The Public Square
(August/September 1997)


Richard John Neuhaus


Copyright (c) 1997 First Things 75 (August/September 1997): 74-91.

In the Beauty of Holiness

When asked what he most misses since becoming a Roman Catholic, Father George Rutler, a former Anglican, routinely responds, "The liturgy in English." I feel his pain. Most Catholics apparently don’t, having never known the King James Bible or liturgy in the tradition of the Book of Common Prayer. Or, if they do, they exercise heroic patience with a Mass that is linguistically pockmarked with banalities and barbarities. In deciding on the lectionary, the book that contains the biblical lessons, what a shame that after the Second Vatican Council the English-speaking bishops were not ecumenical enough to choose the first Revised Standard Version. The New International Version, now most widely used by Protestants, is also immeasurably superior to the New American Bible now used in the Mass. The Catholic story of Bible translation, it sometimes seems, is from the Vulgate to the vulgar. When challenged by the literate, the biblical and liturgical establishment defends the accuracy of the current translation. Accuracy is very important, but it need not be the enemy of felicity, memorability, and clarity.

Now a committee of American bishops has returned from Rome with permission to introduce what may or may not be new mischief, "moderately inclusive horizontal language." We are assured there will be no meddling with "vertical" language that refers to God, which is heretical, but references to human beings will be gender-nonspecific, which is only philistine. Apart from the liturgical establishment and a relative handful of neophyliacs who persist in confusing progress with change, there is no popular demand for "inclusive" language. On the contrary, the evidence is that a great majority of Catholics—and an even greater majority of Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week—do not favor this innovation. Never mind. As the bishop who until recently headed the U.S. committee on liturgy declared in his valedictory, the People of God will just have to get used to perpetual change.

A very different perspective is offered by the new Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, who is one of the most respected theologians in the Catholic world and was chosen by John Paul II to be chief editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In a recent interview with Our Sunday Visitor, Schönborn said: "To put it in a very blunt way—and I hope I do not sin against charity—I think the whole debate on inclusive language is a short period in a certain phase of modern history which will pass very rapidly. In a few years we will ask ourselves, ‘What was the problem?’ Equal dignity and the difference between male and female—both are revealed truth and both are essential. Of course, man and woman have the same dignity as creatures, as persons. Nevertheless, to banish gender from language means to banish it from revelation. This is simply nonsense." Schönborn adds that "language is not an arbitrary vestment that you can take or leave. It’s not as if the fashion has changed, so we do not wear a certain type of blue jeans any longer. Language, in the biblical understanding, reveals reality."

The adoption of moderate horizontal inclusive fashions in the lectionary is not the end of the world. The bishops who worked this out with Rome feel they have successfully rebuffed zealots here who pressed for more radical changes, and perhaps they have.

But one wonders why the zealots should be setting the agenda in the first place. The bigger question is whether the Catholic Church can regain a sense of worshipping God in the beauty of holiness. This requires a careful reexamination of almost everything done in the last three decades in putting the liturgy into English. There was a time when converts to Catholicism were suspected of succumbing to aestheticism, which is worshipping the holiness of beauty. No more. While there is a dramatic upsurge in the number of adult converts—estimates are 200,000 per year in the U.S. alone—it seems likely that many take the step despite the general liturgical and linguistic slovenliness. Apostolic continuity, doctrinal confidence, and sacramental substance cover a multitude of aesthetic sins.

Archbishop Schönborn again: "In a world full of so much ugliness, liturgy should be a rest for the soul, a repose where the soul can breathe. Beauty is not aestheticism. It is not an aim in itself. It is a glimpse of God’s glory. We shouldn’t stay with the glimpse. I come from Austria where, you know, we have some not-so-bad musicians. On the great feast days, we have a Mass of Mozart or Schubert or Bruckner, and the liturgy is celebrated in our great gothic cathedral, a marvelous space, shining radiantly in morning light. This is really a glimpse of heaven’s glory. This Easter Sunday the cathedral was full as I have never seen it. Thousands of people standing, packed, crowded. Why? Because people are thirsting for beauty and for what they rightly feel is behind beauty: the glory of God revealed to us. Heaven opens in liturgy. Beauty in liturgy costs time, love, care, commitment. We must take time for preparing the liturgy, looking for the beauty of the flowers, the songs, the space, incense, candles. All this has nothing to do with pure aestheticism, but is an expression of love. The faithful feel whether in a church there is a love of God. My experience is that, wherever you have a beautiful liturgy, people come. People are attracted, and rightly. We should not say that this is only a superficial attraction. Beauty is one way to God. It should never be separated from goodness and truth. Beauty without goodness is not beauty; so love for the poor has to be cultivated together with love for beauty—and, of course, with love for truth."

