO Dan Cathy's proclamations about biblical marriage, gay marriage advocates called for a boycott. The mayors of Boston and Chicago are trying to use the hammer of state power to ban new franchises. In response, Gov. Mike Huckabee and other boycott opponents called on friends of the company to get a tasty sandwich today. Even the ailing Billy Graham ordered in.

Here's how I serve up the issue.

If you don't like chicken hash, don't open the can. If my employees and franchisees depended, as Cathy's do, on selling as much chicken, fries, and ranch dressing as possible, I would confine my expression of my views about potential customers' race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, political party, and positions on the Afghan war to Bible study, the dining room table, and Al-Anon meetings. That would be especially wise when it came to a flash point issue like gay marriage, which has split the American people almost exactly in half.

Boycotters should also count the chickens after they're deep-fried. I agree with Andrew Sullivan, who argues that marriage equity should be won at the ballot box and believes that the best response to Cathy's contributions to anti-gay marriage groups was Jeff Bezos' $2.5 million gift to the other side (chicken may by the only thing Amazon doesn't sell):

There is no contradiction between marriage equality and a robust defense of the rights of those who oppose marriage equality - including maximal religious freedom and maximal free speech. In fact, it is vital that we eschew such tactics, as they distract from a positive argument that has been solidly winning converts for two decades.

We may never learn whether boycotters are hurting the company more than Huckabee and Graham helped. Given the social and cultural demographics of those who are still eating a lot of fried chicken, not an especially enlightened food, Cathy may actually net out with even more eggs to pass along to his pet causes. The photo above, which I took tonight, doesn't do justice to the hundreds of cars and customers descending on the Yorba Linda store. Most probably don't like gay marriage. Some just may not like being told where to eat.

Chick-fil-A has a bone to pick with New Gingrich and Sarah Palin. Messing with the First Amendment is a treacherous business. When Gingrich was planning his presidential run, he found it politically expedient to stigmatize Muslim U.S. citizens who wanted to add a cultural center to an existing worship space near the World Trade Center. Palin and others joined in, doing considerable damage to our social and cultural consensus about bedrock constitutional principles. No one should complain about the infringement of Chick-fil-A's freedom of speech by the mayors of Boston and Chicago who didn't oppose the wannabe presidents who tried to deny freedom of religion to millions of Americans.

So call me chicken, but neither the boycott nor Chick-fil-A Day was for me. I voted against Prop. 8 and preached in the south Orange County, California parish that I serve in support of The Episcopal Church's recent decisions to permit the blessing of same-gender unions and prohibit discrimination against transgender persons who want to be deacons, priests, and bishops. As one might imagine from a glance at public opinion polls, not everyone at our church agrees. We remain together in community anyway. That may be just a little harder to do now that activists have labeled loyal Chick-fil-A customers as bigots.

Ross Douthat argues that, as with many wrenching social issues, the case for gay marriage is being made by appeals to reason as well as other means:

The cause of gay marriage has indeed advanced because many millions of people have been persuaded of its merits: No cause could move so swiftly from the margins to the mainstream if it didn’t have appealing arguments supporting it and powerful winds at its back. But it has also advanced, and will probably continue to advance, through social pressure, ideological enforcement, and legal restriction. Indeed, the very language of the movement is explicitly designed to exert this kind of pressure: By redefining yesterday’s consensus view of marriage as “bigotry,” and expanding the term “homophobia” to cover support for that older consensus as well as personal discomfort with/animus toward gays, the gay marriage movement isn’t just arguing with its opponents; it’s pathologizing them, raising the personal and professional costs of being associated with traditional views on marriage, and creating the space for exactly the kind of legal sanctions that figures like [Boston and Chicago mayors] Thomas Menino and Rahm Emanuel spent last week flirting with.

Boycott supporters are probably more interested in hurting Cathy's bottom line than pathologizing his customers. But now that the chicken wire has gone up, once again dividing us against one another, my junk food choices are complicated by political as well as nutritional considerations. I've had no chicken sandwiches and one hamburger since resolving to give up 30 pounds for Lent. But the next time I want one, I'll probably give Cathy and his local franchisee my business, because they make the best chicken sandwich in town. It's like the scene in "Broadcast News" in which a TV producer played by Holly Hunter tells a Nicaraguan contra to put on his boots if he wants to, not because her camera is recording the moment. I'll choose my chicken strictly based on what tastes best when I'm hungry. You can hold the secret semiotic sauce.

