R. Scott Appleby Lays an Egg

A few nights ago, I attended a lecture at UCSD given by Scott Appleby entitled "What Can Muslims & Catholics Teach One Another & the World." As a Catholic, it was an incredibly depressing and embarrassing talk.

Appleby is a history professor of some note at Notre Dame. Notre Dame being the foremost Catholic educational institution in the country, I was hoping for a lot more than I got. Professor Appleby was there as a representative of my faith and one of our most respected Universities and he let us down badly.

First off, his talk was so poorly composed that it was nearly incoherent. Two thirds of the way through, I was still trying to figure out where he was going with it.

Second, one of his key concepts - that Catholics and Muslims need to engage in theological conversation* - was blown out of the water in one of the first questions at the end when a Muslim fellow stood up and told him that the Koran was the word of God and that was the end of that discussion right there. On the way home from the lecture, my host for the evening expounded at length on how Muslim students in his class agree with that concept and that questioning the Koran was a distinct no-no. If one side takes its text as The Unquestioned Truth then discussions aren't going to be discussions at all, but lectures instead.

Third, the good professor trotted out his progressive bona fides right at the start of the talk and snarked about "right-wing talk show hosts" fanning the flames of religious paranoia. By coincidence, I had tuned in to Hugh Hewitt that evening on my way home from work before the talk and listened to his interview of Lawrence Wright. Here's a tidbit.

We have a population of about two and a half million Muslims in this country. But the truth is, our Muslims in this country, we’re so blessed by this community, it’s so much better off than, it’s the wealthiest Muslim community in the entire world, Saudi Arabia included. They make about as much money as the average American, they’re just as likely to go to college or graduate school as the average American, far less likely to go to prison.

Wow, that's some pretty serious paranoia. Err, maybe not. Hugh is as big a Republican honk as there is out there. It's a good bet that Professor Appleby has never met him. The audience of his lecture all sniggered sagely when Scott condescendingly sneered at Hugh and his peers. So much for dialog with one's opponents. Pathetic.

Fourth, Scott missed the mark badly in not discussing how the US military has contributed to the conversation between religions. The Abraham Lincoln Battlegroup probably did more for Christian - Muslim relations in one month than that entire room of academics will do in their lives. Our last several wars have been fought in defense of Muslims and we've accomplished a lot despite our attempts to inflict torture and atrocities on them.

Indian Ocean (Mar. 14, 2005) - An elderly Indonesian patient shows her sincere appreciation to a "Project HOPE" volunteer by kissing her hand and saying a prayer for her as she waits for her helicopter flight back to Banda Aceh, Sumatra, Indonesia, upon discharge from the Military Sealift Command (MSC) hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19). U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jeffery Russell
Fourth, the talk ended with a paean to President Obama. That in itself is no issue, partisans will be partisans, but his discussion of Obama seemed Messianic to me. As he gushed, I mentally substituted "Jesus Christ" for "President Obama" and concluded that if the talk had been given 2000 years ago in the Middle East, not much would have changed. It was creepy to hear a professor touted as a Catholic thinker praise Obama as if he were the second coming of Christ. The good professor thought that President Obama had indeed earned the Nobel Peace Prize and trotted out the Cairo speech as a perfect example of what Obama is trying to accomplish. I'll leave it to Victor Davis Hanson to wreak havoc on that particular bit of Obama narcissism. Suffice it to say that it was embarrassing to hear a history professor from Notre Dame gush about such a dreadfully historically inaccurate speech.

But this is still missing the point. It's not that the professor's talk was flawed, it's that he missed the crucial point of what Catholics and Muslims have to teach the world - the denial of one's self in the pursuit of a holy life serving the will of God. As the talk went on, I wondered if Scott ever went to Mass any more, he missed the point of Catholicism that badly.

It's a good bet that the majority of the audience was secular and the secular world has much to learn from Catholics and Muslims. The greatest mass murderers of all time were secular - Mao, Stalin and Hitler (even if some of them are our favorite political philosophers). The secular world has brought us sex without commitment which has filled our prisons and impoverished more people than any corporate fatcat. The secular world is filled with taking without earning, a viewpoint that is at the heart of President Obama's domestic policies. (See also: debt, $1,400,000,000,000 of.)

As I sat there, I wondered what was going on in the heads of the academics around me. I doubted many of them understood in their hearts the meaning of my Catholic faith and that of the Muslim fellow in the audience. They had all gathered to listen to a Catholic historian from the premiere Catholic university in the country tell them what they could learn from Catholics and Muslims. It turned out that from him, they couldn't learn much at all.

* - At least I think that was one of his key concepts. The talk was such a disorganized hodgepodge of intellectual odds and ends that it was difficult to figure out just what he was trying to say.