Congratulations to Rory McIlroy, winner of last week's Masters tournament. The Irish golfer actually led by five on the back nine before a series of bogeys nearly took him out. The win earned McIlroy a rare Grand Slam and marks one of the greatest comebacks of all time.
Speaking of amazing comebacks, George Weigel reviews Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church by Philip Shenon.
"When a book’s dust jacket describes its author as an 'award-winning investigative reporter' and the author begins by describing his work as 'an investigative history of the modern Roman Catholic Church,' readers might expect that, by the end of the book, something strikingly new would have been revealed. But in this case (to borrow from Richard M. Nixon) 'That would be wrong.' For Philip Shenon gives the game away two sentences later when he defines 'the battle for the soul of the church' in these terms: 'It pits Catholics desperate for a more tolerant church—one, that in the words of Pope John [XXIII], dispenses the medicine of mercy instead of severity—against those who see that vision as heresy.'"
"Right.
"How Shenon came to that conclusion—the Platonic form of the New York Times’s view of the Catholic Church—is clarified in the book’s Acknowledgments where, after claiming the Catholic Church is more 'secretive' than the Mossad, authorial thanks are rendered to a Who’s Who of the Catholic Left, living and dead. At the end of an extensive list of those who wrote books of papal history (12 of the 14 being firmly on the portside of things Catholic), the author gives a nod to my 'deeply researched biographies of John Paul II'—after proffering a trigger warning that 'I … fundamentally disagree with the views of the author George Weigel.' And while I’m mildly gratified that Philip Shenon thinks my books 'important additions to [his] library,' that seems a low bar to overcome, given some of the fabulists (e.g., Malachi Martin) and progressive spin-doctors (e.g., Austen Ivereigh, the late Richard McBrien, Massimo Faggioli) whose work he evidently found far more agreeable."
"The fundamental flaw in Jesus Wept is the (admittedly agnostic) author’s inability to understand the Catholic Church as both a human institution and a supernatural reality. One wonders if Philip Shenon has ever heard of Hilaire Belloc’s remark about the Church: that an institution run with such 'knavish imbecility' would 'not have lasted a fortnight' were it not a 'work of God.' That fundamental flaw is magnified by Shenon’s inability, or unwillingness, to recognize that the Church he seemingly favors—a Catholicism imitating liberal Protestantism in its embrace of the woke zeitgeist and the polymorphous peculiarities of the sexual revolution—would be, like liberal Protestantism everywhere, doomed. For the consistent sociological evidence, around the world, is that Christian communities with a clear sense of their doctrinal and moral identity and boundaries can thrive under modern and postmodern cultural conditions, while Christian communities whose boundaries become so porous that one cannot tell whether one is 'in' or 'out' wither and die."
In a similar way, Weekend Beacon contributor Tal Fortgang takes on Jonathan Rauch's Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.
"Following their first two presidents, Americans have long recognized there is a public interest in the proliferation of religious piety, as long as it is not coercive and does not interfere with public peace and order. Rauch joins that tradition first by apologizing for his long-ago contributions to the public discourse celebrating Christianity’s apparent demise, and second by arguing—admittedly not as forcefully as he could have, and with pages of asides about Rauch’s disputations with faith—that we need to find a workable balance between a secular liberal state and religious communal flourishing. 'The church’s crisis is not only the church’s business,' he writes. 'It is … indeed my business.' He deserves applause for saying so, and, despite his prolonged efforts to distance himself from Christianity, making it his business in this book to strengthen rather than weaken the church.
"Unfortunately, the answers he offers to all the right questions are wholly inadequate to dealing with what ails religion and stands in the way of secular-religious reconciliation. The inadequacy begins with a questionable survey of the landscape.
"Rejecting the idea that secular culture is to blame for evangelicals’ embrace of the culture wars, Rauch writes that 'the idea of a relentless legal attack on Christianity is fanciful. Never before in American history have the law and the Supreme Court been as protective of religious liberty as they are right now.' One problem with this analysis is that there is more to life than the law. What about American culture? Christians are mocked, demonized, and discriminated against in every elite American institution. That doesn’t make them Jews in 1930s Germany or black Americans under Jim Crow, of course. But bigotry against Christians is alive and socially acceptable today."
"If Rauch won’t say it outright, this Jew will: America would be better off if Christians were more Christian. Not militant, necessarily, but not looking to compromise with liberalism so much as engage it in productive competition. We are parched for a Christian answer to cultural liberalism. We would all benefit from Christians answering the call to share their view of a life well-lived, advocate virtues like forbearance and self-sacrifice in a culture that could use a good deal more of both—and demonstrate that being part of communities that make real demands of you can be just as fulfilling as being 'affirmed' or 'validated' regardless what you do. And we non-Christians should stop feigning offense when our fellow citizens try to show us what they consider the truth. Our Madisonian bargain is that Christians get to preach as loudly as they like, as long as they don’t coerce me into converting or treat me as less of a citizen on account of my remaining Jewish."
Changing tunes, Kara Kennedy reviews Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly.
"Pelly's examination into Spotify starts with a simple question: What happens to music when it becomes not about artistic expression and more about stock prices? And through anonymous interviews, insider gossip, and stories of pissed off Swedes—where the company is headquartered—she concludes the answer to this question is music that is 'just inoffensive enough not to get shut off.' The playlists pushed on us, Pelly explains, are largely centered on mood—Wake Up Happy, A Perfect Day, Feeling Down, Drifting Apart, Sad Beats, Devastating, etc.—and allow the company to flood the listener with cheap, monotonous songs that all sound alike. There are multiple reasons for this, the primary one being 'to collect and sell the data of how we are feeling to advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions.'
"Pelly also alleges a lot of the 'filler' songs that do well under this model aren’t real songs recorded by real people at all. The company, she writes, is 'filling its most popular playlists with stock music attributed to pseudonymous musicians—variously called ghost or fake artists—presumably in an effort to reduce its royalty payouts.' Spotify denies this, and hit back with a statement claiming 'we do not and never have created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists.'
"Pelly’s case is compelling, however. Her findings reveal around 20 songwriters are behind the work of more than 500 'artists,' and that thousands of their songs on Spotify have been streamed millions of times. But according to industry insiders, it is more probably the case that creators have caught wind of these milquetoast tunes getting millions of streams, and they want in on the action. Real creatives no doubt react to the general soundscape around them, Spotified as it is, too, which exacerbates the same effect. They wouldn’t be the first to take advantage of the algorithm. Songs in general are getting shorter because artists are financially incentivized to make them short. Singer Mark Ronson told the Guardian in 2019: 'All your songs have to be under 3:15 because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of "non-complete heard," which sends your Spotify rating down.' Considerations like this sound more like those of a videogamer working on his stats than an artist deep in the process of creative expression."
Time to resurrect my old mix tapes. Speaking of which...