Tony Blair at Yale

The former prime minister of Great Britain, Tony Blair, is now a Roman Catholic.

That's old news? Well, maybe. But here's something a bit newer: he's also now a lecturer on religion at Yale University.

It's a part time gig. He'll deliver five lectures a year for three years, in return for a nominal fee and a donation to his foundation.

In his honor, then, here's a quotation from The Varieties of Religious Experience, on the appeal of the Church of Rome.

"To intellectual Catholics many of the antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they are childish in the pleasing sense of 'child-like,' -- innocent and amiable, and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition of the dear people's intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out their delivate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at his literalness."

Converts to the Church of Rome

The religious precincts of the blogosphere are abuzz these days with the name of Francis J. Beckwith, a new and surprising convert to Roman Catholicism.

Surprising because Beckwith was, until his conversion, president of the Evangelical Theological Society, an association of Protestant theologians.

(I should say that I don't feel any personal stake in Beckwith's move. I grew up as an observant Catholic, but that was decades ago, and feels as if it might have been in another galaxy. I comment only as a curious observer.)

Beckwith has become a prominent figure in church-state issues in recent years, taking predictable positions for an ETS head, arguing in favor of the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools, for example.

Here's his blog, rightreason.ektopos.com

He has explained himself, and his new faith, there. Most of his account is absorbed in issues of timing and mechanics. Once a very visible Protestant philosopher makes such a decision, how should he best make the fact known publicly without doing damage to an institution, the ETS, for which he continues to have good will? That was his quandry. He didn't want to play into historical suspicions about "the Jesuitical secrecy of these papists," but he didn't want to make an open and dramatic break, either.

The issue of mechanics may well have been wrenching for him, but concerns me not at all. What I want to know is: what did the conversion feel like? Was it impelled by reason, or by a non-rational inner light, or something else?

I had to scroll down rather far in the piece before he addressed that at all.

"As you probably know," he says at last, "my work in philosophy, ethics, and theology has always been Catholic friendly, but I would have never predicted that I would return to the Church, for there seemed to me too many theological and ecclesiastical issues that appeared insurmountable. However, in January, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible."

Justification. Ah, that's the crux. Roman 1:17. "The righteous shall live by faith." The idea, as Luther and others have expounded upon it, is that faith leads to good works, but that it is the faith, not the good works, that justifies one before the Lord, that makes righteous.

What was the Catholic view on justification? The scandals that enraged Luther (the implication especially that one could buy an "indulgence" and either free a deceased friend from Purgatory or limit one's own stay there) were genuinely outrageous and no one today defends that.

So Beckwith said that key to his own conversion was a look at the Patristic writings. It was a very intellectual/academic sort of conversion experience, I gather. Like Cardinal Newman.

There may be another, even higher-profile, conversion to the Church of Rome soon.
Tony Blair is said to have been waiting for the end of his tenure at Ten Downing Street before declaring himself a Catholic -- the faith of his wife, Cherie.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1801237.ece

"all antiliberal forces"

That's a neat phrase, which I take from a story in today's Wall Street Journal.

The story concerns the French presidential campaign. The second round of voting is set for this Sunday, May 6, and pits the top two vote getters from the first round against one another. The top first-round vote getter was Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy (31.18%).

The runner up was Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, with 25.87% of the vote.

Though I usually distrust left/right spectral analyses in politics, I haven't studied the French situation with sufficient care to critique the Wall Street Journal's spectrum-driven analysis, so I'll merely summarize it here. There were six first-round candidates to Royal's left, who collectively received 10.57% of the vote. There was a centrist candidate (between Royal and Sarkozy) who received 18.57%. And there were three candidates to the right of Sarkozy, who received 13.82%.

The article's emphasis was on the difficulties that Royal is facing consolidating her base. She's presumably want to be able to take for granted not only her own 26% first-round votes, but the first-round votes to the left of her, who presumably see her as preferable to Sarkozy. If she could take them for grahted, she could then compete with Sarkozy for the centrist votes, those who went for Francois Bayrou in the first round.

Here is where the neat phrase that I've used above as a title comes in. This weekend, a Socialist named Henri Emmanuelli held a press conference stating his unhappiness with Royal. He apparently thinks of her as the French Tony Blair, co-opting a socialist party for the bourgeois. He advocated the creating of a new leftist party ... which would presumably mean sitting out the second round. The new leftist party will encompass "all antiliberal" forces.

Liberal in the context of French politics means, roughly, market-driven. I find it refreshing to be reminded of that usage of the term so vigorously, because in the US of late the term has been used as a sort of cussword by the right, as a way of lumping together our Royals with our Emmanuellis, so to speak. The Clintons with the Kucinichs. Actually, it's hard to identify a politician in the US who has views at all like Emmanuelli who is taken at all seriously, so one is driven to invoke the amusing figure of Dennis Kucinich here.

At any rate, the polls are so far favoring Sarkozy. Time will tell.