“You’ll never regret it!” Gus Hall welcomes me into the Party.

[A shorter version of this was published two years ago under the title “The anniversary of a foolish decision.”]

Yours truly, freshly minted young Communist and Xavier Military Institute (High School) senior, 1971

Fifty-five years ago today, on a muggy Tuesday evening, I arrived at 23 West 26th Street, Manhattan. The Communist Party USA was headquartered there, and I was about to be enlisted in its ranks.

Years later, I learned that in the 1940s, it was also where members of the Council on African Affairs, including W. E. B. Du Bois (chairman), Paul Robeson (vice-chairman), and Alphaeus Hunton (educational director), met to further the cause of Pan-Africanism. Ironically, out of the offices of that edifice and its neighbor, Number 21, built in 1881, the real estate empire spawned by John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) conducted its business.

The diary entry of Xavier High School student and research assistant to Herbert Aptheker for May 25, 1971, reads:

Got over to 23 West 26th Street [headquarters of the Communist Party USA] about 6:45 [P.M.]. Whatta nice place! The meeting was on the third floor, where pictures of famous comrades and covers of magazines and pamphlets were displayed. Gus [Hall, General Secretary of the Party] answered questions very well. He described how the Party operates from top to bottom, about international relations. My questions concerned the time a college student needs to be an active member and about the 2 vouchers + age stipulations [minimum age, 18]. Rasheed [Storey, 1936-2016] and Gus were the vouchers and I was let in even though I[’m] still 17!!!! I really feel like a complete person. As Gus said to me, I’ll never regret it.

The former lumberjack and steel worker congratulated me with a handshake that risked rendering useless my guitar-pick-holding fingers.

I really have commitment and the enthusiasm and the vision. I’m proud of the Party. I want to make the Party proud of me. [See also Anthony Flood, “Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager,” October 25, 2018.]

The building where my formal turning to the political dark side occurred has a storied past. (See “The Astor Offices at Nos. 21 and 23 West 26th Street,” The Daytonian, Saturday, August 4, 2012.) John Jacob Astor IV (1864–1912) was a passenger on the Titanic. His son, Vincent (1891-1959), “commissioned the architectural firm Peabody, Wilson & Brown to give No. 23 a neo-Federal facelift in 1922. Only two years later he sold the building for $30,000 to Frederick Vanderbilt Field (1905-2000), a Communist who wrote for the Daily Worker ….”

Thirty-thousand dollars, a century ago. Today, that won’t buy you a bathroom in Manhattan. And, yes, a Vanderbilt. One of the most intriguing and revealing autobiographies I’ve ever read was his From Right to Left (Lawrence Hill Books, 1983).

May Day flashbacks: Memories of a Communist and working-class leader
Same year, 1971: Gus Hall, in hat (above “MU”), marching on Fifth Avenue in New York City [People’s World Archives]. I believe the bespectacled gent to Hall’s right is Arnold Johnson (1904-1989); James E. Jackson (1914-2007) is the second person to Hall’s left.
On June 9th, two weeks after my induction, I attended Xavier High School’s graduation ceremony at Hunter College (Lexington Avenue and 68th Street). My diary records my regret at missing a talk by James E. Jackson (1914-2007) at the Center for Marxist Education, located at 29 West 15th Street. That building, now a co-op, abuts a 21st-century extension of my pre-Civil War alma mater.

Midday on September 18, 1974, I met fellow Aptheker research assistant (and non-communist Civil Rights Movement historian) Hugh Murray for lunch; at six, I’d meet my then-closest comrade and friend, Kurt Stand, who would be convicted of spying for East Germany in 1998, “to discuss a great decision I feel I must make once and for all.”

On September 23rd, internally still a Stalinist, I entrusted my resignation letter, addressed to the comrade who chaired the meetings, to the doorman of her building located at the southwest corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street. “Now I can relax and decide more clearly what I’m going to do with my life.”

To resign was a wiser decision than the one it negated, but it could not reverse the latter’s effects.

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 4: Bias, the Infirmity We Cannot Help But Bring to Dialectic

Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), late ‘40s/early ‘50s

[Also on Substack. See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

It’s a challenge to write about dialectic without engaging in it, that is, without evaluating examples of dialectic from one’s position. It’s a challenge because dialectic presupposes experiences or documents that one has interpreted and historically contextualized, and the ability to engage in such activities varies from person to person.

In every dialectical exchange, the opponents have achieved a certain level of personal development, a level they cannot improve “on the spot.” That is, awareness of truth-inhibiting biases, like the ability to evaluate experiences or documents, is person-variable. One goal in a dialectical exchange is to bring those biases to light, to expose not only the gnat in the interlocutor’s eye, but also the camels clogging one’s own esophagus. (Matthew 23:24) Not everyone welcomes such exposure. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 4: Bias, the Infirmity We Cannot Help But Bring to Dialectic”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 3: The Task Rendered Manageable (with more than a little help from Bernard Lonergan)

[Also on Substack. See Part 1, Part 2]

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dialectic (from διαλέγειν, dialegein; “to speak across”) is a situation before it is an approach to it.