The Two Religions of American Jews

"Most American Jews have two religions, Judaism and Americanism, and you can’t have two religions any more than you can have two hearts or two heads." So writes Adam Garfinkle, executive editor of the National Interest, in the Winter 1996 issue of Conservative Judaism. The American civic religion, says Garfinkle, is based upon contract and has equality as its central dogma, while Judaism is based on revelation and necessary inequalities, not least the difference between Jews and others. "Moreover—and this is the key—contrary to common comfortable assumptions, the demands that both Judaism and Americanism place upon our loyalties are nearly all-encompassing to the extent that their spirits are taken seriously. Both ways of thinking about society are religious in that they depend on belief in certain values, and both generate universalist social visions from those values. Judaism is less concerned with abstract theology than with deeds, and the power of American values is not limited to the public realm but inhabits the heart as well. Name any consequential public policy issue, and both Judaism and Americanism speak to it with passion and fervor."

Those Jews fool themselves who think that America is innocently secular. Secularity is not neutral but creates a vacuum that is filled with the belief system of civic religion. "Most American Jews have two religions the way some men have one wife and one mistress, or some women one husband and one lover. It is a condition that can be managed, learned from, even enjoyed, sometimes for long periods. But it can never be brought to true conciliation." Those who observe Jewish law, or halakhah, have a view of authority that might be described as distinctly un-American. "In traditional Jewish thought, social and political authority lies in the hierarchical organization of society, which forms an interpretive funnel backwards through time to make God’s will knowable and applicable on earth. Individuals are born into a people, and into God’s covenant with that people. They are not free political agents, free to interpret the Torah on ill-defined or ambiguous issues. It is within such a paradigm that the Sanhedrin found its basic meaning centuries ago and that the authority of Talmud and post-talmudic responsa finds its binding force today." In addition, being "the chosen people" makes a real difference. "The Jews do not merge with the nations or convert them. They are, said Balaam in Numbers 23:9, a people destined to live alone. Although Jewish ideas are universalist, traditional Jews see themselves in exclusivist terms, a self-perception that has caused endless confusion and resentment among non-Jews. Jewish apologists like to emphasize the special burdens of this role and point to the costs it has exacted on the Jewish people in history—no doubt all true. But that does not change the basic fact, as even a casual reading of central Jewish texts shows, that Jews have believed themselves special, closer to the Divine than other peoples."

Pluralism Is No Answer

While some Jews think pluralism has solved the problem of being both fully Jewish and fully American, the contrary is indicated in ways both large and small. "They are correct in the sense that the enthronement of cultural pluralism in America gives everyone the right to be different, and the right to feel proud of it. Moreover, we have extended the right to be different from individuals to groups; hence affirmative action and class-action suits. As a result, thanks to various court decisions, it is now much easier for Jews to be Sabbath-observant in a secular environment than it was twenty-five years ago. Nevertheless, any group of Americans that does not eat hot dogs at baseball games, whose athletically precocious children do not play Little League on Saturday mornings, whose kids cannot sleep over at most neighbors’ houses because of concern with kashrut, and who feel strange when sent a Christmas card by oblivious coworkers, is not fully American in the cultural sense that most Americans understand the term."

