Banning Burqas?

 

And Other Assorted Head Gear and Garments 
  In some places people are compelled to wear certain things, while in others they are sometimes forced to remove them. The question in more "liberal", secular  countries is whether the banning of, say the burqa can be reasonably justified. Such issues are usually avoided because they are controversial and perhaps, more so, because they are complex - and they are. It is easy to say that a hijab doesn't hurt anyone, but to admit that a kirpan could. Masks may not be menacing when worn by Zorro or the Lone Ranger, but they can be threatening when worn by a man entering a bank or an ICE man in the U.S. Keffiyehs don't cover faces, but they are now prohibited in some instances. The debate over such issues is real in both France and Quebec. The debate everywhere is generally more about politics and religion than the philosophical problems.
   The question - "Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa?" has been examined by Brandon Robshaw and he provides a fine example of how philosophy can be applied in such instances. I will simply introduce you to his work and provide some suggestions about how it can be found. 
   He has written a book and you can find it at Bloomsbury Publishing or on Amazon, where there is this description of: Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa?Reconciling Liberalism, Multiculturalism and European Politics:

   Debates about whether the Wahhabist practice of face-veiling for women should be banned in modern liberal states tend to generate more heat than light. This book brings clarity to what can be a confusing subject by disentangling the different strands of the problem and breaking through the accusations of misogyny and Islamophobia. 
   Explaining and expounding the ideas of giants of the liberal tradition including Locke, Mill, and Rawls as well as contemporary thinkers like Nussbaum, Kymlicka and Oshana, the book considers a variety of conceptions of liberalism and how they affect the response to the question. Directly addressing issues facing many of today's societies, it unpicks whether paternalism on grounds of welfare can be justified within liberalism, the value of personal autonomy and the problem of whether a socially influenced choice counts as a genuine preference. 
   Covering the role of multiculturalism, gender issues and feminism, this comprehensive philosophical study of a major political question gets to the heart of whether a ban could be justified in principle, and also questions whether any such ban could prove efficacious in achieving its end.

[as an editorial aside, close readers around London may recognize the name "Kymlicka", which in this case refers to a son of Kym, who was well-known on the Western campus.]

The TOC is helpful:

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Reflections on the French ban
3. The liberal position on habitual public face-covering per se
4. What kind of liberalism?
5. Paternalism considered
6. Personal autonomy and the burqa
7. Adaptive preferences and the burqa
8. The burqa and multicultural theory
9. Gender and the burqa
10. The effect of the burqa on others: Offence
11. The effect of the burqa on others: Harm
12. Conclusion
Bibliography

Unfortunately, the price is $272.57

Another Approach
  If you are not that interested in this subject, go to this article by Robshaw which reveals why he became interested in the subject and his rudimentary thoughts about it. The entire article is available for free at: Philosophy Now: A Magazine of Ideas (Issue 135 - "Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa?".)
   Mr. Robshaw was so interested in the issue he decided to use it as a proposal for a PhD dissertation and that ultimately became the book and a review of it is found here: "Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa?: Book Review," Andreas Matthias, Daily Philosophy: Making Sense of the World (nd)
"A very clear, instructive and carefully argued book that shows off applied philosophy at its best."

The Bonus: 
  If you don't have $272, I will hint that the entire dissertation (296pp) is available for free. Here is the abstract:

  "This thesis concerns the problem of whether a liberal state should – for liberal reasons – ban the wearing of the burqa in public. The core of the problem is that liberalism appears to pull in two opposed directions on this question. On the one hand, liberals strongly support religious tolerance and the burqa is seen by many, including most of those who wear it, as a religious commitment; and even if it is not a religious commitment it may still be a personal choice, and liberals strongly support enabling personal choice. On the other hand, liberals are committed to supporting equal rights and freedoms for both sexes, and the gender asymmetry of the burqa (women wear it, men don’t) combined with the fact that habitually covering one’s face in public is liable to cause disadvantages in personal, social and professional life, look like good reasons for opposing it; moreover liberals value personal autonomy, which may be compromised if the burqa is worn in response to cultural pressure. The issue thus exposes a tension within liberalism. A central element of my approach is the disentangling of a number of connected but separate strands of the problem. Thus I consider: different conceptions of liberalism and how they affect the response to the question; whether paternalism on grounds of welfare can be justified withinliberalism and if so whether it would justify intervention in the specific case of the burqa; the value of personal autonomy within liberalism and whether a concern to safeguard or promote it couldjustify a burqa ban; the problem of adaptive preference and whether a socially influenced choice counts as a genuine preference; the role of multiculturalism in liberalism and to what extent it could justify exemptions; gender issues and feminism; the problem of coerced wearing of the burqa; and the problem of how likely it would be that a ban, even if justified in principle, would prove efficacious in achieving its end. 
[the additional bonus]
  The conclusion to the thesis is that banning the burqa in a liberal state is unlikely to be justified. It could not be justified in terms of the welfare or autonomy of the individual who voluntarily wears it. It could only be justified on the grounds of harm to others. It might, for example, theoretically be justified if coerced wearing of the burqa were widespread. This would be regrettable, however, as it would override the free choice of those who wore it voluntarily. Empirical evidence that such coercion was occurring would be necessary; and such a ban could only be justified if there were no other, equally efficacious and better targeted means of preventing coercion. My aim is to bring some clarity to this often heated and confused debate, and to supply clear principles on which to base any decision."

