The Taliban are not Medieval

 

Chartres Cathedral

During the flurry of worry as we abandoned an ally to barbarism, many commentators and social media "experts" said the Taliban is Medieval.  

This is America and we are, as a country, as dumb as a sack of lug nuts when it comes to history, so I was not surprised to hear the Taliban to be labelled as Medieval, but they emphatically are not.  

The Taliban are not Medieval. They are ignorant, despicable thugs who hate civilization, freedom, light and love.  The Medieval era brought beauty to the entire world. It celebrated knowledge and learning. Eventually the Renaissance and the Reformation sprung from its problems.  

The Taliban, like all fundamentalists, look backward and express their faith in death and demolition.  

There is nothing Medieval about the Taliban.  They are Westboro Baptist Church with a national flag. 

As with every attempt to label eras of history, the period roughly between 1000 and 1500 could be called the Medieval period, though some put the start date almost at the end of the Roman Empire in 472.  Either way the term Medieval only applies to parts of Western Europe under the influence of the Catholic Church and of the Holy Roman Empire. 

In some ways, the Medieval period the zenith of culture in the west.  Chartres Cathedral was a work of centuries by people who had an eternal vision and expressed their beliefs in stone--most knowing they would never live to see the final result of their life's work.  

Chartres Cathedral inside and outside

The popular image of the Medieval Europe is dominated by The Plague, the corrupt Catholic Church, and the Inquisition, but this Monty Python view ignores the beginning of the modern university and the beginning of Romantic Love as equal to other loves. The Divine Comedy and the Arthurian Legends brought Romantic Love to the center of western culture. 

Dante's Divine Comedy, the entire universe, 

physical and spiritual, in 14,000 lines of poetry

Literature left the confines of the Latin language in the Three Crowns of Florence:  Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch.  They wrote in vernacular Italian. And the world followed their lead.

Everybody Hates Jews

Honestly by Bari Weiss, a new podcast

 One of my favorite new podcasts is Honestly by Bari Weiss.  She was a columnist at the New York Times  until she resigned last year saying woke culture had taken over the Times and created a hostile work environment. She is a conservative, but against Trump populism.

She was Bat Mitzvah at the synagogue in Pittsburgh where eleven Jews were murdered by a gunman shouting that he wanted all Jews to die. 

On her podcast, she interviews guests covering a gamut of American culture and its dysfunction.  

Her second episode was interview with Mark Cuban on money and hard questions on the ill effects of billionaires on society.

In her most recent episode, Weiss interviewed Dr. Vinay Prasad about strategies to overcome vaccine hesitancy. She ended the interview by asking Prasad how he lives his life in and out of the hospital where he works in San Francisco.  Prasad said a vaccinated person wearing a mask outside is completely unnecessary, but he lives in a very blue city so he sometimes wears a mask outside just to be part of his community.

She interviewed Professor Peter Boghossian about why he left Portland State over an oppressive woke culture dominating the campus.

Lt. Gen. HR McMaster discussed his career and tenure in the Trump administration in an interview I found fascinating. 

She interviewed the head of Apple News in Hong Kong about the formerly independent city state falling under direct control of China.

And for something completely different, listen to the episode on America's Sex Recession.  

Weiss also has a substack. The latest article titled Everybody Hates Jews is brilliant in showing the danger of Jew hatred from the left and the right:  

In an era in which the past is mined by offense-archaeologists for the most minor of microaggressions, the very real macroaggressions taking place right now against Jews go ignored. Assaults on Hasidic Jews on the streets of Brooklyn, which have become a regular feature of life there, are overlooked or, sometimes, justified by the very activists who go to the mat over the “cultural appropriation” of a taco. It is why corporations issue passionate press releases and pledge tens of millions of dollars to other minorities when they are under siege, but almost never do the same for Jews. 

Here is the full article.

I listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts. 

Hunting Magic Eels and the Search for Spiritual Reality

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age

by Richard Beck

 In one of my book groups, the one where we read and discuss books of all kinds, we are in the midst of discussing:  Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck.  

This book reminds me why I love book discussions so much.  Each reader brings his or her own life to the book.  The discussion brings those perspectives together to clash or harmonize, reinforce or raze, and otherwise share the wonder each person brought to the book.  