Jewish difference should make a difference, says Garfinkle. "Does the fact that halakhic Jews—as well as the Amish, Mennonites, and others—choose not to partake in the potential universalism of America make them less culturally American? Yes, it does. Does the primacy of group identity among halakhic Jews clash with the individualist ethos of the American ideal? Yes. And no placing of Holocaust Museums in Washington—at base an attempt to turn a Jewish experience into an American one so that American Jews can pretend that the Jewish parochialism they love and cling to and the American universalism they admire and need do not conflict—can change that."

Among non-halakhic Jews, there are arguments between conservatives, neoconservatives, and liberals, but at bottom they are agreed about their ultimate allegiance to Americanism. "Not all non-halakhic Jews hear the same things from the oracles of American democracy, of course; some are conservative or neoconservative and they argue incessantly. When they do, they sometimes raise the question of who is politically correct in Jewish terms. The real ground of these arguments, however, has little to do with Judaism; at best, it has to do with Jews and Jewish parochial interests (like Israel). Thus, ‘Judaism’ is frequently impressed into the service of the contending sides, but in fact it is the passion of American politics, ideology, and foreign policy that really animates debate. Those both pro and con are engaged with religious energies in a discourse over religious principles, except that the god for whose sake all this is done is not the Holy One, blessed be He, but rather the Republic for which it, the American flag, stands."

Three Ways of Being Jewish

To make aliyah, or return to Israel, is important also to secular Jews who are Zionists. Garfinkle writes, "The Jewish people today is divided into three groups, a phenomenon unique to post-Emancipation times. First are those who define their Jewish peoplehood in halakhic terms, the traditional formula. Second are those Israeli Jews who define their Jewishness in modern and avowedly secular national terms, in secular Zionism. The second group will last at least as long as Israel survives and maybe beyond, and the first group as long as halakhah survives. Third are non-halakhic Jews in the Diaspora, including America. What of those who reject both halakhah and aliyah? On what basis can their Jewishness endure? If one asks them, they will say that one need not make aliyah to be a Zionist and one need not follow halakhah to be a Jew. Despite its popularity among American Jews, this answer makes no sense."

Garfinkle risks treading on some very sensitive toes: "One hates to admit that people like Gore Vidal or Patrick Buchanan are ever right, but those (admittedly few) American Jews who emphasize secular Zionism to define their Jewishness do raise the problem of dual loyalty. It is impossible for people who define their Jewishness solely in modern national terms to explain not emigrating to Israel. As for being a Jew by religion without halakhah, this has been attempted before and the eventual result, with precious few exceptions, has always been the same: failure and assimilation. Taken together, they form a veritable travesty of bad faith." Acknowledging the "optimists" who come up with occasionally hopeful indicators of Judaism’s flourishing in the future, Garfinkle is skeptical. "Jews have the lowest birthrate of any American group, and assimilation through intermarriage now exceeds 45 percent. As a result, Jews now constitute 2.7 percent of the American population whereas thirty years ago they constituted 3.7 percent. According to the June 1991 survey done by the Council of Jewish Federations, 87.5 percent of Jews surveyed said that they would accept the marriage of their child to a non-Jew."

A Grim Prognosis

The only promising and believable future for Judaism is for Jews to be Jews. "Withal, ask any serious historian of Jewish life if Jews would have survived as Jews throughout the centuries of exile without halakhah, and you will be told, ‘probably not.’ Thus, only by assuming that America is not exile (galut) for Jews, but more neutrally ‘Diaspora,’ can we say that dispensing with halakhah carries no danger of cultural extinction. But this assumption, common as it is, is almost certainly mistaken. The American civil religion and the surrounding social ethos have virtually destroyed the power of the Jewish worldview for most American Jews." The prognosis is grim: "It has been nearly two centuries since the Emancipation. In another two, there will probably be no significant non-halakhic Diaspora Jewry in America. Only one thing is delaying this process, and only two things might reverse it. The delaying factor is the State of Israel, which constitutes a focus of Jewish identification outside the normal American cultural context. But the positive association with Israel in the hearts and minds of American Jewry is eroding over time."

