What I remember from my exposure to theologian Paul Tillich from my growing-up years was his formulation of God as "the Ground of Being." His name occasionally came up at the PCUSA church I attended with my family until the tenth grade (when my parents had had a bellyful of mainline Protestantism's leftward drift). But I never really checked him out.
Historian Charlie Riggs, writing at Hedgehog Review, gets us well acquainted with Tillich.
The short version: He was a horndog in an unhappy open marriage to an atheist, fond of throwing fashionable dinner parties and fostering connections among New York's pretty people, and constantly looking to put a deep-thinker sheen on the sin ("estrangement" in his framing) he seems to have known he'd unavoidably have to account for.
Those who fawned over him were deft at glossing over his, um, inherent contradictions:
Tillich also inspired immense loyalty and admiration among his wide circle of friends, colleagues, and confidantes. Even when they judged his sexual behavior, most agreed that it grew out of his undiscriminating sensuality and his accidental ways—and a certain kind of innocence, even—rather than any predatory instinct. Many of them, moreover, believed that Tillich’s immense gentleness and generosity was inextricably bound up with his darker side—that he represented, in his person, the very ambiguity of human nature that he described in his theology. He found himself recurrently tangled up in “situations.” Langdon Gilkey, one of Tillich’s students and a theologian in his own right, remembered him as
a lovable as well as an awesome man. There was something childlike about him, a hint of vulnerability, of near helplessness, that made even much younger persons, like graduate students or assistants, feel protective about him. He seemed (even if he may not have been) barely able to cope, near at times to panic, subject himself to the terrifying modes of angst of which he spoke with such familiarity…. This vulnerable aspect of Tillich, of course, united with his vast intellectual power and the strange magnetic vitality that emanated from him to give him extraordinary personal presence, a kind of dialectical coincidentia oppositorum which, like the universe of being he reported to us, combined at once dynamics, form, and alienation, in short both depth and mystery. His was a power of personal being that was also accessible, almost “cuddly,” and so a numinous power united with a pathos and comedy that were infinitely attractive.10
One of Tillich’s secretaries remembered him as “a contradictory mixture of sophistication and disarming naivete.”11
Here's an episode that says much about the ridiculousness of the position into which he'd put himself:
Hannah Arendt was also close to Tillich, and he impressed her with this same quality—as well as with something else, a deeper integrity. Hilde Fränkl, Tillich’s mistress and his secretary at Union Theological Seminary, was Arendt’s best friend before Fränkl’s death from cancer in 1950 (and before Mary McCarthy became Arendt’s new best friend). When Fränkl fell seriously ill in the late 1940s, Arendt and Tillich used to trade off keeping vigil in her apartment, which was across the street from the Tillichs’. Years later, after Tillich’s own death, Arendt still remembered how he had conducted himself, particularly noting his devotion to Fränkl at her deathbed. “His behavior—he was married, with all the consequent complications—toward my friend was excellent, so to speak, morally,” she wrote. “We were very close at the time, and I saw him there daily. He made a great impression on me, because I understood that, despite all the possible psychological perversities, which are very foreign to me, he was a Christian, that is, capable of Christian love.”12 The strangeness of this situation—its “wrong shape,” as Tillich put it in a letter of his own to Arendt—is worth emphasizing: a Jewish, atheist philosopher commends her friend for his “Christian love” in evading his wife to care for his mistress who is dying of cancer.13
Here's Riggs on Tillich's use of the term "estrangement":
he use of estrangement was certainly a creative leap on Tillich’s part. The word was not, as Tillich admitted elsewhere, found in scripture.5 Most of the biblical words for sin relate etymologically to recondite facets of premodern life like archery (missing the mark) or travel (straying from the path) or land ownership (trespassing) or animal husbandry (tainted livestock). Estrangement, on the other hand, was a term culled from modern philosophy. The question thus arises: Was Tillich simply substituting his own preferred and somewhat abstract concept—drawn from Marxism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism—in place of a storied and settled usage? Such has been a recurrent complaint against Tillich over the years—and not only on the question of sin. From opposite perspectives, atheists and religious conservatives have accused Tillich of grafting new, fashionable concepts onto traditional religious vocabularies so as to allow those who no longer believe the traditional doctrines to remain in spurious Christian community with those who do. Squeamish about sin? Just mentally substitute the newfangled word estrangement. Do the same thing for God (“the Ground of Being”), Christ (“the New Being”), and faith (“ultimate concern”).