                                     [How unique and refreshing.]

Italian Snakes

 First, A Few Words About Patrick Fermor
    I am a fan of the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor who died in 2011.  I have most of what he has written and recently picked the book pictured from the shelf. It is an anthology and I thought I had read everything in it, but had not. It contains a piece about snakes.

Serpents of the Abruzzi
    That is the title of the snake essay and it originally appeared in The Spectator, on June 5, 1953. During that year, Fermor was walking through Tuscany and Umbria when he came upon a religious festival honouring San Domenico who is credited with removing the snakes from the Abruzzo region. Large numbers of snakes are gathered and they are draped over the statue of San Domenico as it is paraded through the village of Cocullo. 
   Curious about whether the Rito dei Serpari or the "Rite of the Snake Charmers" written about by Fermor seventy years ago, still happens, I went searching and found that the snakes still slither around Cocullo on May 1. For more, and some very good pictures see this BBC piece, "Italy's Annual Snake Festival in the Village of Cocullo."  After viewing them you may prefer Coachella or even Pamplona and the "Running of the Bulls." 
   Here are some of the snake bits from the Fermor piece:

   LEAVING the gentle, Italian, primitive landscape of Umbria for the blank sierras of the Abruzzi was as complete a change as a journey to a different planet. Indeed, these wild grey peaks have an almost lunar remoteness, and the little village of Corullo, a grey honeycomb of houses at the end of a blind alley of the mountains a dozen miles from Ovid's birthplace at Sulmona, must usually seem a desolate habitation. The sun beats down from a blazing sky, but in the labyrinthine shadows of the lanes there is a chill bite in the air from the towering snows of the Gran Sasso.

    But once a year, in the first week of May, this planetary silence is broken, and the village population, normally only a few hundred souls—shepherds and small cultivators to a man—swells to several thousands.. Pilgrims, last month, swarmed from all the neighbouring villages, and, as this is one of the few parts of Italy where regional costumes survive, the streets were a kaleidoscope of different colours and fashions, A bearded shepherd, playing an ear-splitting pibroch on a bagpipe made of .a patched inner tube, wore raw-hid/ mocassins, and his legs were cross-gartered, Iike those of a Saxon thane, with thick leather thongs. The religious occasion was also the pretext for a rustic fair, and the market was full of trussed poultry and squealing pigs. Pedlars carried trays of rosaries, medals, little tin motor-cars, celluloid thumbs-ups and dried acorn-cups. There were " lucky" hunch-backs, crippled beggars, hucksters with fortune- telling canaries and a wandering hypnotist. Less usual was the presence, wherever one turned, of snakes, slung over brown forearms or twisting like bracelets, lying in loose tangles among the funnel-topped bottles in the wine-shops, or held in clusters of four with their unwinking heads all gathered in the palm between the laden fingers of both hands, their long forked tongues sliding in and out of their jaws. Some were nearly two yards in length, and all of them looked alarmingly dangerous. Most of the serpari, or snake catchers, are under twenty. For weeks past they had been hunting them in the mountains, where they abound. Capturing them while they are still dazed with their winter-sleep, they disarm the poisonous ones by giving them the hem of a garment to bite, which, when snatched away, breaks off their teeth and drains their poison. Then, stored in jars or sewn into goatskins, they are put by until the great day conies round. There were now several hundred of them in the streets of Corullo—black, grey, greenish, speckled and striped, all hissing and knotting together and impotently darting and biting with their harmless jaws. The floor of the church—baroque, and surprisingly large— was deep in crumbs and bundles and debris, for hundreds of visiting peasants, finding the village overflowing, had slept there all night. Queues waited their turn at the confessional, and, under a pink and blue baldachin, relays of priests 

administered the sacrament....