The gravamen of Adam Garfinkle’s article is that Jews, especially religious leaders, should stop fooling themselves about what they are doing. "We must speak truthfully about what we find before us. When Reform rabbis choose late-twentieth-century American or Western cultural standards over halakhic ones to render judgment about ordaining homosexuals or women as clergy, or when they officiate at mixed marriages, they are choosing to affirm contemporary American concepts of equality and authority and to reject Jewish ones. They are not reformulating Jewish tradition within a Jewish framework; they are trying to change Jewish tradition and law by substituting an Americanism whose basic principles are antithetical to Jewish ones."

What Garfinkle says about Jews and Judaism can, mutatis mutandis, be applied to the Christian circumstance in America. From a Christian perspective, however, I would make the argument that Christianity is not "antithetical" to the basic principles of Americanism. See, for instance, my recent article "The Liberalism of John Paul II" (May), in which I contend that we can and should reappropriate and revitalize the American liberal tradition. My strong intuition is that such a reappropriation and revitalization is also possible from an authentically Jewish standpoint. As with the arguments of Christians such as Methodist Stanley Hauerwas and Catholic David Schindler, I think Garfinkle’s stark antithesis between Americanism and authentic religion is strategically dead-ended and, in the final analysis, wrong. But of course it is for Jewish thinkers to explain why Garfinkle is wrong. The great contribution of his argument is to underscore that there is a very big problem, which, if not addressed effectively, may well result in the death of Judaism in America.

China: Not By Bread Alone

From time to time, I find myself caught betwixt friends who are strongly disagreeing in public. In this case it is Mr. Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council and Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, and the subject is U.S. policy toward China. Bauer has been leading the forces to deny China most favored nation (MFN) status, and Sirico is the champion of free trade. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fr. Sirico accuses Bauer of ignoring "the difference between urging certain moral ends and using government coercion to bring them about." That is not quite right. Both of them are exercising their prudential judgment regarding which U.S. policy will more likely move China toward democracy and respect for human rights, especially for religious freedom.

Fr. Sirico protests that Bauer is in bed with labor unions and "protectionists," but surely it is in the nature of coalitions that you join with people who might be doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Fr. Sirico asserts, "Economic prosperity through free trade is the most effective distributor of wealth and power, and trade with China is the surest way to break the grip of centralized political power." Well, maybe. The day before the Sirico piece appeared, the WSJ carried an article by its editor, Robert Bartley, that more modestly asserted that we should accept the gamble that free trade would lead to an alleviation of China’s atrocious record on religious and other freedoms. I confess to more than a little skepticism about the dogmatic assurance of "economic conservatives" that free trade = democracy = peace. Many years ago I worked at the Council on Religion and International Affairs and kept on my wall a letter from its founder, Andrew Carnegie, confidently declaring that "the bonds of sacred commerce" between the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany precluded the possibility of war. The letter was written in the summer of 1914.

In any event, when fellow Christians are being persecuted we have an obligation to speak out as effectively as possible, and it is obvious that one effective way of getting China’s attention is to challenge its trade privileges. So I think I’ll stay with Gary Bauer and the Catholic bishops of the U.S. in opposing MFN. Against that position, Fr. Sirico says that the Holy See is moving toward "an official recognition of the Catholic Church on the mainland," presumably meaning the regime-approved patriotic church. Perhaps. Rome has its own fish to fry in international diplomacy. I am not privy to the details of that. I am persuaded that Christians in America have the obligation to make as clear as they can their concern for those who are persecuted, and especially those who are persecuted for the faith.

During the late unlamented cold war, we were told to mute our protest because the question of religious persecution in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was being addressed through "quiet diplomacy." Some of us rejected that argument then, and should reject now the not entirely dissimilar argument that the only effective response to political tyranny is the promotion of economic prosperity. As I am sure Fr. Sirico agrees, fat tyrants are no great improvement, especially when they can persuade or force their subjects to live by bread alone.

