Introduction to, and rationale for, yet another blog
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April 18, 2020“After one has rendered unto God what is God’s, there is nothing left for Caesar”
Dorothy Day
If you are reading this then it means you are probably bored during the Corona virus lockdown and decided to take a look at yet another blog. Or perhaps you have stumbled upon this by accident while surfing the internet in search of a new supply of Ramen Noodles and hand sanitizer. Some of my former students might be checking this out just to make sure that I am not dead, in which case there will probably be widespread disappointment at the discovery that I am very much alive, and still the curmudgeon that they remember. Of course, some of you are reading this because I posted it on Facebook, which, as we all know, is THE source to go to for truth and reasoned commentary. In any case, welcome to this new venture.
But why another blog? That is a really good question since I have to admit at the outset that I tend not to like blogs, and I am also a bit of a luddite (well, more than a “bit” actually). Indeed, I was very disappointed when I discovered, like Homer Simpson, that the internet is on computers now. I also harbor a special disdain for many of the blogs currently fashionable among traditionalist American Catholics, which is odd since I, like Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, am a traditionalist Catholic myself. But I find most of these traditionalist blogs to be facile and pinched-up enterprises loaded with the lard of theological and historical ignorance. Part of the reason for this is that nobody reads books anymore, least of all traditionalists it seems, and most of these bloggers clearly spend the vast majority of their time online, surfing the internet in order to find materials to blog about. And even here, the topics appear to be chosen based on their clickbait value rather than on their profundity, with an eye toward attracting the internet rubber-neckers who only want to read about the latest ecclesiastical car wrecks. As such they are little more than forums of gossipy Jabberwocky and echo chamber ramblings. It really is a rather lazy form of discourse since it mostly entails looking at the day’s headlines and then commenting on it with a spittle-flecked, Ignatius Reilly, hortatory style. They are thus kind of like the old Jack van Impe bible prophecy shows, only with incense and “I hate Pachamama” emojis.
Now, you might say that all sounds rather judgmental. And it probably is, but I don’t really care. This is my blog and I’ll cry if I want to. I will be offering up many such “judgmental” statements as the blog rolls along and I make no apologies in that regard. And that is because our culture and, to a great extent our Church, has lost its mind. Blunt talk, even biting, satirical, and harsh talk, within the bounds of reason and civility, are needed. Therefore, I want to address and dismiss the issue of “being judgmental” at the very beginning of this endeavor. Because often today what passes for a concern for “judgmentalness” is really just a thinly veiled attempt at muzzling and domesticating the Christian evangel in order to secure the blessings of bourgeois suburbia. Accusing someone of “being judgmental” is one of those weaponized simulacrums of Christian virtue used by the champions of technocratic, secular modernity to silence anyone who is critical of their totalizing and, ironically, judgmental agenda. Which is to say, they use such counterfeit virtues to domesticate Christianity and to turn it into the religious equivalent of an aroma therapy boutique.
And all of this is done with great deception, manipulation, and mendacity, lest we figure out that the end-game the secularists have in view is the reduction of society to what I call a “collective of concupiscence”, the goal of which is the furtherance of an alliance between surveillance Capitalism (thank you Shoshana Zuboff for that phrase), the national security State, and the corporate production of shiny things to delight our senses and to entice us into consuming the honey coated arsenic of a million useless products we have been convinced that we need. The hypocrisy is immense, as we are daily lectured, to cite one example by the fundamentalist, secular prophecy crowd on the coming climate apocalypse, even as they vigorously promote the very technocratic and industrial civilization that created the crisis in the first place - - a crisis that is very real but which will never be solved by doubling-down on yet more technocratic solutions to our tech-induced problems. It is like taking LSD to help me get over my nightmares only to discover a whole new level of haunting phantasms.
So I am going to proceed under the assumption that the world, as Peter Maurin noted, has gone crazy. I am also going to proceed under the assumption that I am right about everything. Because, and I say this with the deepest modesty and humility, I usually am. Therefore, I thought of naming this blog after a favorite book of mine: “My Correct Views on Everything” by Leszek Kolakowski. He was a half-crazed Polish philosopher, and I am half Polish, so I am one quarter crazed, assuming of course that “Polishness” is the mark of insanity that I suspect it is. But in all seriousness, and all joking aside about crazy Poles, this does cut to the heart of why I am starting yet another blog. Namely, that I think I have something worth saying that not many people are saying. I am a bizarre combination of factors: I am a Catholic traditionalist, a theologian and retired theology professor, the owner and manager of a Catholic Worker Farm, a writer, a Romanticist (Romanticism is our only hope by the way), and a selfish blackhole of simmering resentments and not-so-veiled hostilities toward almost everyone. I have also now reached an age (61) where I truly don’t care about such things as my career, reputation, or “standing” in the scholarly community. These days I find most academic writing to be unbearably tedious and, quite frankly, mendacious in a politicized way. In other words, I find most of it, as the Irish say, “pure useless”. And that is not an anti-intellectualist stance. Quite the opposite actually insofar as there is really very little genuine intellect in any of it in the first place. So my blog is not an academic enterprise in the modern sense of that word and seeks instead the recovery of the ancient language of “wisdom”. I hasten here to add that I do not possess such wisdom myself and I am certainly not going to pretend that I do. Indeed, it is my own lack of wisdom, infected as I am with the same bacillus that has driven the modern world insane, that compels me to seek this wisdom elsewhere. And I think that is the same path that was trod by countless others, up to and including Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin.