 Then the devotees moved on to the effigy of St. Dominic himself, a lifesize, wooden figure in black Benedictine habit with a horseshoe in one hand and in the other a crosier. Embracing him with a hungry and possessive veneration, they rubbed little bundles of coloured wool— sovereign thenceforward, when applied to the spot, against toothache and snakebite and hydrophobia—down the grooves of his skirt, or lifted their children to kissing distance of the worn and numinous flanks. Silver ex-votos hung round his neck, and pink ribbons, on which were pinned sheaves of offered banknotes, fluttered from his shoulders. St. Dominic of Sora, or " the Abbot "—he has nothing to do with the great founder of the " Preachers' " Order—was a Benedictine of Umbrian origin, born in 951. He was eremetical and peripatetic by turns, and his countless miracles during his lifetime, and, the Abruzzesi relate, even since through the agency of his relic, were nearly all connected with the foiling of the bears and wolves, and, especially, of the snakes. 

  By the time High Mass began, there was no room to move in the crowded church. Yet a passage was cleared and two young women advanced with large baskets balancing unsupported on their heads, each of them containing great hoop- like loaves; both baskets were draped in pink and white silk and decked with carnations and wild cyclamen. The girls stood, like caryatids, on either side of the high altar until, at the end of the service, the image of the saint was hoisted shoulder-high and borne swaying into the sunlight before the church door. There, while the compact multitude clapped and cheered and the bells broke into a jubilant peal, the serpari clustered round the lowered float. Snakes began flying over the tonsured head like lassos. Parish elders arranged them feather-boa-like, about his shoulders, twisted them round his crosier and wound them over his arms and through the horseshoe and at random all over his body until the image and its pedestal were an all squirming tangle. Many fell off or wriggled free, and one over-active reptile was given a sharp crack over the head. It was raised shoulder high once more like a drowned figurehead salvaged from the Sargasso Sea. .A small pink banner, pinned all over with notes, and a large green one, were unwieldily hoisted. Village girls intoned a hymn in Abruzzi dialect in St. Dominic's honour; then the clergy, one of them bearing the cylinder with its swinging tooth, formed a procession

Then came the two girls with their peculiar baskets. A brass band struck up the triumphal march from Aida, and the saint, twisting and coiling with the activity of the bewildered snakes and bristling with hissing and tongue- darting heads, rocked insecurely forward and across the square. The innumerable peasants, the conjurors and pedlars and quacks, fell into step; the wine-shops emptied; pigs and poultry were abandoned in their pens, and the whole immense con- course, now itself forming a gigantic many-coloured serpent, wound slowly along the rising and falling streets. Every few steps the effigy came to a halt while fallen snakes were replaced or yet more banknotes, which floated down from the upper windows, were pinned to the fluttering ribbons. Boys on all sides brandished tangled armfuls of redundant snakes, and, looking up at the bright mid-day sky, I saw girls on the roof- tops waving the now familiar reptiles in either hand.

Sources: 

   "Strange Italy: The Festival of Snakes in Abruzzo." 

   "The Ancient Snake Festival of Cocullo." 

"A Statue Draped With Snakes? In Italy, It Happens Every Year: Held in a Small Mountain Village, This Festival Has It All: Snakes, Charmers, Religion, Science. See For Yourself -- and Try Not to Squirm," Francesco Martinelli, New York Times, Sept. 29, 2023.
  Fermor has many fans. Have a look at the Wikipedia biography first and if interested see this website devoted to him: "Patrick Leigh Fermor; He Drank From a Different Fountain." You could start with A Time of Gifts which is about an earlier walk across Europe just before the start of World War II. 

If you are close by and want to borrow any of his books, just let me know. 

The Bonus:

  For more about religion and snakes see, the "Snake Handlers."

TEOTWAWKI Time for Anti-Trumpers

 

End Time Indeed
   I am spending little time reading about the U.S. election and even less of it reading about Mr. Trump. I admit, however, that a couple of articles about him attracted my attention and I will call them to yours.
   A few of us remain perplexed regarding Trump's continuing and even surging popularity and I am especially puzzled by the fact that he has been embraced by evangelicals and many others who are religious. The two articles are about that and explain the illustration above. I am not religious which puts into context the cartoons below. 