The premise of the book is that the world has become disenchanted. The author tells how we became disenchanted, then tells how he, and we, could become re-enchanted. 

I liked the beginning of the book, particularly connecting our disenchantment with the reformation.  He makes a good case for the unintended consequences of blasting the foundations of Catholicism.  In Beck's analysis, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are more layers of the disenchantment cake Luther and Calvin baked.  

For me, the Scientific Revolution and the wonder of the Enlightenment re-enchant the world of faux spirituality that grows in a world of religion plus ignorance, but I know that makes me very marginal among believers.  

I have a favorite author among those who explain relativity physics.  I wrote him 25 years ago to tell him I love his book.  In that book, Spacetime and Special Relativity, M. David Mermin writes a long aside explaining why fundamentalists are wrong.  I also told Mermin that I am a believer and found the fact that light was the speed limit of the universe made my faith more vivid.  He wrote back and told me he was working on a sequel that dropped the criticism of belief.  A few year later It's About Time was published with even better illustrations of the inextricable relations of space, time and special relativity.  

To return to Beck, after he makes the case for disenchantment, I found his case for re-enchantment difficult.  Not what he did, but the context in which he writes.  He teaches in Texas.  The book was written after 80% of Evangelicals and nearly as many conservative Catholics voted for a game show host who believes himself entitled to sex with anyone he wants and has no need of forgiveness.  And Beck returned to spiritual health in the company of charismatic believers.  They may, as Beck says, have a grip on the reality of the ministry of the Holy Spirit that other Churches lack, but the charismatic Churches are also the source and propagators of the horrendous prophecies declaring Trump a modern day Cyrus, chosen by God to rescue the Church, and after the 2020 election, charismatic groups more than any other promote the lie that Trump won the election and will be returned to office by God.  The false prophet of Revelation is clearly legion.

Can re-sacralizing spaces help re-enchant the world? It can't hurt.  But I wonder what would have helped the German Christians expelled from Churches in 1935 if they had one Jewish grandparent.  In this world, all spiritual practice exists in a political reality.  Among the first martyrs were those who refused to worship Caesar.  If a Church is enthusiastic about worship and also believes every lie from Trump's mouth (only worship does that) is it a Church.  Reading about the expulsion of the Jewish believers in Holy Week 1935, I wondered if that building and congregation was a Church the following week.  The definition of love that leads to that end is utterly Orwellian.

So here's my letter to Beck.  No answer so far:

Richard,

I am reading your book Hunting Magic Eels at the prompting of a Orthodox Christian friend. We will be discussing it September 9 with a small group that formed beginning with ESL volunteers.  Our first book "Laurus" followed the (imagined) life of a Russian monk and Holy Fool in the 15th Century. We read that book in 2016.  The core of the group is parents with six kids.

That year, I felt increasing dread as the election approached.  I am half Jewish (my father) from a non-religious home.  I became a believer after being blinded by shrapnel in a missile explosion in 1973.  But the Church, the anti-intellectual American Church, has always been difficult for me. The next year, after Charlottesville, the Church became impossible for me.  I left and joined a synagogue.  If Nazis can march in America chanting "Jews will not replace us" and be "fine people" according to the President.   

As I read your book, I am pulled back to Holocaust narratives.  As you can imagine, I was drawn to the stories of Jewish converts expelled from German Churches in 1935. Most were dead by 1945.  There were 400 million people with the label Christian who lived between the Pyrenees and the Urals during the era of the Nazis.  Fewer than one in a thousand actively helped Jews.  

For me, a Christian who cheers Trump echoes Nuremberg.  I was in Europe last month for three weeks visiting death camps.  I have visited ten since 2017.  

If you will allow me the cliche, is re-enchantment of our lives and personal spaces just arranging deck chairs on the Titanic? 

I like your book but cannot shake the larger context of wondering what those German Jewish believers, some going back three generations, would say about re-enchanting their lives when their last days were in death camps.

If the coup had succeeded on January 6, or if the next attempt succeeds in 2024 we will be living in an authoritarian nation. And once tyranny begins, Jews are in trouble.

Neil