And, at age 61, I also do not care whether or not I can make a living off of this venture by becoming a clickbait, Catholic YouTube star. I couldn’t anyway, even if I wanted to. I might podcast on YouTube someday, but God save me from descending into the madness I see there among some Catholics. The professional, podcasting Catholic chatterers have a vested financial interest in ginning-up “apocalypse fever”. It is indeed true, of course, that we might be living in apocalyptic times, but these MacBook prophets of doom are no Jeremiahs, and are actually nothing more than the Catholic internet equivalent of a supermarket tabloid. If they could cross Archbishop Vigano with Bigfoot and somehow develop a Pachamama UFO connection, they would complete the circle and strike internet gold. The more successful talking heads even come with a kind of Catholic Art Garfunkel sidekick who is just talented enough to say something coherent, but not so talented as to eclipse the host. But it is really all just carefully crafted to create the echo chamber consensus so needed by these festering cankers to gain legitimacy.
And this is one of the other primary reasons I desire to start a new blog. Because devout, traditionalist Catholics who are true traditionalists are being ill-served by this gaggle of self-appointed Torquemada’s. As I said above, I have reached a stage in life where I really don’t care about things like reputation, money, scholarly standing, or whether or not I am a “player” in the game of ecclesiastical Twister. In other words, I think I have something unique to say and I feel like saying it. I hope it isn’t a mere vanity or conceit on my part to think such things, but it really is not often that you find a Catholic Worker who is also a theological traditionalist with an ability (or so I think) to bring those two worlds together. My motives are therefore focused on that specific agenda - - to recover the hyper-traditionalist Catholic vision of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and to show why it is more relevant today than ever (I will elaborate more on what I mean by that below). If you are even mildly interested in that project, I invite you to read what will probably be my thrice weekly ramblings. If you are not, then you can always find other diversions like quilting or socially distanced Mahjong via Zoom. I think those are your primary alternatives but, admittedly, that list may not be exhaustive.
And so, I decided against calling this blog “My Correct Views on Everything” and chose instead “Seasoned Ukrainian Wood”, which of course requires an explanation. About 15 years ago now, back when I was still a real person, I hosted a summer gathering of my department colleagues from DeSales University on my patio. There was a fire ring next to the patio within which was a Chernobyl level conflagration in full blaze. One of my colleagues observed the intensity of the fire and said that whatever wood I was using must be very well seasoned. I then responded by saying that the wood had just been purchased the day before from a local man with a thick eastern European accent. My exact words were “I think he may have been Ukrainian based on his accent and last name”. Whereupon, my colleague, and all-around scoundrel, Rodney Howsare said “Oh, so this is seasoned Ukrainian wood then?” I laughed and said “Indeed!”. Rodney then opined that should I ever pen my autobiography I should name it “Seasoned Ukrainian Wood: The Life and Times of Larry Scott Chapp”.