Stemming the Epidemic Is Not Enough

The New Republic goes after us again in an editorial called "Obstruction of Justice." "The current wave of judicial bashing," the editors complain, "began in November, when First Things . . . published ‘The End of Democracy?,’ a symposium decrying judicial activism." And now the editors think it has gone far enough; in fact it has gone much too far. Congress is holding up confirmation of appointees to federal judgeships and thus "obstructing justice." "It is disgraceful," we are told, "that the usual voices of responsible conservatism have not found the courage to say publicly what they must know privately: there is no epidemic of liberal judicial activism." In truth, the editors claim, judges have been pulling in their horns, and they cite the upholding of Proposition 209 in California and the (then expected) Supreme Court refusal to find a constitutional right to assisted suicide.

Regrettably, TNR continues to miss the point. The argument is not simply about "judicial activism" but about "the judicial usurpation of politics." It is about government that is not derived from the consent of the governed. Because they are, as presently constituted, political institutions, the courts take fright when challenged and, here and there, temporarily restrain their propensity for making laws. At the moment, the challenge has concentrated the minds of some judges and there may be no "epidemic" of judicial usurpation, but the disease is widespread and entrenched. The search for remedies has hardly begun. The editors of TNR say, "Robert Bork, having recently abandoned his proposal for legislative override of judicial decisions as insufficiently radical, now says he wants to end judicial review entirely." As I understand it, that is not an entirely accurate representation of Bork’s position, but the questions he is pressing are precisely what is needed if we are to hope for anything better than periodic declines in the epidemic of judicial usurpation.

Coming from a different angle, Ernest van den Haag attacks us in National Review. "Where does First Things find the ‘higher law’ it wishes to be adhered to by the Supreme Court? There is only one answer. We need a theocracy as in Iran or Afghanistan. With all its imperfections, I prefer our current system, a secular republic." The editors of National Review, who have been supportive of the First Things initiative, respond by citing the position of constitutional scholar Harry Jaffa "that the Constitution tacitly incorporates the postulates of the Declaration of Independence." "It was not deemed necessary, when the Bill of Rights was argued, to make a case for the fetus or for heterosexual marriage. Dr. van den Haag’s position, though seductive, must be approached with caution. It is, after all, mutatis mutandis, a Nuremberg defense."

I would put it somewhat differently. Van den Haag charged that "First Things advocates a moral reading that finds moral principles in the Constitution which are not in the document. I, too, have moral principles. The first one is: Don’t read into the Constitution things that aren’t there." Although it is certainly not the first of my moral principles, and I hope it is not that for van den Haag, I wholeheartedly agree. The job of judges is to interpret the Constitution accurately, which means to do so in an "originalist" reading that respects what those who wrote and ratified it actually meant. A judge has no business invoking higher law or his own political preferences to make the Constitution say what he thinks it should have said. That is making law, and making law is the legislative prerogative of those who represent the people, who also have the right to amend the Constitution when they deem it necessary. It is not a Nuremberg defense for a judge to limit himself to what the Constitution says. A faithful reading of what the Constitution says, however, must of necessity attend to the moral principles embraced by its authors, including the Declaration’s "We hold these truths . . ."

These debates go on and on, as I was reminded in writing the extended essay, "The Anatomy of a Controversy," for The End of Democracy?, the book. (See the advertisement on page 92.) At first I thought to write a relatively brief piece of about twenty-five pages, until it became obvious that everybody (or so it seems) was getting in on the act. It turns out that the question of judicial usurpation has produced in many quarters a reconsideration of the basics of democratic government, which is all to the good. Even better would be evidence that those in public office are determined to find ways to check an out-of-control judiciary, such evidence being at present in short supply.

The Academic Guild and the Church’s Faith

Meeting in Minneapolis-St Paul, the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) overwhelmingly approved—by a vote of 216 to 22—a report on "Tradition and the Ordination of Women." The week before the vote, Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote: "For members of the CTSA to revisit this teaching at such a late date, when so many other urgent issues face the Church, is more than just disappointing. It will not solve the vocations problem. It creates unnecessary and belated confusion. And it raises questions about the CTSA’s continuing usefulness for the life of the Church. As a bishop, it is certainly my counsel and hope that the CTSA will retire this document as briskly as possible." But of course his counsel and the urgent counsel of others was not heeded.

