A Christmas Meditation from David Brooks: “A Holy Friend”

[Valin]

Power Line:

Steven Hayward

December 25, 2014

 

David Brooks comes in for a lot of heavy weather from conservatives for supposedly going native at the New York Times, and especially his early fondness for Obama, but let’s not go too far overboard here: he just said he liked the crease in Obama’s pants, and didn’t go all leg-tingly like Chris Matthews. And if you follow him closely, you’ll have noted that he stopped saying much about Obama quite a while ago. I think Brooks’s relative silence about Obama must sting at the White House, which courted him assiduously during the first term.

 

In any case, there’s another side of Brooks that is really more meaningful and should be considered by all fair-minded readers. You can catch a glimpse of it in his column earlier this week, “The Subtle Sensations of Faith.” There’s a lot in here and it is hard to make a short excerpt that captures it, but perhaps this paragraph is a useful jumping off point for further thoughts:

 

 

The process of faith, of bringing moments of intense inward understanding into the ballyhoo of life, seems to involve a lot of reading and talking — as people try to make sense of who God is and how holiness should be lived out. Even if you tell people you are merely writing a column on faith, they begin recommending books to you by the dozen. Religion may begin with experiences beyond reason, but faith relies on reason.

 

 

(Snip)

 

Now, if you have a spare half-hour over the next couple of days (or podcast download capabilities), you should hear David’s more recent broad-gauge thoughts, which he gave at a speech to a group of evangelical philanthropists, call “The Gathering,” in Florida about three months ago. You can read a transcript of his remarks here, but I think it is much better to hear David deliver this talk, which you can do by clicking the button at the bottom of this blog post by The Gathering’s Fred Smith. But here’s one sample from the text, where, in discussing the “walls” people of faith sometimes put up around themselves, he has this very interesting passage:

 

 

And the final wall is this wall of intellectual insecurity. I teach at Yale. We are not nice to each other. We brutally attack each other. We are not good Christians.

 

But out of that comes a hardened appreciation of truth. And sometimes we are brutal to each other because we are brutal in pursuit of the truth and we don’t take…we take our ideas very seriously and we’re sometimes willing to hurt each other because the ideas are so serious. Sometimes we veer on the side of just nastiness. Sometimes in my experience in Bible Study, the desire to be nice, the desire to be affirming, softens all discussion. So the jewel of truth is not hardened. Vague words and ethereal words are tolerated because nobody wants to be too offensive.

 

 

(Snip)

 

On the other hand, I can count as a Christmas blessing never reading The Daily Beast again, or thinking I might miss something useful or important.

[Valin]

I suspect an ongoing series...What Fun!

 

A meditation on David Brooks

Scott Johnson

December 26, 2014

 

Reading Steve Hayward’s post on David Brooks and his mistreatment by Jay Michaelson in the Daily Beast set me off. In his magnanimous style, Steve calls for attention to Brooks’s religious reflections by all fair-minded readers. Steve urges us not to write Brooks off simply because his political judgment has gone haywire.

 

As Steve suggested, I have listened to Brooks’s speech on Christianity in the public square. It’s an interesting speech and well worth the time to take it by audio or by text.

 

But what are we to make of Brooks? In his day job, he is one of the regular columnists accorded prime real estate on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Brooks came to the Times from a conservative journalistic milieu. Life at the Times has domesticated him. In his 2009 New Republic piece on Brooks Gabriel Sherman recounts:

 

(Snip)

 

Now those of us who aren’t as smart as Brooks had no problem pegging Obama’s place on the political spectrum, and it wasn’t a terribly difficult task. We didn’t find him to be “a Burkean.” We thought he was a left-wing ideologue who would do great damage to the United States at home and around the world, and I believe he has done so. Steve says that Brooks has gone silent on Obama, but, if so, he needs to open up. Good grief, the man is a political columnist, not a spiritual adviser.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

My meditation on David Brooks and Peggy Noonan

Paul Mirengoff

December 27, 2014

 

Let me begin by confessing my weakness for pundits who produce original and/or against-the-grain ideas. I also confess to the related tendency of preferring a plausible but misguided center-right defense of President Obama’s latest offensive policy initiative to the umpteenth denunciation of the policy on sound conservative grounds.

 

These weaknesses help explain why I like David Brooks’ work. He’s the rare opinion-writer who comes up with ideas that I not only didn’t think of, but probably couldn’t have.

 

Unfortunately, original thinkers are more likely than most to make spectacular errors. As Scott points out, Brooks made one when he became infatuated with candidate Barack Obama.

 

(Snip)