[Roger Slater]

As I mentioned on another thread, Mike Juster has "stepped down" (his words on Twitter) from First Things as of May 13th. No reason given.

[Aaron Novick]

Reno apparently thought better of at least some of his dumbfuckery (or someone looking at the accounts thought better of it for him)

https://www.firstthings.com/web-excl.../05/an-apology

[Claudia Gary]

Good for Mike! I knew he’d do the right thing!

[Julie Steiner]

I found Rod Dreher's response of May 15 (after Reno's deletion of his Twitter account, and before Reno's apology on the First Things website) interesting. Some key snippets:

The Trump ascension obviously signaled the diminishment of authority of conservative institutions, including magazines. It’s a confusing time. First Things has tried to seize the Trump moment, clumsily. I realized over the past day, thinking about this current controversy with Reno, that the fear that Reno was making the same mistake that Neuhaus and Weigel did, hitching the magazine too closely to Washington politicians and causes, has been gnawing at me for a long time. Consider, though, how difficult this challenge is facing any editor of First Things: how to be relevant to current debates in public affairs without aligning yourself too closely with a party or politician? It’s even harder when you see yourself as a player, as First Things was from 1990 until the end of the George W. Bush administration. You can’t be a player without picking a team. What if the team captain is Donald Trump? You see the problem. Well, that’s not a problem for some Christians, but the community of intellectual Christians who read and write for First Things are divided sharply in ways that we weren’t in the Neuhaus era.

Touchstone is a very fine magazine, but it is not a “player,” and has never aspired to be. Same with Mere Orthodoxy, Comment, Plough, and other excellent Christian publications whose profile isn’t as high as First Things, because Neuhaus and his times made First Things a player. The biggest player! But the game is over now.

It would be wrong to say that Christians should stop thinking and writing about politics and public affairs, especially in this time of tumult and transition. But the way we think and write about it has to be different, has to be suited to these times, not the past. Neuhaus’s great triumph with First Things came from his aspiration to make it a political player. He succeeded. But it was also his (and the magazine’s) Achilles heel, not only with the Bush administration and the Iraq War, but with the magazine’s identification with the Catholic hierarchy.

I mentioned this morning to a scholar I know, a conservative whose work has appeared in First Things, that I felt bad for being so quick to join the pile-on, though Reno deserved criticism. The scholar replied, “I kind of feel bad too, until I remember that he willingly met with people while he was infected, and then implied that people who take precautions by wearing masks are cowards.” There is that. I fear that Rusty Reno’s coronavirus diaries may one day be viewed as Father Neuhaus’s March 2002 FT piece pronouncing exoneration on Marcial Maciel and the Legion of Christ, in the face of allegations of abuse.

[...Newhaus quote omitted...]

He said that the accusations were “gossip” and “trash.”

[...two more Newhaus quotes omitted...]

But as we discovered later, all of it was true! And worse! In that same long piece, Neuhaus used all his considerable powers of rhetoric to savage the characters of the late Gerald Renner and Jason Berry, the journalists who had done incredible work to expose Maciel. Now, I too was following the case against the Legionaries, and as incredible as the charges seemed, the evidence was far, far more substantive than Neuhaus lets on here. He was animated by his prejudices, and ended up defending a rotten cause, and trashing the names of good reporters who were not as deceived as he was.

The problem with Neuhaus’s piece wasn’t that he defended Maciel. It was still possible at that date to do so, with real effort. The problem was that Neuhaus wound himself up rhetorically to a very high pitch, dismissed all evidence against what he wanted to believe, and portrayed himself as a heroic defender of justice against a pair of hateful journalists who only wanted to tear down the Church. Neuhaus went far beyond reason into the realm of ideology and spitefulness. And it blew up in his face. He honestly could not believe that he could be wrong about this stuff. I know, because in the spring of 2002, I was on the receiving end of several angry phone calls from him, in which he lambasted me for not believing Catholic bishops when they told me there was nothing to these scandals. RJN was no cynic; he was a true believer.

He got away with it because he was Richard John Neuhaus, and had built up a massive amount of social capital. Still, you see where I’m going with this. Reno has spent the pandemic writing strong pieces denouncing those who have a more conventional view of the pandemic’s threat than he does, and trashing the character of those who don’t share his view. The unfortunate tweets from the other night do not stand alone. I don’t know why he did it, though by deleting those tweets and his entire Twitter account, he apparently regrets it. Good. He should. I expect that he will reflect long and hard over the meaning of the institution that it is his privilege to care for, and going forward, resists the siren-song of ideological passions. Giving voice to strong emotions and provocative opinions is the way one can become a player in Trump World; that this state of affairs existed prior to Trump has a lot to do with why Trump is president today. But it’s a temptation to which a magazine like First Things cannot surrender and still remain what it is supposed to be.

The question again is, what does it mean to be a magazine about religion in the public square in a time when religion doesn’t mean as much to people, and the public square is increasingly befouled? Is it even possible to play the game without getting as filthy as the players? Or is the contest really over, and ought traditional Christians, who have been largely eliminated from competition, to be spending more of their time and effort constructing “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness”? I know where I stand. By no means is First Things is obligated to stand with me, but I hope its editorial leadership will take serious the moral and reputational cost of aligning itself with the worst aspects, including temperamental aspects, of Trumpism.

https://www.theamericanconservative....yer-in-a-game/

[Aaron Novick]

This article, on masks, is worth reading:

https://theconversation.com/masks-he...wearing-138507

[Claudia Gary]

Hi Aaron,

Great article. Thanks for posting. This is something I’d consider printing out and posting in a place where neighbors will see it. (Or give to a grocery store manager?)

Claudia

[Julie Steiner]

I should clarify, after having extensively quoted him above, that I vehemently disagree with Rod Dreher on many things.

The final paragraph that I quoted contains a not-very-veiled plug for the thesis of his book The Benedict Option, which promotes a vision of Christian separatism that to me not only seems at odds with Jesus's stated mission to "all people," but also smells suspiciously like white nationalism--especially given the fact that Dreher has been an enthusiastic supporter of right-wing authoritarians with exclusionary and anti-Islamic policies.

Dreher has also repeatedly equated mutually consensual, adult homosexual activity with pedophilia, which can never have fully informed consent. The presence or absence of consent makes homosexuality and pedophilia such obviously different things--even if certain pedophiles' chosen victims are always of the same sex as themselves--that I can't believe anyone could possibly confuse them, unless he or she is determined to portray homosexuals in the worst possible light.

But I think in the article I quoted Dreher is spot-on about the hubris, and about First Things' political influence over the years. The hubris and the obsession with political influence have always been my main problem with First Things, and with Christian conservatism in general (including Dreher's). Jesus did not say, "Go out to all the world and change the laws to impose your version of morality on unwilling people, because that's ever so much more efficient than having to be persuasive when you preach."

[Quincy Lehr]

Rod Dreher has inspired some quality bits from Chapo Trap House, like this:

https://youtu.be/xaXActou0TI

and this:

https://youtu.be/Zk2FRzDSGhs