If positions are both topically related and opposed to each other, then they imply a dialectic. The position-holders need not be aware of this. Each side is presumed to be oriented toward truth, however imperfectly, even if they sinfully suppress and distort the truth (which, of course, depends on some grasp of the truth).

What I call the “metaproblem” of dialectic is a problem insofar as ignoring this fact of life hampers the opposed sides in their efforts to resolve their disputes. That is, it’s not a first-order problem, one they set out to tackle. It’s a second-order problem that “comes with the territory” of being human this side of the Kingdom. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 3: The Task Rendered Manageable (with more than a little help from Bernard Lonergan)”

Dispensationalism, Diversity, Dialectic, Part 2

[Also on Substack. See Part 1]

I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed in Scripture.

Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers who see things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”

According to my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many posts on this site), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.

Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, is neither to prove nor refute but rather Continue reading “Dispensationalism, Diversity, Dialectic, Part 2”

Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?

[Slightly updated, this was first published here two years ago.]

Fifty-six years ago this afternoon, classes being over, I trekked two blocks east from Xavier High School along 16th Street to Union Square Park, where I’d take the No. 6 subway to the Bronx. To my astonishment, the park was jam-packed with people. Thousands of them, in the middle of the day. It had the vibe of an anti-war demo. It was replicated elsewhere in Manhattan and in many other cities around the country, all too familiar to us today in its size and planning.

“What’s this?,” I muttered. “Earth Day?  You gotta be kidding me!”

A newly minted Stalinist (and Jesuit high school student), I knew that that day marked the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Illych Ulanov, known to history as Lenin. Continue reading “Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?”

Slavery and the Catholic Church: Father John Maxwell’s neglected study

The following republishes a post from almost five years ago. 

In a footnote to a recent post, I referred to Father John Francis Maxwell’s vastly underappreciated Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery. Barry Rose Publishers, located in Chichester (UK), published it in 1975 in association with the Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights (its name from 1956 to 1990; it’s now the Anti-Slavery International). A foreword was provided by the Right Honorable Richard Wilberforce, Lord Wilberforce, C.M.G, O.B.E., great grandson of the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

Ten years ago [i.e., in 2011] I posted a facsimile of the full text of Maxwell’s book on my old site. I hope that someone with the authority to do so will retype Slavery and the Catholic Church either from my pdf or a physical copy of the book and cause it to be published as a searchable eBook.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to discover who, if anyone, has the copyright to the book. Can a reader point me in the right direction? Here’s my homework to date.

Father Maxwell wrote in his preface: “The author wishes to record his thanks to the Most Reverend Cyril C. Cowderoy, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Southwark, who released him from parochial duties between 1966 and 1973 and enabled him to do full-time research.”

Unless there were two Father John Maxwells assigned to the Diocese of Southwark (or I’m overlooking some other possibility), then the author died on August 19, 2007.

Six years later, I wrote to the Secretary and Webmaster of the Archdiocese of Southwark about Fr. Maxwell. I did not hear back. Today [June 10, 2021] I reached out again to that person on LinkedIn.

Barry Rose, who published the book in 1975 when he was 52, passed away in 2005 at age 82. He sold the company; its new owners renamed it Barry Rose Law Publishers Ltd. An internet search yields an address (5 East Row, PO19 1PG, Chichester, West Sussex England), a phone number (01243 783637), and an email address, which I used today to inquire about who holds the copyright. Minutes later I got this bounce-back:

Address not found: Your message wasn’t delivered to books@barry-rose-law.co.uk because the domain barry-rose-law.co.uk couldn’t be found.

If you know anyone who knows how to get to the bottom of this copyright matter, I’d be grateful to hear from him or her. Slavery and the Catholic Church deserves a better platform than my old site (which, like its owner, won’t be around forever). [Given the subject matter, it is ironic that the search for copyright might limit the reach of this study.—A.G.F.]

What reinforced my conviction was a long, one-star 2015 Amazon “review” of Slavery and the Catholic Church by one “Jeri” entitled “The information in this book is biased and poorly organized.” It starts with this sentence fragment—”A biased and confusing book which leaves out the most important historical points”—and goes downhill from there. Continue reading “Slavery and the Catholic Church: Father John Maxwell’s neglected study”

Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 1: A Daunting Task Beckons

[Also on Substack.] The daunting task arises out of my return to philosophy as the launch of my Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers approaches. The book’s not out yet, but I must begin to consider what I will focus on once it is.

I’m returning to philosophy, not to try to solve its problems, but rather to identify the problem that all writers, trained in philosophy or not, face as soon as they affirm or deny anything of substance, namely, the problem of diversity in philosophy.

I call this the problem, or rather “metaproblem,” of dialectic. A writer can evade it, of course, but not integrally. To address the metaproblem, I’ll need a metaphilosophy, which seeks to solve not traditional philosophical problems, but rather the problem of philosophy (or theology) itself, the problem that attaches to the maddening array of choices these fields present to the inquirer.

I will be testing the foundation laid out in Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him and more doctrinally articulated in my new book, cited above.

The foundation for this daunting task is, as I hope you might expect, Christ as He’s revealed in His Word as His Spirit has illuminated it for me with the help of those in whom He’s similarly worked.

