How Odd/Of God
Novak, Michael & Waugh, Alexander & Crocker, H.W. III
BOOKS IN REVIEW like September 11, early on their successor's watch. From the vantage of that catastrophe, Clinton's inaction in responding to the January 1993 Trade Center attack and...
...Or take away Nixon's credit for going to China because it was politically popular...
...For spending to be cut, you need the White House as well...
...Lowry justly lays at Clinton's doorstep the complaisance and lack of focus which animated the Administration's foreign policy...
...But he neglects to credit either Bush's tax hike of the early '90s or Clinton's in his first two years in office with cutting the deficit...
...In response to one impertinent question, the school chaplain assigned Alexander a 1,000 word essay on the topic, "Education is all that is left behind when you have forgotten what you have learned...
...His ideologically driven orthodoxy here belies the accuracy and objectivity of his penetrating analysis of Clinton's failings abroad and in personal behavior...
...Chapter three begins "Origen severed his genitals...
...The consuming tragedy of the Clinton administration is the story of how a man's personal shortcomings his addiction—grew and grew and grew until, like the cancer it was, it choked off all that was once healthy in his character...
...The balanced budget...
...We have ignored the faith(s) of the founders, an "indispensable" part of the narrative...
...The fact that he did so little in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, and only tepidly acted against bin Laden even after the Riyadh, the USS Cole and the American embassy bombings, will undoubtedly stand out as his signal failures...
...An interesting point but one that may undermine the whole reason for writing the book...
...He makes the best case that I've seen that Constantine's theology is what we would come to know as orthodox...
...But so what...
...Crocker III, is, as advertised, much more straightforward in its approach...
...I'll say...
...Unlike his father Evelyn, Bron was not particularly devout...
...But his legacy lies spattered in the mud...
...Chock it up to a convert's wariness, perhaps, but cradle Catholic Michael Novak's new book, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, is a much more ecumenical experience...
...The approach Waugh takes to the subject is blatantly conflationist...
...Each section advances a specific point...
...From the vantage of that catastrophe, Clinton's inaction in responding to the January 1993 Trade Center attack and his failure to take serious anti-terror measures looms so large as to overshadow other aspects of his legacy...
...In the introduction, his son Alexander explains that he had a draft ready to send Jeremy Lott is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...Often," he writes, "when we think we are learning important and interesting things about God, we are actually focusing on something entirely different—in this case the contrariness of a handful of ancient Jewish priests...
...That's true...
...This is a good model, as far as it goes, but the Church has often veered dangerously close to Charybdis...
...Is George W. Bush not to be honored for invading Iraq because it was the politically popular thing to do...
...He doggedly hugs the GOP party line in denying Clinton credit for anything...
...Welfare Reform...
...If that sounds dull, it's not...
...One is reminded of Oscar Wilde's line, "If a man habitually yields to a temptation, he will one day go much farther than he ever intended and be punished much more than he ever deserved...
...Crocker quotes the great Wilde bon mot: "The Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone...
...Crocker decided to ditch the usual nuanced explanation of Church-state relations for a full throated defense of Constantine, a hard man for hard times...
...that his involvement in the Church was much more than a power play...
...Crime reduction...
...But he is less convincing in downplaying the addition of 50,000 to 100,000 new police to the national police population of 500,000 in cutting crime...
...Congress is, in any case, only half of our system...
...With each deception and every act of perjury, intimidation, obstruction, and cover-up, Clinton felt more empowered to take bolder risks and act with more brazen disregard of societal norms...
...Some do so by relaying very British jokes, others are stand alone quotes from inspired sources...
...That this occurred in a nation of goyim has got to rank as one of history's great ironies: God's most endearing joke yet...
...As a result of this borrowing, "the language of Judaism came to be the central language of the American metaphysic—the unspoken background to a special American vision of nature, history, and the destiny of the human race...
...yes, some important theological innovations occurred under him, but God often works in mysterious ways...
...And what it does have to say, says Novak, "relies for its plausibility on the rich and complex experience of nation-building already described in the Jewish Testament...
...Eventually, what began as a defect in his character came to overshadow all else...
...He read the Bible with Apocrypha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the texts of Nag Hammadi, the Koran, mystic Jewish and Christian literature, and anything else he could get his hands on that seriously wrestled with the question of God...
...The cover of God is a stunner—William Blake's portrait of the Almighty crouching in front of the moon, with clouds in the back and foreground, a flowing gray beard, and lightning bolts leaping from his split finger tips, all set against a stark black backdrop— so impressive that I couldn't take my eyes off of it at the bookstore, and simply had to buy it...
...If God can't be got at through revelation, if human participation in the process renders it moot or functionally unreliable, then that leaves, at best, the possibility of natural inquiry...
...In the process of bringing America's religious traditions to the fore, he breathes new life into that concept that is often mocked: a "Judeo-Christian" heritage...
...Lowry dismisses gun control, perhaps rightly, as causal...
...By neglecting the impact of more cops and more prisons on crime reduction, Lowry is as disingenuous as liberals who ignore the growing prison population as a factor in the dropping crime rate...
...Crocker III (Three Rivers Press, 512 pages, $17.95) On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding by Michael Novak (Encounter Books, 266 pages, $16.95) Reviewed by Jeremy Lott IN THE UK, A MAJOR SELLING POINT OF GOD was that the late Auberon Waugh tried to keep you from reading this book...