Michael Lind shares some endearing recollections of "Dinners With [Patrick] Moynihan" at American Affairs Journal.
We're now considerably removed from the second half of the twentieth century (an observation that gives away my Boomer identity, no?), so it may be helpful to younger readers to cut to the part of Lind's article in which he summarizes Moynihan's life trajectory and gives us a glimpse into where Moynihan fits in the ideological lay of the land at that time:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927–2003) shared the record with Jacob Javitz for representing New York in the U.S. Senate for four terms (1977 to 2001), until Chuck Schumer set a new record by winning a fifth term in 2022. Moynihan had come a long way from his birthplace in Tulsa, Oklahoma. When his alcoholic father deserted the family, Moynihan as a boy moved to Manhattan with his mother, who tended bar in Hell’s Kitchen, then a heavily Irish American slum. During the Depression, the young Moynihan shined shoes and worked as a longshoreman before attending City College of New York, which charged no tuition.
His service in the Navy during World War II allowed him to attend Tufts University, where he received two undergraduate degrees—one in naval science and one in sociology—and an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy as well as a PhD in history. His education included a Fulbright scholarship to the London School of Economics (LSE). Being a member of New York governor Averell Harriman’s staff led to his marriage to a fellow staffer, Elizabeth Brennan, and to service in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In 1965, as an appointee in the Labor Department, he wrote the still controversial report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Leaving the Johnson administration, he taught at Wesleyan and Harvard, and like many of the liberals who later became known as neoconservatives, he grew increasingly antagonistic toward the radical Left. Still a Democrat, Moynihan joined the Nixon administration as an adviser, and served as U.S. ambassador to India (a post held in the Kennedy years by another eminent liberal intellectual, John Kenneth Galbraith). His time as an eloquent and fiery U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, where he defended the United States and denounced resolutions equating Zionism with racism, made him a celebrity and helped him to win one of the two U.S. Senate seats from New York in 1976.
This kind of impressive cursus honorum is typically achieved by bland careerists with conventional opinions. But Moynihan was a controversial and highly original public intellectual as well as an appointed and elected official at the highest levels, writing books that bear rereading today, including Beyond the Melting Pot, with Nathan Glazer (1963), Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (1969), On the Law of Nations (1990), Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (1994), and Secrecy: The American Experience (1998). While Moynihan admired Woodrow Wilson as a champion of liberal internationalism, he more closely resembled Theodore Roosevelt in his range of intellectual interests—and he shared what Roosevelt’s daughter Alice described as her father’s wish “to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.”
Lind says there was a pattern to the circumstances in which Moynihan would call him up to suggest breaking some bread:
"Lind,” the voice on the phone told me one day in the mid-1990s, “I’ve been talking trash all day with Al D’Amato. Can you meet me tonight for dinner?”
That is how dinners or lunches with Daniel Patrick Moynihan typically came about. My phone would ring and a secretary would tell me, “Please hold for Senator Moynihan.” Then the familiar voice in those familiar clipped tones would say something like the sentence above—or, to use an example from another occasion: “Michael, I’ve been listening to Donna Shalala [Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Health and Human Services] testify all morning and I need a break. Can you meet me at two o’clock?”
Why would he call Lind in particular?
From 1991 until his death in 2003, Daniel Patrick Moynihan invited me to dinner with him once or twice a year. He never invited anyone else on these occasions and never discussed anything personal. He wanted an intellectual sparring partner, I came to realize, and I did what I could to carry out that demanding assignment.
I look forward to Fridays, when Ben Sears posts his weekly POETS! Day installment at Ordinary Times. He has one of those writing styles in which he takes his sweet time over several paragraphs setting the table for a look at the poet he's featuring. Here's how he approached Amy Clampitt yesterday:
I’m not feeling terribly Christian at the moment.
My grumpy old man mood began when The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 2 caused a trip inside for a comparison with my high school copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. I was very comfortably reading in my backyard and the need for comparison annoyed me to no end.