Backward Christian Soldiers
   That the righteous are lining up behind Trump is baffling and, as this article indicates, "The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions," Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times, Jan. 17, 2024. (Mr. Edsall's columns are typically very long and he usually asks the opinions of others. Read the entire article since some of the quotes I will use, may not be directly from him.)
  I did not know that "God Made Trump" which is a video on something called "Truth Social."(if you click on that link, it is about three minutes long.) It answers some of the questions, one of them being, "Why Was Trump Chosen?" 

"God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump....
God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”

God's choice does make some sense since Eric Trump said that his dad "literally saved Christianity" and there is a "growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity." 
   He is now seen by many as a "Jesus-like figure" and "The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” That is, "The multiple criminal charges against Trump serve to strengthen the belief of many evangelicals about his ties to God..." 

  That Mr. Trump is not exactly a fine fellow, doesn't matter much since,  “a savior does not have to be a good person but just needs to fulfill his divinely appointed role.

  Further, in order to rationalize this quasi-deification of Trump — despite “his crassness and vulgarity, divorces, mocking of disabled people, his overt racism and a determination by a court that he sexually abused advice columnist E. Jean Carroll” — white evangelicals refer not to Jesus but the Persian King Cyrus from the book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible...Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse."

There is more, but thanks to God, Trump will save the Christians, and America, from the attacks of the deplorable progressives. 

   The second article is this one and it begins when the author, Tim Alberta, tells about his appearance on a television show during which the moderator asks why, 

"Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates."

 The author notes that, As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question.

   Alberta's search to find out "What's wrong with American evangelicals?" yielded answers that were not acceptable to many in his father's congregation and they did not hesitate to let him know at his father's funeral. His criticisms of Trump, were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself. By the time of his death, his father probably would have agreed:
Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country....
   What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity.

   Things have only gotten worse:

And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a Christian America that puts them at odds with Christianity. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

From: "My Father, My Faith and Donald Trump: Here, In Our House of Worship, People Were Taunting Me About Politics as I Tried to Mourn," Tim Alberta, The Atlantic, Nov. 28, 2023.  The article was adapted from Alberta's new book: The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: America's Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Post Script:
   I thought of "Backward Christian Soldiers" for obvious reasons. I then googled the phrase and found examples of it. One of its uses is in this, perhaps prescient, book title from forty years ago: Backward, Christian Soldiers?: An Action Manual for Christian Reconstruction, Gary North. [1984!!]
"But if Christians don't control the territory, they can't occupy it. They get tossed out into cultural "outer darkness," which is just exactly what the secular humanists have done to Christians in the 20th century: in education, in the arts, in entertainment, in politics, and certainly in the mainline churches and seminaries. Today, the humanists are "occupying." But they won't be for long. This book shows why." Perhaps a reprint is in order.

  An old friend from out west sent me an email reminding me of long ago and discussions over CARGO CULTS. The subject of the email - Make Melanesia Great Again. He thought the association of  cargo cults and Trump was worth pursuing in Mulcahy's Miscellany and I agreed. But, I took a quick look and the association has already been made. (e.g. "America's Latest "Cargo Cult?", John Edward Terrell, Psychology Today, Aug. 23, 2020.) Plus, undoubtedly a construct like 'cargo cults' has been examined by the neo-colonial historians and any mention of it likely to be frowned upon.

Advice for Anti-Trumpers:

   This will be a useful article as we reach the end: "50 Must-Haves for TEOTWAWKI: A Survival List for When SHTF (S*it Hits the Fan), Countryside, Aug. 31, 2021. This portion will be of interest to the readers of MM:

Books of all sorts, in print: A good library will be important for reference, but also entertainment. Long, dark winters will be a misery for those who don’t attend to a decent library. Without electricity, solar power is a good way to recharge de­vices for digital books, but once the device breaks (and you know it will) that power is useless.

The Cartoons:

These cover cartoons are all by the Canadian, Barry Blitt and are from the New Yorker. For more about Blitt see: Canadian Cartoonists. 

For another MM piece that indicates why TEOTWAWTI is a term for our times see:
"It Is Even Worse Than It Looks"

 

Christopher Hitchens

  Christopher Hitchens passed away on December 15, 2011. This year marks the ninth anniversary of his death and since there will be many remembrances next year, I thought I would present mine now. Had he lived, he would be almost 72 and I am sure would have remained as pugnacious as he appears in the picture above.