...G IVEN THE GLOWING TREATMENT of Constantine, of all people, I was a bit surprised to see the lack of sympathy evinced for Protestants in Triumph...
...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 BOOKS IN REVIEW Crocker, a convert from Anglicanism, constructs a dialectic in which the Church consistently avoids the Scylla of rigorist separatism and the Charybdis of selling out to the cultures in which it takes root...
...Alexander relates this story to readers more out of a sense of curiosity than malice...
...The flip, breezy tone of the book makes it more readable and deceptively honest on the one hand and more likely to be dismissed on the other...
...Most scholars of religion will reflexively object to the methods of this book, and they have a point: religions, like languages, are specific and quirky things, and usually incompatible...
...Bill Clinton never served a day in jail for his perjury nor did he pay much of a fine...
...Novak, who has forgotten more about the founders than any 20 men picked at random from the Harvard phone book know, explains that American Christians of the seventeenth century built most of their arguments about political life upon the experience of the "Jewish [e.g., Old] Testament...
...Evelyn might have gotten a kick out of that, but his grandson was spurred on to "pursue my own lines of inquiry" into things religious...
...I had previously thought the idea a recent invention, contrived in the '70s and early '80s by religious conservatives to help fend off the secularists, but now I'm not so sure...
...Lowry dismisses it, saying that Clinton only signed the Republican bill because I warned him that he'd lose if he didn't...
...Are we only to allow presidents credit for their achievements if they were acts of courage as well...
...Lowry rightly claims that credit is due to the Gingrich-inspired spending cuts of the era...
...The first sentence of the first chapter announces, "In one key respect, the story of the United States that has been told for the last one hundred years is wrong...
...However, once he returns to domestic issues, Lowry is on weaker ground in attacking Clinton's legacy...
...DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 BOOKS IN REVIEW to the publisher when "Bron" arrived, checkbook in hand, and offered to pay him the amount of the advance if only he would agree not to go ahead with it...
...DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...
...Further, though some holy books lay claim to more inspiration than others, they are still, at some level, the products of human hands...
...He did send Alexander to parochial school, however, and the young Waugh's appetite was whetted but far from sated...
...Protestant critics in the past tended to draw attention to emperor Constantine's toleration of/entanglement with Christianity...
...After he renounced the one true faith over post-Vatican H innovations, he played his own religiosity close to the vest and didn't attempt to instill any sense of devotion in his children...
...For respectable people the Anglican Church will do...
...JiNew In Papethadli How Odd/Of God God by Alexander Waugh (Headline, 352 pages, £7.99) Wiumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church: A 2,000-Year History by H.W...
...But Lowry's efforts fall short in analyzing the motivations of the expresident...
...Do we deny FDR his due because he was forced to go to war by Pearl Harbor...
...However, the contents are not nearly as compelling as the dust jacket...
...At one point, while discussing the dietary laws of ancient Israel, and what the Almighty could have been thinking, Waugh does the literary equivalent of throwing up his hands...
...Nor does he give any credit to the massive prison construction in the 1994 anti-crime act which made it possible for long sentences to double the prison population and halve the crime rate...
...To combine the Muslim, Catholic, and Gnostic conceptions of God is as likely to produce a blurry, confusing, incomprehensible image as a more complete one (for proof, pick up any B'ahai pamphlet...
...The seven chapters are further subdivided into 257 continuously numbered sections...
...That does not, however, make it any less audacious...
...The Church's defenders have usually rebutted these charges with a ready-made list of yes-buts: yes, Constantine tolerated Christians, but he wasn't baptized till on his deathbed...
...The fact that Clinton acted in partnership, albeit heated, with the Republicans in eliminating the deficit in no way should diminish the historic nature of their joint accomplishment...
...Also, note that the New Testament says surprisingly little about politics that is not already present in the Old...
...He explains that he tried to show "from as many angles as possible" that "God is the most perplexing and yet compelling figure in human history," but he only really proves the perplexing part...
...As for the fact that Constantine executed several relatives and converted only when his life was spent, well, no one's perfect, and leaders often have to do unpleasant, un-Christian things...
...Punished...
...TRIUMPH: The Power and Glory of the Catholic Church, by Regnery mainstay H.W...
...and that the Nicene Creed might not have become nearly so popular without the emperor's approval...
...Triumph is a popular history of the Catholic Church with a polemical intent—that is, to make the case that the Church was created by Christ and preserved by God against error, often in spite of itself...
...The language of the Hebrew Bible— "lingua franca for the founding generation"—was preferred to avoid charges of partisanship and to dodge the issue of doctrinal disagreements among the sects of the New World...
...still others make historical claims and arguments but usually find some way to leaven the material with that famous Waugh sense of the absurd (e.g., the section on Jesus' paternity has Lady Wisdom cross-examining God and declaring a mistrial...
...yes, he did intrude himself on the affairs of the Church, but bishops often stood against him and his successors...
...But science isn't willing to pursue metaphysical speculation and most believers, along with Pascal, trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—or the local cultural equivalent thereof—not the God of philosophers, theoreticians, or cheeky British scribblers...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
