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4/5 of the Stages of Grief, Nominalism (and some satire)

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    1. 80% of the Stages of Grief.
    2. Morally wrong, really wrong.
    3. The Coalition that does not yet exist.
    4. Errata.
    5. A cheesy story

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Melinda Selmys offers insight into one of the contentious issues of the day in How to Speak About Homosexuality at First Things.

Her launching pad is an ÜberCatholic 94-minute video recently released on the website ChurchMilitant.tv that “brings together in one place all the negative tropes and stereotypes that animate the Catholic opposition to the sinister ‘gay agenda.’” She declines “to rip into its bloody meat and leave behind a mangled carcass as a warning to others who might desire to make something similar,” instead discerning that “it reveals the deep sense of grief  that the American Church must grapple with to become effective in ministry to homosexual people.”

Selmys identifies herself:

  • I believe in and defend the Church’s teaching, and gave up lesbian sex over fourteen years ago ….
  • I’m a queer Canadian girl, born in the eighties, raised in a liberal Anglican tradition and educated within a gay-positive public school system. Even though I have since adopted the Catholic faith and chosen to pursue a heterosexual marriage, my knowledge of what older American Catholics have lost is vague and largely theoretical.

The fifth stage of grief is acceptance, which Selmys finds missing from the video:

[I]t is only after acceptance that we can rebuild. The Church in America understandably finds acceptance difficult. In Europe, the death of Christendom is a clearly established fact, the Church has had several centuries to grieve, and the hierarchy is ready to start building a new life for Christianity in the third millennium. In America, the dream of one nation united under God—a Christian nation in which men harmoniously work together in life and liberty pursuing happiness in accord with the natural law—is still alive in the hearts of many Christians ….

Occasionally I encounter a little pocket of the community that used to exist, and I’m filled with a sense of longing and nostalgia, the way that a child feels when she sees the photograph of a father who died in her infancy.

For folks like me, however, the feeling that “‘tis not too late to build a newer world” overwhelms any need to pine for the past. The call to a new evangelization is exciting: We’ve crossed the threshold with hope, we’re not afraid, and we’re ready to undertake brave new experiments in the art of loving and preaching the gospel.

I have long disbelieved in “Christian America,” so I’m not grieving it. (I am grieving the loss of sane America – from a conception of sanity that is informed by lifelong Christian belief but is also aware that some disciplines are only for the Christian faithful, not for everybody.) It may not be the last word on the topic, but I highly recommend Selmys’ article for a useful way of analyzing what many of us traditionalists are feeling.

(Selmys responds to First Things comboxes here.)

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I’m disheartened to hear, in our sexuality-related debates, echoes from 40 years ago, when abortion was widely acknowledged to be “morally wrong” but politicians who ritually mouthed that nevertheless seemed not to believe that it was really wrong. “Morally wrong” apparently referred to mere transgression of some sort of cultic taboo, which of course one should never “impose on others.” Parallel concessions, using different words, are being made today by good-hearted people who don’t want to give offense.

There seems to be, in other words, no deep conviction by people that their religions are really true, even for those who don’t acknowledge the truth and even as we afford them great latitude to believe and to enact untruth.

I’m pretty sure that what I’m hearing, in still more other words, is nominalism rather than Christian realism:

The idea that God cannot redefine the nature of things was central to the realism of the Aristotelian/Thomistic approach. It meant that when God wills something or issues a command, He is not arbitrarily assigning ethical valuations to particular actions or states of being that might equally have been given alternative valuations. This is because God’s will is not the ultimate source of moral values. Rather, the ultimate source of moral values is the nature of how reality is. God’s will for a thing corresponds to what the real nature of that thing actually is (hence, the term “realism” was used to describe this approach).

(Aquinas, Ockham and the Power of Ideas, emphasis added)

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Also at First Things, Christopher Palko elaborates on his observation that the “March for Marriage had without a doubt the most racially diverse crowd that I had ever seen associated with a right-of-center political cause.” I’ll take his word for it. He sees hope for a political coalition advantageous to the GOP. I’ll not hold my breath.

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Errata we’ve dreamed of seeing:

Monday’s NRA news reported that the significance of Easter is “more guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans.” According to the New York Times, the newspaper of record, the correct answer is that it’s “the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ into heaven.” We regret the error.

5

Local TV news reported that a “hot truck” was pulled over for safety inspection and that boxes of cheese were found saturated with blood from warm meat stored above them. The cheese, they said, “had to be destroyed.”

Somehow, I’m picturing a state policeman, service revolver drawn, grimacing and averting his eyes as he squeezes the trigger to “put down” a box of cheese.

Is this part of the meaning of Easter?

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.



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