![]() This is a time-tested formula that we humans have found fun and funny since the origins of Panto centuries ago. They hosted Bingo to raise money for community groups and they were good at it because they were funny and fabulous and anyone who isn’t utterly dead inside is bound to have a good time playing charity bingo hosted by a bunch of bawdy drag queens dressed as nuns. What the Sisters mostly did, early on, was Bingo. And anyone who critiques a politics of resistance without acknowledging the explicit, pre-existing, overwhelming politics it is resisting against is either a fool or a fascist. But they didn’t pick that fight and they didn’t start it. The Sisters were always spectacular, but their early days didn’t involve anything like what Brooks condemns as “the politics of spectacle.” They were certainly political, in the sense that any group that refuses to comply when told they have no right to exist is inherently political. They formed a softball team and played against the Gay Men’s Chorus and the Metropolitan Community Church (baseball has been “woven into” the group since its earliest days). The ad hoc “order” of Sisters sprang from that as a social club - a civic group no different, in pretentious Kuyperian categories, from the Rotarians or the Elks or Masons or Mummers (although their costumes weren’t quite as flamboyant as those of the latter two). Their original habits were the genuine article - donations provided for an all-male production of The Sound of Music by actual Catholic nuns who got the joke. The Sisters are a group of drag queens who dress as nuns. ![]() ![]() When one sphere drops the ball, refusing or failing to meet its responsibilities, the others are forced to step up to do more.įor a real-world example of what that looks like, consider the civic association that is the subject of Brooks’ column and of his scorn: The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The greatest danger to neighborliness and to justice is not the usurpation Brooks fears - “when one sphere tries to take over another sphere.” The threat to justice, to neighborliness, and to every mutually bound “sphere” of society, rather, is the problem of abdication. Subsidiarity and/or “sphere sovereignty” are descriptions of and guides to neighborliness, not ground rules for a game of musical chairs. This is not what “sphere sovereignty” means. Brooks enlists this language forgetting that Kuyper’s spheres are distinct, but still “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Brooks seems to think of these spheres as existing in conflict, competition, or tension - as though civic groups, families, and churches were engaged in a tense standoff like the end of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. ![]() “Sphere sovereignty” was Kuyper’s Protestant/democratic revision of subsidiarity - an attempt to preserve its insights without the hierarchical Great Chain of Being baggage in the original. It wasn’t hard to tell which students had read the book and which ones were just riffing based on a loose grasp of the class discussion. When I was a seminary TA, I had to grade papers on Jim Skillen’s book about the Reformed political theology of Abraham Kuyper. It is an attempted “Kuyperian” attack against “little platoons.” It’s a criticism of “the politics of spectacle” that is, itself, an example of “the politics of spectacle.” And, above all, it’s a vivid demonstration of one representative Old White Guy’s bewildered failure to understand that 2023 is not 1983, and thus comes across like a boilerplate “shut up and dribble” rant of the sort that Brooks’ predecessors cranked out about Branch Rickey in 1947. Why waste any more time on this habitually disingenuous hack - this second-generation Reader’s Forum shopper and lifelong capicola-eater? Because Brooks’ column is, I think, confused in some helpfully clarifying ways. Unfortunately, the rest of it is even worse - more pretentious, more confused, and less sincere. Fortunately, most of Brooks’ column isn’t about baseball. ![]()
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