June 25, 2002

Sullivan calls our attention to this tasty bit of moral corruption from Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas:

“On Sept. 11, Americans were confronted by people ready to die as an expression of their profound moral commitments. Their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its members in response to Sept. 11 to shop.”

Uh--Stanley? I think the point is that we were confronted by people who were ready to kill 3,000 men, women and children as an expression of their "profound moral commitments." I don't know about you, Stan, but from where I stood on September 11--which was in an all-encompassing cloud of choking skyscraper dust--their willingness to die wasn't nearly as important as their willingness to try and kill me.

Article author Patrick O’Neill writes that Stanley is "not afraid to humanize those who flew jets into buildings on Sept. 11." How brave, Stan! Do go on.

And he does: “A people who have been bred to shop then can quickly become some of the most violent people in the world,” Stan says, “exactly because they’re dying to have something worth dying for.” Oh, wait--I must have missed the 19 shopping-crazed Americans who took out the twin Petronas towers in Malaysia to give their lives meaning. Did I miss that, Stan? Show me, you feisty thinker, you! I also seem to have missed the government-run genetic engineering program that is responsible for the irresistible urge every American feels at all times to buy things.

So this is what a doctorate from Yale gets you. And this, apparently, is what being "holy" means: to be so far removed from anything real or moral that your every utterance is laden with deep respect for murderous fanatics and contempt for the dead of September 11. After all, they were only following their genetic imperative to acquire wealth so that they could continue shopping, like the good little consumer animals that they were.

I encourage you to send a note to the editor of the National Catholic Reporter at ncr_editor@natcath.com.