The CTSA report was couched in terms both academic and deferential to the Church’s teaching authority. Tonalities aside, however, the substantive reality is a rejection of the authority of the Church’s magisterium. Pope John Paul II solemnly declared that the Church is not authorized to ordain women to the presbyterate. In response to an inquiry, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with the express approval of the Pope, said that teaching is infallible. The CTSA disagrees. Rhetorical cautions notwithstanding, it has invited a wide-open debate of the question, and it is no secret that many, perhaps most, of its members strongly favor the ordination of women.

There are many pieces to this development, and it will receive more thorough attention in a forthcoming issue. Suffice it for the moment that the CTSA action will exacerbate confusions, but it does not create a crisis, except for the future of CTSA and the academic guild that it represents. In the words of Archbishop Chaput, "It raises questions about the CTSA’s continuing usefulness for the life of the Church." And it raises questions for the Catholic colleges and universities in which the several hundred members of CTSA teach.

There is considerable disagreement about the criteria to be met for a papal declaration to be infallible. The only undisputed exercise of infallible teaching authority as specified by the First Vatican Council was the definition of the Assumption of Mary in 1950. There can be no disagreement, however, that in deciding what teachings of the Church are infallible, the members of CTSA have substituted their own judgment for the judgment of the Pope and those authorized to speak in his name. In making that substitution, it would seem that CTSA has abdicated any claim to being an ecclesial body with some role, however ill-defined, in the Church’s teaching ministry. The upshot of the CTSA action is that it is now on record that two hundred-plus Catholic teachers of theology in colleges and universities do not agree with what the Pope, the bishops, and unbroken tradition say the Church teaches. At this late date, that will hardly come as news to anybody. The news is that the CTSA as an organization has—its claims to the contrary notwithstanding—withdrawn from the community of ecclesial reflection devoted to ever more clearly expressing and transmitting the Catholic faith, which is perhaps just as well.

President Clinton and the White Race

"E Pluribus Unum." "Out of the one, many," as Vice President Gore translated it. That received some derisive comment, but nothing as compared with Dan Quayle’s adding an "e" to the spelling of potato. Maybe that is because Gore’s blooper was not a blooper. It accurately reflects the policy of this Administration. The term for that policy is multiculturalism—as in David Dinkins’ "gorgeous mosaic," as in the comment of the White House aide who cheerfully announced that by the year 2050 there would be "fifty million Muslims in the United States." As, most notably, in President Clinton’s San Diego commencement speech on race relations.

"Can we become one America in the twenty-first century?" Clinton asked. In answer, he lifted up the state of Hawaii, which "has no majority racial or ethnic group. It is a wonderful place of exuberance and friendship and patriotism." Lest anyone miss the point, he declared more flatly, "A half century from now, when your own grandchildren are in college, there will be no majority race in America." There are several assumptions here. First, that immigration will continue at well over a million per year, and involving mainly nonwhite populations. Second, that the birth rate of immigrants will far exceed that of the native born. Third, that this is inevitable, the American people having no say about it or else having agreed that this would be a good thing. Fourth and most troubling, that the current majority consists of a race called white people.

The polite term for this is racialism. The more common term is racism. Apart from Aryan militia circles, few nonblack, non-Asian, non-Hispanic Americans think of themselves as belonging to the white race. Clinton was criticized by many for not backing up his words in San Diego with an announcement of new policy initiatives. The alarming thing about the speech, however, was the resurrection of the idea of a white race, an idea from the era of Bull Connor that most of us hoped was definitively past. Pitting the "majority race" against nonwhite claimants to justice is a sure formula for exacerbating the tensions that Clinton says he wants to heal. It necessarily involves, among other things, the discredited and profoundly unjust policies of affirmative action and quotas that, not surprisingly, Clinton strongly defended in San Diego.

We have agreed in these pages with those who say we must regain control over immigration policies that are manifestly out of control. We have strongly disagreed when they say that race should be a factor in shaping immigration policies. No good can come from asking the American people, as some say they should be asked, whether they think it is a good idea that fifty years from now a majority of the population should be nonwhite. That is a racialist, if not racist, way of posing the question. Regrettably, albeit from the other side of the immigration debate, that is the way President Clinton has posed the question.