I needed to check some of the footnotes in my high school book. Not a specific footnote; any would do. I flipped to The Canturbury Tales. “The holy blissful martyr for to seeke” with a superscript seven after martyr led the reader to “7. St. Thomas a Becket, murdered in Canturbury Cathedral in 1170.”
That was helpful. I’m eight hundred and fifty years removed from that last breath and just over six hundred from when Chaucer would assume that if he said “holy blissful martyr” the reader would think “Becket.” Without the footnote I might confuse Chaucer’s martyr with Spenser’s “And holy Martyrs often doen to dye,” which I’m kindly informed by Norton’s means “1. Probably a reference to Herod’s massacre of the Innocents (Matthew 2.16), traditionally viewed as the first martyrs for Christ.” Helpful stuff.
What sent me looking was a footnote I read in the Anthology of Modern and Contemporary. In Amy Clampitt’s “Hispaniola” there’s the line “brought to Alexander” with a little four after Alexander. “4. Macedonian emperor (365-323 B.C.E.).” I was so staggered by the apparent state of education that I didn’t bother rolling my eyes at B.C.E.
I like anthologies. Not as an end. Books put out by poets are almost always better than collections or anthologies for the same reason that albums are better than greatest hits. But anthologies are great for – I so badly want to write “poetaster” – sampling before you buy. A few Plath poems leads to reading Ariel, a few Rossetti Poems leads to reading Goblin Market and Other Poems, etc.. They work kinda like a shopping center where an anchor store like Walmart draws people in and Applebee’s plus a few CPAP shops benefit from the traffic. Feature Eliot and Auden and fill in with contemporaries most people would never otherwise come across. That’s how I found Amy Clampitt yesterday.
The downside to anthologies is dealing with Millicent. If you’re not familiar with her, Millicent is a recent liberal arts graduate whose podiatrist father and intellectual property lawyer mother, fearing having her laying around the house for another few years, called in a few favors and set her up with a non-taxing but interesting sounding, at least to the parent’s inquiring friends at the country club, internship in the publishing industry in New York. Last night, like every night, she stumbled into her apartment at 3 am, full of apple martinis and the cratering aftermath of too many energizing trips to the bathroom. By 9, she’s at her work desk groggily snarling her way through the pile of unsolicited submissions her bosses deemed unimportant enough to entrust to her. Or something like that.
Millicent is the creation of Anne Mini at Anne Mini’s Blog, but the character has taken on a life of her own in the minds of some (see above.) She’s the boogey man. A noise in the dark. A fiend writers use to scare their children: “Be good or Millicent will get you.” Mini’s blog is a great source of information about getting published. Writers need to write well, invent wonderful stories, be clever, be original, and all the stuff your high school English teacher who elongated the vowels in “transcendentalists” told you good writers do. But none of that matters if you can’t do the most important thing: Get past Millicent.
The Millicent that haunts me does side jobs writing copy; all the small descriptors and blurbs that are important to a publication but get done by underlings because they don’t make people want to have sex with the author. I learned to spot intern writing when I was employed as a wine buyer. I read a lot of reviews. If a red scored less than 90 the descriptions that followed contained “Bouquet”, “flinty”, “hints of”, “cassis”, “bold”, “malolactic”, and the like in no set order. Put words in a bag, shake, and give to the intern to type up.
I saw Millicent’s hand in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Vol 2introduction to Amy Clampitt.
I read outside of Norton’s. Clampitt didn’t publish until her fifties. In 1974, she released Multides, Multides and became a regular poetic voice in The New Yorker but it was the publication of The Kingfisher in 1983 fixed her as an important voice in American poetry.
I’ve only read a sampling from her body of work, but I can see a few themes in her writing. Millicent says “Her poems often evoke complex resemblances between seemingly incongruous subjects.” That’s true. Clampitt uses metaphors.
In “Beethoven, Opus 111” she compares the composer writing music he strains to hear to her father working towards something he might never realize. Her father,
driving somewhere in Kansas or Colarado,
in dustbowl country, stopped the car
to dig up by the roots a flower
he’d never seen before – a kind
of prickly poppy most likely, its luminousness
wounding the blank plains like desire.