Is that what Joseph of Aramathea would have done? It depends on what he thought about the ethics of the marketplace, where he evidently had thrived. As long as businesspeople obey the letter and spirit of the law, they deserve to profit from hard work and reliable products. Boycotters should also think about the franchises' employees, who don't deserve to lose their jobs in this chicken-feed economy because of their big bird's big mouth. When it comes to politics, the same rule applies to Cathy and his critics. They belong in the voting booth, not the drive-through.

It Goes By Awfully Fast

From Charles McGrath's elegant obituary of Gore Vidal (he's shown with George McGovern at the Nixon library in 2009), an always-timely warning:

In 2003 Mr. Vidal and his companion, [Howard] Austen, who was ill, left their cliffside Italian villa La Rondinaia (the Swallow’s Nest) on the Gulf of Salerno and moved to the Hollywood Hills to be closer to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Mr. Austen died that year, and in “Point to Point Navigation,” his second volume of memoirs, Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked from his deathbed, “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”

“Of course it had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.” Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was already inscribed with their names side by side.

Halling Off To Washington

During the 1980s one of the joys of going to All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena along with my mother, Jean Taylor Lescoe, a longtime congregant and former vestry member, was the preaching and teaching of its senior associate rector, the Rev. Canon Gary Hall, who's just been called as dean of Washington National Cathedral. (The Washington Post's coverage is here.)

In this video, he discusses his Hollywood roots, progress of ministry, and most recent work as rector of Christ Church Cranbrook in the Romney family's home town of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Giving Romney Too Much Credit

Two views on Mitt Romney's cultural superiority speech. Peter S. Goldman at the Huffington Post says Romney was playing to a home town audience, and not just U.S. Jews:

He is asking for votes by telling the story of a mystical America in which life is equally fair for everyone, one in which winners and losers reflect their innate virtues. So help yourself to a giant tax cut, wealthy Americans, because you've earned it! And look in the mirror, struggling people who may need help, because you are the loser spawn of damaged culture.

This is something Romney could never say quite so explicitly at home -- at least, not without running the risk of being branded insensitive and maybe a racist. But the upside of owning this message seems clear: He cultivates support among those distrustful of government, the usual means of rectifying systemic injustice such as that which separates white America from black America, and Palestine from Israel.

Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, argues that Romney might be right:

Are the Israelis solely to blame for the plight of the Palestinians? Or is Romney pointing to a larger problem, one that has afflicted the Arab world? It's surely not racist to point out, as Thomas Friedman repeatedly does, that there is something rotten in the Middle East, that kleptocratic tyrannies have held back their populations over the past century, that the Arab world remains far behind the West economically, despite its incredible oil wealth, and that Israel's existence has permitted Arab leaders to use it to deflect attention from their own grievous shortcomings, particularly when it comes to education and social programs. For his part, [David] Landes, who taught economic history at Harvard, was trying to explain why the West had come out so far ahead of the rest--part of his effort was to refocus attention on Max Weber's theory of the [P]rotestant work ethic. Does that ethic also prevail in, of all places, Israel?

I'd say both writers give Romney too much credit. He was being neither as diabolical as Goodman proposes (his aides seemed pretty upset about the story) nor as insightful as Heilbrunn. It's fine to talk about Arab leaders holding their people back. It's a terrible idea to talk about superior and inferior cultures, which sounds too much like a euphemism for race and religion.

Visiting Israel, Romney could have accomplished his mission of winning the votes of U.S. Jews while also demonstrating the capacity for nuance required of commanders-in-chief. Maybe he and his aides think we're tired of nuance. But in foreign policy and especially in the Middle East, you can never have too much. And yet in what was billed as a major policy address, he snubbed the peace process. Instead, he said something about Palestinians that sounded intellectual to try to make his neglectfulness look respectable.