Evangelization via Exercise-Induced Near Comas
...and why I don't care if RJN is a snob (and I'm not saying he is one)
As I get older I've noticed that by all objective measures I'm becoming less fit. This means that it takes an amazingly small amount of exercise to reach the goal of blissful brainlessness, that point at which you forget everything around you. This sometimes happens while I'm reading a book while doing the StairMaster, or as I call it, the ScareMaster.
I was apparently reading Richard J. Neuhaus's Catholic Matters because yesterday I noticed the book was missing. A quick check of various rooms revealed no book. I looked in the bedroom, the kitchen, the car. I looked in the bathroom, the basement, the bar! (That rhyme was for Bill Luse since he seems to get such disproportionate pleasure out of 'em. :-)
But there was no need to panic as I'd knew it was probably at the fitness center. And sure enough I asked the gal there and she asked the title and I told her and she said she was wondering when someone could claim it. She took me to the office space shared by the four exercise professionals.
One of them looks a bit like Bern Luse, a cute girl-next-door type who is probably a good Christian girl since the posted bio/pics of the workers says she went to a Christian college. And here this Catlick book was front and center, there to keep her and her three mates company should they become curious. That can't be bad, given the amount of downtime they have while they're waiting for exercise appointments or just waiting to lock of the gym...Call it inadvertent evangelization. It's what I'm best at.
Speaking of Neuhaus (and we were), I recall a recent post that sounded a tad pretentious, beginning as it did with: "After dinner, the evening before that conference in Vienna a while back, Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn took George Weigel and me on a private tour of the episcopal palace." And yet I can't begrudge the sort of pretentiousness I detect in a Neuhaus or a Weigel because they are serving the sort of role, as ambassadors to secular society, that William F. Buckley did as a political conservative to the liberal intelligentsia. Buckley affected some of that "smarter than thou" pose because conservatives were considered unenlightened troglodytes back then and still are in some quarters. Buckley was effective in making conservatism respectable to many elites.
Christians today are considered the new troglodytes. You can see that reflected by the term atheists give themselves, "brights", and by the reputation Christians have as being science-phobic. Neuhaus and Weigel show that you can be intelligent and well-informed and still be a Christian: faith and reason.
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