Some of the reasons why I admire him are better expressed by Larry McMurtry who wrote this about him in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:

“The descendants of the great readers I have mentioned are too often merely fluent know-it-alls, of whom Christopher Hitchens might be considered the exemplar. There he is, every week or month, in the Nation, Vanity Fair, the London Review of Books, writing about history, politics, books, public figures, virtually anything that comes down the freeways of our global culture. I personally have seen Christopher Hitchens in public debate while so weary or drunk or both that he can hardly have known whether he was even facing his audience, or whether there was an audience --and yet not a detail of his argument was dropped and not any of his long and well-turned sentences were slurred. His speech, like his writing, is precise, often brilliant, sometimes spellbinding, rarely inelegant; and yet one feels--as with many of his high-journalistic peers--that all this knowledge (or at least all this information) is not really reading-derived, but has been acquired more or less by osmosis, by rubbing elbows with his journalistic peers in Washington, London, New York, Paris, Delhi, Tehran, or wherever. I might note that this fluency is something few Americans seem to possess; perhaps it stems from admirable European secondary education. I might note too that it is mainly those high journalists who seem to command the steadily released energies of their Victorian counterparts, Bagehot, Macaulay, Saintsbury.” (p.123)

To be able to argue well while drunk may not be a skill you admire, but as one who does not do such a good job, even when sober, it is one that appeals to me. I am, by the way, rather good at drinking and much prefer it over arguing.

The abilities he displayed while arguing typically where employed in support of notions I also support. He was not a fan of religion as you will gather from the hint provided in this title: God Is Not Great. If you need a bigger hint, it is found in the not so subtle sub-title: How Religion Poisons Everything.

After receiving the cancerous death notice, he was asked near the end if it was likely that he would seek solace in religion. Here is his answer: "Mr. Hitchens discussed the possibility of a deathbed conversion, insisting that the odds were slim that he would admit the existence of God."“The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain,” he told The Atlantic in August 2010. “I can’t guarantee that such an entity wouldn’t make such a ridiculous remark, but no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a remark.”

  He was also a critic of what is termed "Islamofascism" and would have undoubtedly written (as I did) about the recent beheading of a French teacher and the murder of three churchgoers by Islamist terrorists. He defended Salman Rushdie who, you may remember, had to go into hiding and whose Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher shot. This is what Hitchens wrote when asked about that fatwa:

When The Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship -- though I like to think my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offence of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. (p.268.)

Post Script:

In the "About This Blog" section of this blog I state the one of its purposes is to serve as a memory aid for me. By reading up on subjects and then writing down thoughts, I assumed, for example, that a year-or-two from now I might have a vague recollection of who Christopher Hitchens was. It is not working.

A few paragraphs into this post I had the thought that I might have written about Hitchens before. I have. Not only that, I quoted the same bit from Larry McMurtry! Well, it is a good bit and if I have any readers, they may have forgotten it as well. The post was about Mother Teresa, about whom Hitchens wrote a book: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice.

The Bonus:

Since I provided the McMurtry quote twice, here is a new one. It is from Michael Kinsley and it is found in a review of God Is Not Great, in the New York Times, May 13, 2007:

His enemies would like to believe he [Hitchens] is a fraud. But he isn’t, as the very existence of his many enemies tends to prove. He is self-styled, to be sure, but no more so than many others in Washington — or even in New York or London — who are not nearly as good at it. He is a principled dissolute, with the courage of his dissolution: he enjoys smoking and drinking, and not just the reputation for smoking and drinking — although he enjoys that too. And through it all he is productive to an extent that seems like cheating: 23 books, pamphlets, collections and collaborations so far; a long and often heavily researched column every month in Vanity Fair; frequent fusillades in Slate and elsewhere; and speeches, debates and other public spectacles whenever offered.

The quotation about Hitchens unlikely deathbed conversion is also from the New York Times:

"Christopher Hitchens, Polemicist Who Slashed All, Freely, Dies at 62," by William Grimes, Dec. 16, 2011.

You can see and hear Hitch in action in many YouTube videos; e.g. interviews with Jon Stewart and Sean Hannity and an almost seven hour compilation.

Mother Teresa

It was not at all my intention on this fine Sunday morning to tackle this subject and for an obvious reason that will soon become apparent, it is not the best day to do so. After reading several headlines such as these - “Mother Teresa Is Made a Saint by Pope Francis” and “Pope Declares Mother Teresa a Saint and Model of Mercy” - why would I feel compelled to be contrary about the canonization of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu? Or, to put it another way, “Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?  For less obvious reasons I should also steer clear of this topic since I really can’t say that I read those articles, nor do I know much about Catholicism. I should add, however, that my ignorance does not incline me to feel hostile toward Catholics who, I am sure,  would at least tolerate my cartoonish rendering of the Pope, if I had the ability to draw one.  My attitude toward religion can perhaps best be summarized by the fact that I agree with this definition of Faith which is “The quality by which we are enabled to believe that which we know is untrue.” As I said, I was not even interested enough to read the articles.