Multiculturalists and the champions of a white majority have in common the aim of raising race-consciousness, and in this they powerfully reinforce one another. To tell the majority of Americans, as Clinton did, that they should "celebrate" the prospect that in fifty years most Americans will not be like them is politically stupid and morally wrong. It is politically stupid because most people think that being like them is a pretty good thing. It is morally wrong because it invites the majority of people to identify themselves by race. The most long-standing and divisive struggle in American history—from abolition through the civil war to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr.—has been to overcome the racial mindset endorsed, however inadvertently, by Bill Clinton. Good arguments can be made for continuing to welcome a large number of immigrants to this country. But does the President really want to frame the public debate in terms of the proposal that a half century from now there will be no majority race in America? One earnestly hopes not.

While We’re At It


Sources: Interview with Archbishop Christoph Schönborn, Our Sunday Visitor, May 18, 1997. Adam Garfinkle, "The Two Religions of American Jews: A Provocation for the Sake of Heaven," Conservative Judaism, Winter 1996. Attacks on First Things for its claims of judicial usurpation, The New Republic, May 19, 1997 and National Review, May 19, 1997. Father Sirico on China, Wall Street Jounal, June 11, 1997. Quotations from President Clinton’s San Diego commencement speech on race relations, New York Times, June 15, 1997.While We’re At It: On Seventh-Day Adventist forum, "What Is a Person? How to Decide Which Lives Are Precious," conference announcement. Fr. Thomas Michel on Muslim-Christian dialogue, National Catholic Register, March 9, 1997. Thomas A. Howard on Jacob Burckhardt, National Interest, Spring 1997. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture reviewed by Midge Decter, Public Interest, Spring 1997. On misuse of $2.3 million Episcopalian trust to support pro-abortion legislation, Washington Times, March 12, 1997. On Americans United, Wall Street Journal, March 20, 1997. Dennis Prager on O. J. Simpson verdicts, Prager Perspective, February 15, 1997. Kenneth Roth on "special pleading" of Freedom House, New York, March 31, 1997; Roth interview in Toronto Star, March 18, 1997. Episcopal bishop Walter C. Righter on ordination of openly gay priest, Sunday News Journal, March 16, 1997. Elizabeth Kastor on priest who died of AIDS, Washington Post, February 23, 1997. David Gelernter op-ed essay on the disaster in Rancho Santa Fe, New York Times, March 30, 1997. David Foster on Christian connection to suicides in Rancho Santa Fe, Rocky Mountain News, March 30, 1997. Leon Wieseltier on Rancho Santa Fe, The New Republic, April 21, 1997. Results of Barna Research Group on "born-again" Christians reported in Focus on the Family’s Pastor’s Weekly Briefing, March 28, 1997. Barry Lynn on rally to keep the Ten Commandments in a Montgomery, Alabama courtroom, press release of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, April 10, 1997. Michiko Kakutani on Norman Mailer, New York Times, April 14, 1997. Gallup poll on religious belief, Emerging Trends, Princeton Religion Research Center, April 1997. Charles A. Hammond on Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, Virginia, letter to the Board of Trustees and personal correspondence. James Lehrberger on Frederick Wilhelmsen, Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1996. Michael Uhlmann on Archbishop Levada, Crisis, March 1997; on press conference about pro-gay legislation in San Francisco, Wanderer, April 17, 1997. On Carl Sagan, Publishers Weekly, May 12, 1997. On the Berrigan brothers, New York Times, May 10, 1997. On amendment to reserve marriage to opposite-sex couples, statement by Hawaii Catholic Conference, April 30, 1997. On the Child Health Insurance and Lower Deficit Act (C.H.I.L.D.), Insight, May 1997. On Israeli Knesset law forbidding religious conversion, Insight, May 1997. William Grimes on Dennis Rodman, New York Times, May 4, 1997. Daniel Goldhagen book Hitler’s Willing Executioners and Richard John Neuhaus review of it criticized in Commonweal, June 6, 1997. Barry Lynn on Randy Tate, press release from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, June 11, 1997.