On November 10, 1775, 230 years ago, the Continental Congress authorized the formation of two battalions of Marines. Tradition says that the earliest recruiting of Marines took place at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, owned by Robert Mullan, who later became a Continental Marine officer. The Marines' first operation was a raid on a British base in the Bahamas. As I like to say, the Marine Corps was formed in a bar and then immediately went on a Caribbean cruise.
The Marine Corps has the reputation of being one of the finest fighting organizations in history. In his wonderful book First to Fight, Lt. Gen. Victor H. "Brute" Krulak recounts a discussion he had early in his distinguished career with a senior Marine NCO. To Krulak's query about how the Marines had come by their reputation, the old Gunny replied, "Well, lieutenant, they started right out telling everybody how great they were. Pretty soon they got to believing it themselves. And they have been busy ever since proving they were right."
...Yet what set of values can energize the French and other Europeans to reclaim their culture? It is said that you can’t fight something with nothing, and now that it is under fire, secular hedonism seems, in effect, to be fairly close to nothing. In this connection, a small but indicative detail emerging from this conference has remained in my mind. One of the presenters, a British sociologist who has done extensive polling on religion and religious identity across Europe, discovered that a significant number of the French (somewhere around 10 percent, as I recall) insist upon identifying themselves both as atheists and as Catholics. How to explain this? I doubt they are “Santayana Catholics,” who embrace the rituals and symbolism as a form of poetry, while rejecting the faith itself. The speaker himself said that he believes these Frenchmen were using “Catholic” as a passive cultural (or, in more Huntingtonian terms, civilizational) identity marker. In other words, it was a convenient (and not entirely socially unacceptable) way of saying “I am European, white, and not a Muslim.”
To say “Christian” apparently would imply positive belief in a way that they aren't willing to do. Thus, “Catholic,” to them, is not so demanding as a moniker. But somehow I think this is likely to be just a way station for them, and I greatly fear it's more on the way to being “white” than anything else. Such cultural use of religious markers tends to mangle and degrade the religion they batten upon. I’m reminded of the famous joke about the Irish terrorist who grabs an unsuspecting fellow, hauls him into an alley, and demands at knifepoint to know whether he is a Protestant or a Catholic. The man calmly replies, “Actually, I’m an atheist.” Impatient with such fine points, the mugger insists, “Are ye a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?” The joke is, of course, no joke at all.
Jimmy Carter's 20th book is a tedious meditation about the appropriate uses of moral values in political life--as wisely and humbly exemplified by Himself--and of their misuses under the current Bush administration.
But tedious isn't quite the right word here, because it suggests mere boredom while Mr. Carter's prose manages to be irritating as well. Is there an English-language equivalent to the German Rechthaberei, which loosely translates as the state of thinking and behaving as if you're in the right and everyone else is in the wrong? Yet even such a term doesn't quite capture the sanctimony, the self-congratulation, the humorlessness, the convenient factual omissions and the passive-aggressive quirks that characterize our 39th president's aggressively passive world view. Mr. Carter is sui generis. He deserves his own word.
Everything about "Our Endangered Values" is wrong, beginning, obviously, with the title. The values Mr. Carter says are "ours" are certainly not mine and probably not yours and therefore, necessarily, not ours. In fact, it is not at all obvious that the things Mr. Carter speaks of even qualify as values, properly speaking, unless you believe that "economic justice" is a value, or you subscribe to Marxist liberation theology (Mr. Carter considers the Catholic priests who practiced this theology to be "heroes"), or you would like to pay your "personal respects" to Syria's dictator (never mind that he just had the prime minister of Lebanon assassinated), or you can think of nothing bad to say about Saddam Hussein except, perhaps, that he is "obnoxious."
El Salvador was destroyed by 13 years of unremitting violence. Every Salvadoran family had to mourn the loss of at least one of its members. One third of the population fled to neighboring countries. Its infrastructure was devastated, with no resources to reconstruct itself, and more than half of its population lived under the poverty line. At the end of the war in 1992, El Salvador seemed hopeless...
I say hopeless in a literal sense. At the beginning of the war, El Salvador was a deeply Catholic country. However, led by revolutionary priests beginning in the 1970s, important sectors of the Church embraced liberation theology. The Bible was read as a political program that justified armed insurgency. Christ’s teachings were used to justify terrorism.As they sought the protection of the Church in their need for spiritual comfort, our campesino families found that the pulpit had become one more source of violence. They were asked to hate, and told to act violently.
They did neither. These campesinos searched for Christ’s teachings elsewhere. I remember them walking through the narrow pathways of our mountains in those terrible days. The men wore long sleeved white shirts and black trousers, the women long skirts and their hair under white veils. If the guerrillas or the army stopped them, these humble people held a Bible up to the gun barrels that were pointed at them. They were courageous in their silence and though greatly vulnerable, they were immensely dignified. Never in my life have I been prouder to be a Salvadoran.
Despite its foreboding title and evident academic audience, von Glahn's treatment of Chinese religion offers a wealth of information and insight to general readers as well as to students of Chinese culture. To explain the rise and transformation of one prominent cult--that of Wutong, a precursor to the smiling face we see today--the author ranges widely throughout Chinese history. The end product is a general overview of popular Chinese religion from earliest times to the present.
After a succinct and critical review of recent theories of traditional Chinese religion, von Glahn traces the development of Chinese "vernacular" religion from the Shang Dynasty up to the 20th century. Such a survey complements the usual treatments, which neatly separate Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and "popular" beliefs and practices.
In particular, von Glahn traces the vicissitudes of what he terms "the sinister way." This menacing phrase refers to the "dark side" of Chinese religion. While some objects of worship, such as the Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin), represent nothing but benignity and kindness, others, such as Wutong, display a propensity for malice.