The problem is that I am a disciple of the late Christopher Hitchens, the creator of the "shriveled old lady’"description above. He also called her a “fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”, and even worse a “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf.” His attitude toward religion is summed up in his book - God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  By the way, he also said unkind things about Princess Di.

At this point you are probably not likely a fan of the man and are wondering why I am. From this description you might see why:

“The descendants of the great readers I have mentioned are too often merely fluent know-it-alls, of whom Christopher Hitchens might be considered the exemplar. There he is, every week or month, in the Nation, Vanity Fair, the London Review of Books, writing about history, politics, books, public figures, virtually anything that comes down the freeways of our global culture. I personally have seen Christopher Hitchens in public debate while so weary or drunk or both that he can hardly have known whether he was even facing his audience, or whether there was an audience --and yet not a detail of his argument was dropped and not any of his long and well-turned sentences were slurred. His speech, like his writing, is precise, often brilliant, sometimes spellbinding, rarely inelegant; and yet one feels--as with many of his high-journalistic peers--that all this knowledge (or at least all this information) is not really reading-derived, but has been acquired more or less by osmosis, by rubbing elbows with his journalistic peers in Washington, London, New York, Paris, Delhi, Tehran, or wherever. I might note that this fluency is something few Americans seem to possess; perhaps it stems from admirable European secondary education. I might note too that it is mainly those high journalists who seem to command the steadily released energies of their Victorian counterparts, Bagehot, Macaulay, Saintsbury.” p.123 in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry.

Plus, Hitchens  generally offers good and solid reasons in his arguments and I wondered what they were in this case.

Although a disciple, I confess to not having read his book about Mother Teresa: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Since you are unlikely to, I suggest that you look up the Wikipedia entry for Hitchens and in it you will find another link to a thorough analysis of and synopsis of The Missionary Position..., also in Wikipedia. Some of the criticisms of the saintly one are quite serious and go beyond just questioning the ‘miracles’ that are a prerequisite for sainthood. It is argued, among other things,  that perhaps she was more interested in conversion than charity and often less interested in the source of some donations (those, e.g. from Jean-Claude Duvalier and Charles Keating), and ensuring the money was properly used. And, of course, she was not in a position to do much about the population problem.

Given that the sources above are good and that I obviously am not well-read on this subject, I will abandon you here having simply played the contrarian. In the short bit of poking around I did this morning, however, I did discover a couple of Canadian connections that are interesting and which will allow me to end on an impartial note by offering them to you.

Back in the last century, a Canadian priest (Father Kolodiejchuk) was chosen to be the “postulator” (promoter) of the canonization of Mother Teresa and in 2001 he delivered 32,400 pages of documentation to the Vatican. (see: “The Mission: In his 16 Years as a Priest, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of Winnipeg Has Never Tackled a More High-pressure Job: It is up to Him to Persuade the Vatican to make Mother Teresa a Saint,” Christopher Guly, The Ottawa Citizen, Sept. 2001). One imagines it was positive, although Hitchen’s views were supposedly recorded.

More recently and more negatively, some  Canadian academics have offered their views. Here is an English abstract of the article which they have written:

“The impact of Mother Teresa’s work has no religious or geographical boundaries. In the four parts of this text, we try to understand this phenomenon. We first present the method used to collect the available information and then discuss a few biographical considerations to clarify her mission and the media’s contribution to her popularity. The third part identifies four stumbling blocks on her way to canonization: her rather dogmatic religious views, her way of caring for the sick, her political choices, and her suspicious management of funds that she received. Fourth, we discuss some elements of her life related to beatification, including her “night of faith,” the exorcism to which she was subjected as well as the validity of the miracle attributed to her. In conclusion, we question why the criticism of which she has been the target has been ignored by the Vatican.”

Source: “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa,” Serge Larivée, Carole Sénéchal, and Geneviève Chénard Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, September 2013; vol. 42, 3: pp. 319-345.
There are other critical articles to offset the positive. See, for example: "Why Mother Teresa is Still No Saint to Many of Her Critics," Adam Taylor, Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2016.

I have faith in Hitchens, but you can decide for yourself.