Regarding constitutional crises

In "Ireland's Constitutional Crisis" on the First Things website, John Waters discusses the harm visited upon his nation because many of his fellow citizens have forgotten that their constitution does not grant rights upon them. Rather, it enumerates the rights they have because said rights preexist their constitution, having been granted to all persons by the Triune God.

His discussion is helpful not only for the Irish, but for Americans as well. Our own Declaration of Independence asserts that our rights are unalienable because all persons have been endowed with them by our Creator. As this truth becomes less and less self-evident to our fellow citizens, the more likely it becomes that our civil governments will attempt to alienate our rights from us.

Ireland may not be the only nation suffering a constitutional crisis.

Selective outrage is for ninnies

Sadie likes me.

The questions we face

In the words of Lancellotti, Del Noce understood that “we cannot just rely on a mechanical repetition of [religious] formulas, because what we received from our forebears is conditioned by the questions they faced, and we ourselves can only think in terms of the questions we are facing.”  

In his critical review of Augusto Del Noce's The Age of Secularization (translated by Carlo Lancelloti), Francis X. Maier focuses on Del Noce's thought with regard to technological change. The above quote of course has theological implications, and presbyterian implications especially.

On the one hand, I'm reminded of John Frame's frequent admonition that theology must be done by every generation because every generation must apply the Bible to its own time. As I've argued elsewhere, this even extends to a Church's confessional standards; I continue to believe the Orthodox Presbyterian Church's confession needs to speak much more robustly and clearly on the Biblical doctrine of anthropology (especially with regard to sexuality and marriage). In the same vein, I'm reminded of the error of puritanolatry, which often renders its practitioners incapable of dialogue with  citizens of this present age.

On the other hand, the more subtle, and accordingly more profound danger, warned against in the above quote is that of thinking that answers to our forebears' questions are answers to our own. One way in which this error manifests in conservative reformed and presbyterian Churches is the belief that the best defense against theological liberalism is to maintain, unchanged, centuries-old confessional standards. (Looking at you, Westminster and Three Forms of Unity.) On this view, there are no new questions, only ones which have been answered by our forebears. In practice, of course, our generation faces its own questions, and the temptation is to repress or ignore them because our traditions are silent. Here again, the Church runs the risk of irrelevance by denying the valid concerns of our own day (for example, race relations and gender power dynamics). 

We are obligated by the 5th Commandment to receive the traditions of our forebears with respect and honor. The same commandment also obligates us to build on those traditions for the sake of our generation and those who follow. We must identify the questions we face, and seek answers on the basis of the only true source of all religious formulae, which of course is the Bible itself.

Nope

In "Superheroic Testimonies," Armond White argues that the recent Zack Snyder-helmed Superman films represent an exploration of spiritual (and especially Roman Catholic) themes and an attempt to unify the cinematic masses around genuine emotion. Marshaling the evidence of both imagery and plot device, he views these DC-Universe films as a serious examination and recreation of mythological tropes for our era.

Nice try, but no.

Glen Weldon gets everything wrong with the most recent Superman movies right when he writes,

Zack Snyder, the man charged with ushering the latest wave of DC heroes onto the movie screen, and thus into the wider cultural consciousness, does not believe in heroes. He's a Randian Objectivist tasked with bringing to cinematic life characters who are, at their essence, embodiments of a deep, fervent, and all-consuming altruism. That is why the moral universe he creates around them is one in which the very notion of heroism, of selflessness, is unrealistic, even laughable, and ultimately futile. 

Weldon's The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture is a masterful cultural biography of Batman by a man who understands why we read comic books and why superheroes have arisen to fulfill the mythological void left by Christendom's victory over the old gods. A few pages on, he repeats a thesis he has already set forth with some frequency:

[This fan] culture holds up moral ambiguity and ambivalence as inherently more interesting, more relevant and–crucially, as far as they are concerned–more sophisticated. This is nonsense, as the role of superheroes is to be ideals, exemplars, absolutes–the stories we tell ourselves as we strive to follow their lead.

Glen Weldon understands superheroes and why we love them. And thanks to his dutiful research and scintillating writing, I'm caught up on everything Batman's been doing for the last several decades.

I'm going to go re-read The Dark Knight Returns now. Again.