He mentioned in a letter the disappointment
of his having hoped in might transplant –
an episode that brings me near tears,
still, even as his dying does not –
She continues with the “seemingly incongruous subjects,”
Beethoven, shut up with the four walls
of his deafness, rehearsing the unhearable
semplice e cantabile, somehow reconstituting
the blister shirt of the intolerable
into these shakes and triplets, a hurrying
into flowering along fencerows: dying,
for my father, came to be like that
finally – in its messages the levitation
of serenity, as though the spirit might
aspire, in its last act.
In “The Kingfisher,” the titular poem from her breakout book, she writes,
Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard
through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird
reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.
At Public Discourse, sociologist Mark Regnerus examines "What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means":
. . . there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).
Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.
This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.
Just this morning, via Substack Notes (a social-media platform for Substack writers, where I'm making the acquaintance of some lively minds), I got turned on to a guy who has only written three posts so far, but they're so good that I've subscribed in anticipation of more. The Blue Scholar will be the repository of observations from Nathaniel Marshall, a guy from a family of tradesmen who was about as handy growing up as - well, me. He did this and that for a living, but, with his pastor serving as a catalyst, wound up becoming a plumber. I'll let him tell the story in his post "The Work Begins":
I am, by trade, a plumber. I currently serve as a full-time plumbing instructor for my employer’s trade academy, the same employer I began with in June of 2015, long before our academy existed. Through my time in the field as a residential service plumber, my time in our office at various levels of management, and now as someone privileged to pass on knowledge of this trade to those who have quite literally never seen a pair of pliers before, I’ve had opportunities to think about what work means and that pretty much sums up the essence of The Blue Scholar: exploring the meaning of work, primarily and especially (but not exclusively) manual labor.
I’m writing this post from the comfort of a local Irish pub on a computer covered in stickers that read things like “Cubicles Suck”, “Sausage Fingers Club”, and “Dirty Hands, Clean Money”. I don’t think you could have convinced me ten years ago that one day you’d find me either in a pub or with those particular stickers unironically stuck to my laptop, but here we are. There’s a lot about my life that has been unexpected, but perhaps nothing more unexpected than the discovery that plumbing has taken on a meaning for me that is in some way foundational to my identity, a meaning that penetrates – and this is no exaggeration – to every facet of my being. My moral faculties, the way I move through space and time, my emotions, my thought life, my relationship to my neighbors, my ability to support my family, my hopes for the future, my religious sensibilities, my place in the wider community and society, my achy back and the scarred-up hands to which my sausage fingers find themselves attached: nothing in my life remains untouched by labor.
And this inclusive scope, this comprehensive integration of my whole being, this near-exhaustive influence on how I exist in the world, hasn’t yet ceased to fascinate me. I don’t know that it ever will.
A few months ago I found myself looking not just for books on work, but for more formal reviews of those texts. I know that as a plumber who thinks about his work with philosophical, theological, economic, social, and political lenses, I’m a bit of an odd duck, but I had assumed that the internet’s capacity to aggregate those with niche perspectives into networks that would otherwise not exist in the non-digital world due to their rarity in a given geographic radius would have done its work and led to the creation of a website with these kinds of thoughtful reviews. Reviews of books and essays from the perspective of reflective tradespeople must certainly be out there, mustn’t they?!
Apparently not.
“Well,” I thought, “if such a website doesn’t exist, then maybe I should make it. But what to call it?” A number of names presented themselves to me, but most came across as too long, too forgettable, or else almost abhorrently (and unintentionally) elitest. It was my younger brother, a welder, who said to me, “Dude, it’s sitting right in front of us: blue collar scholar.”
“BLUE SCHOLAR,” I responded in all caps. Brilliant. Since “collar” is said when pronouncing “scholar”, I felt I could get away with removing “collar” from between “blue” and “scholar” while still getting the point across in a pithy, poignant way.
Speaking of Substack, I have some recent posts at Precipice.
Yesterday, I was motivated by the three Supreme Court rulings of the last few days - the ones having to do with affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and providing wedding services for same-sex couples - to take an in-depth look at rights - how the human species honed in on a common understanding of what they are, and what, by definition, they can't be.
My June 20th post is entitled "Expressing Faith Without Insipid Platitudes," in which I posit that apologetics has to be a strong component in Christians' mounting of a persuasive explanation of what they believe.