I will never write my autobiography owing to the embarrassing levels of stupidity and moral turpitude my life has displayed, but I am starting this blog which will contain, willy-nilly, autobiographical elements. And so, I name my blog “Seasoned Ukrainian Wood” as a homage to the spiritual dimension of the comradery of friendship, which is quite literally the only place where such moments of mirth-generated creativity are birthed. But also, and more specifically, I title this blog as I do as a nod to the importance of that deeper kind of friendship known as the “best friend”. And for me that is Rodney Howsare, centerpiece of the above narrative. I hired Rodney at DeSales during my purgatorial one year stint as undergraduate academic dean, but then upon my return to teaching, worked side by side with him for 15 years as a kind of theological tag team and dog and pony show, which my friend Dr. Bill Portier referred to as the “Larry and Rodney show” (which I am not certain was a compliment). The reason why this is of more than biographical interest is that it was within the crucible of those 15 years that Rodney and I both learned, feeding off of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, that the time for “business as usual” teaching of the faith is over. In other words, in “handing over” (tradition) the faith to this generation, one must first repristinate it, with an eye toward how its breathtaking originality can once again destroy the falsehoods and lies of the world of the libido dominandi. What we discovered is that there is no way to construct the faith in the hearts of modern people until you first deconstruct both the secularist agenda of bourgeois modernity, as well as, and maybe even most especially, the many ways the Church has falsely accommodated itself to it, rendering itself boring - - as indeed all redundancies are. None of this would have been possible for me without Rodney’s capacity for deep humanity, deep faith, deep humor, and deep friendship. And so I name this blog in his honor. Thus, I don’t care if the blog title is nonsensical and idiosyncratically self-referential. Because in truth it is neither of those things. Therefore, Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Finally, you will notice that the blog is merely one part of the web page devoted to our Catholic Worker farm. And that is quite intentional. I dabbled in the mechanics of starting a stand-alone blog but found it faintly disincarnational in the sense of lacking in context. It therefore just seemed rather too free-floating and a bit of a conceit. As I noted above, the only reason why I would start yet another stupid blog is that I want to do something in the blogosphere that has not yet, to my knowledge, been done. Namely, to recover the true Catholic charism of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in all of its radicality as a form of hyper traditionalism. And by “hyper-traditionalism” I don’t mean some uber conservative, Tridentine, restorationism on steroids, but rather as a deep “ressourcement” that transcends the tiresome, moribund, and useless debates between SSPX types (which I think most so-called traditionalist Catholics secretly are) and the sexually obsessed so-called progressive Catholics who are really just a conclusion (“the modern secular Left is correct about sex and gender and the Church is full of crap”) in search of ad hoctheological “arguments”.
But presenting my own views as charting a path “between these two facile and related extremes” can itself be a tiresome exercise in setting up false, straw man polarities and then patting myself on the back for being so sane and rational as to avoid them. I always hate when scholars make this rhetorical move since it is so self-serving and usually masks the fact that the author really does sympathize with one side over the other, but is so enthralled by the faux “objectivity” of the academic world that he or she will not make their commitments plain. Sadly, it is kind of built into the DNA of the system since it is the stock-in-trade of most theological dissertations. So I will be clear where my sympathies reside. Despite my often bitter and harsh criticisms of the Catholic Traditionalists, my sympathies lie with their intuition that the modern world has gone off the rails. I just generally think that they get the solutions wrong insofar as their notion of Tradition is theologically thin, myopic, and is often illegitimately used to support other “right wing” causes which they conflate with “orthodoxy” (e.g. the death penalty, capitalism, war, and the downplaying of the environmental crisis). Therefore, in the end I think they give traditionalism a black eye and end up doing more harm than good. As for the other side of the polarity - - Catholic “progressives” - - they are just a silly embarrassment, like an old man who tries to be “hip” but who is always 25 years behind in his perception of current fashions. I have zero patience for such nonsense, having lived through Catholicism’s post Vatican II silly season as a young man. I mean, there is only so much liturgical dancing by maladroit octogenarians in diaphanous outfits that one can take.
Therefore, when I say Dorothy and Peter represent a deep ressourcement that transcends facile categorization I mean it in a truly decentering way. I propose it as a challenge to all of us to think openly and without guile, with deep honesty and a self-introspection rooted in a constant exposing of our motives to the light provided by the crucified and risen Christ. And I hope, therefore, that I too come to be so decentered as I ponder these things and engage in the actual process of writing. The late, great, Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (on whom I wrote my dissertation) once said that to be “concentric with Christ is to be eccentric to the world”. I forget where he said this, and I am too lazy to look it up. But trust me, he wrote that somewhere. And that is precisely what I seek in my efforts here to explicate the significance of Dorothy and Peter for the modern world.
Hopefully, enough fellow travelers who are also interested in that project will take the time to read. Indeed… to read and even contribute if you are so moved. I invite others to blog in this space as well. Feel free to send me submissions to that end.
One final note and I will end this already too long introduction. Some of the blog posts will be short and mainly meditations on some idea that struck me while engaging in some frivolous, time wasting, dissipation. Other posts will be long and more oriented to a systematic analysis of some issue that I have deemed to be more important than it probably is. Which is to say, you probably won’t read them, but they will be posted all the same and stand as eloquent testimony to my having kissed the Blarney Stone. But whatever the length, all of the posts will be pure genius and worthy of a Pulitzer. If, after reading a few of the posts, you disagree with that assessment and decide to read no more of my deep thoughts then … well … there is always quilting and Mahjong.
Salud and cin-cin