secularization, Hemingway, and The Simpsons

I anticipate getting a few emails about my column in today’s Journal. I really hope people don’t think I’m an irrelegious grouch. I’m really not. I just think there’s an awful lot of intellectually dishonest talk out there in the conservative Christian media about how religious our Founding Fathers were. I just don’t buy it. Look at Thomas Jefferson, my favorite of the FF’s.  A man completely in love with all things French, especially revolutionary ideas. The whole thrust of the French Revolution was the ascendancy of reason and science over old forms of authority – authority which especially meant religion and the church.

I don’t see how anybody can claim to read history objectively and not agree with that.

I’m not saying that I completely agree with the whole thrust of the French Revolution. It went pretty far off the tracks eventually. Still, the ideas of science, reason, democracy, egalitarianism – all of it – were the ideas that Jefferson and others took to heart in building this country. They were trying to get away from Christendom, a Christian theocracy , the old world, authority based on religious ideas. They were doing something totally new and I’m convinced that what they envisioned was a secular world where religion is welcome but private.

So, I hope people understand me on this one. I’m a devout Catholic. I love my church and I love God and my brothers and sisters. I’m not an atheist. For the record. I just don’t drink the Kool Aid when it comes to insisting that the FF’s were all a bunch of evangelicals who meant to build a Christian theocracy.

And, as always, I don’t mind if folks disagree with me. I have a number of close friends and colleagues, sources on whom I rely regularly, who strongly disagree with me. Fine. God bless them. They’re entitled to their opinions and I love them for it. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Still, as far as FOCA, well, at least Pat Robertson and I can agree on something

So, on to another subject.

Friday, like a good Catholic boy, I was stuffing my mouth wtih catfish and greens, staring at the Lee County Courthouse when my good friend the Rev. Jimmy Barnes of St. Paul UM sneaked up behind me and told me he’s trying to get together seven pastors for a servivce on Holy Thursday at his church. I think this is a great idea and I’d like to help him promote it when he makes more plans.

This weekend I have  few projects. First, fix this slow leak in my roof that’s been worrying me for about two weeks. It’s right above my favorite reading spot on the sofa, an expanding, brown ring that’s growing like infection across the candlelight paint on my ceiling. I’m not really up to the job but maybe I can fumble my way through it.

Tonight, I’m reading Ernest Hemingway’s last book, published posthumously, “True and First Light.” I skulked around the fiction section of the Lee County Library today on my lunch hour. My friend Jan Willis looked happily content in his office, behind that Tiffany lamp, so I didn’t go over and bother him. I picked up a new James Lee Burke audiobook, and Tom Wolfe’s “Hooking Up,” which I’m not too enthusiastic about but I liked “I Am Charolette Simons” so I’ll give this a try.

My favorite thing to do on Friday night is watch my DVDs of The Simpsons, episode after episode, while my wife and cats sleep. I’ll watch until two, three in the morning sometimes. My favorite all-time episode is “Mr. Plow.”

Sometime this weekend I’ll get around to finishing my story about St. Patrick’s Day, then I’ll go over to the boneyard and do some jogging.

I’ve gotten some really nice emails and calls, lately, and I’m very grateful. I have to take the good with the bad and I’m getting better about that. Todd Vinyard, our IT man at the Journal is going to help me next week in setting up a formate where I can do a live blog on Saturday mornings. I hope to accomplish that by next Saturday. Wow, people will really get online and let me have it then, eh?

La paz con usteds, hermanos y hermanas

Galen