You cannot, however, predict from generic information about me how I will approach the problem of dialectic. There will be nothing cookie-cutter or off-the-shelf about it. I promise not to make your eyes glaze over by intoning “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” Do not overlook the material, some written by me, referenced in the notes. They will prove useful for future installments of this series. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Dialectic, Part 1: A Daunting Task Beckons”

For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press

Otis Q. Sellers, March 25, 1901-February 23, 1992. This is how he looked when he attended Moody 1921.

[Also on Substack] In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The charred remains of Jefferson Hill, his wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.[1]

An octave of days later, on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Sellers Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. A few weeks earlier, on March 9, The New York Times had noted the publication of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. When Otis was a half-year-old, an anarchist’s bullet felled William McKinley, the fifth of seven US presidents to hail from the Buckeye State. Theodore Roosevelt, his successor, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. A month after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt made history by inviting Washington to dine with him at the White House.[2]

America’s adventure in the Philippines would last another year. The Progressive era ended with America’s entry into the European war, but that carnage was not even on the horizon. At the turn of the century, America was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in science’s promise. The month preceding Otis’s birth, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. The day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[3] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[4] Bad news, local or national, could not dampen the country’s upbeat mood.

Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that was Ohio ran deep, even back to the country’s founding. Otis’s great-grandfather, John H. Sellers, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works; another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman and entrepreneur who founded the city in 1873 (and named it after himself). Otis said he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy, but he did mention Grover, if rarely.[5] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.[6]

Continue reading “For the Quasquicentennial of Otis Q. Sellers, an Excerpt from “Christian Individualism,” to be published this year by Atmosphere Press”

What kind of Muslim is Wajahat Ali? (with a new preface)

This question (which I first asked in 2019, and which may also be asked about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani) is still vital, given that Islam, which is irreformable, remains a perennial mortal threat to Western Civilization. The smug musings of Wajahat Ali, the New York Times pundit, inside the progressive echo chamber, are devoid of a single thought-provoking insight. He’s but a stand-in for any number of virtue-signaling “thought leaders” whom I pick on merely because they’re foils for my smug musings. I’ll leave it to you to note what has changed since New Year’s Day 2019 and what hasn’t.—A.G.F.  

Every year around Christmas, illiberal “liberals” (a.k.a. “progressives”) lecture Christians, mostly those of the white conservative persuasion, about the “true meaning” of Jesus and how they obscure it. This year is no different.

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez. D-Ill., questions Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she testifies before the House Judiciary Committee Dec. 20, 2018. The congressman could have benefitted from getting manners for Christmas. Photo: SARAH SILBIGER /NYT / NYTNSRetiring Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) recently shouted at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “Shame on everybody that separates children and allows them to stay at the other side of the border fearing death, fearing hunger, fearing sickness,” he fulminated. “Shame on us for wearing our badge of Christianity during Christmas and allow the secretary to come here and lie!”

He  bolted from the hearing room before she could respond to his slander.

Gutierrez’s rhetoric was on par with his manners: the Roman Empire had impressive walls, but none prevented migration from Judea to Egypt, i.e., from one Roman province to another.

A few days after Gutierrez’s theatrics, the day after Christmas, Gustavo Perez Arriaga—gang-banger, DUI violator, and illegal immigrant—murdered Newman California Police Corporal Ronil Singh, thereby separating his child and wife from him. Permanently.Image result for ronil singh

Arriaga had snuck into the U.S. through Arizona. How many others like him are in the caravan passing through (if you can believe it) Arriaga, Mexico? Is it un-Christian to ask how likely any of them are to make orphans out of American children?

Or are we morally allowed to fixate solely on the tragedy of children whose migrant parents expose them to harm, sometimes fatally?

Wajahat Ali is a Muslim, perhaps the way Gutierrez is a Christian. He’s a Progressive who focuses on combating “hate,” especially “Islamophobia.” Cafeteria-style, he picks out what he likes about Islam and ignores the embarrassing remainder as if they were accidental features of Islam.

Wajahat Ali with the cover of his memoir, “Go Back to Where You Came From”

That is, Ali provides what William Kirkpatrick calls the “smiley-faced version of Islam which emphasizes the commonalities with Catholicism and leaves out the scary parts.” (“Pope Francis, Indifferentism, and Islamization,” Crisis Magazine, December 31, 2018)

Continue reading “What kind of Muslim is Wajahat Ali? (with a new preface)”

Emil Brunner was no Christian Individualist, but he had Rome’s number, and Otis Q. Sellers took careful note

Emil Brunner (1889-1966)

[Also on Substack]

And Otis Q. Sellers was no Neo-Orthodox. Yet, as I noted in a previous article, he found 1953 The Misunderstanding of the Church by Emil Brunner (1889-1966) valuable for contextualizing his own ecclesiology. So do I.

Brunner was clear about Rome’s conceit concerning its authority: she must ever try to discredit Sola Scriptura, the Reformation principle that affirms the Bible’s final authority, an effort that has effectively meant replacing it with Sola Ecclesia, Rome’s putative “magisterium.”

The following are salient paragraphs from Chapter 4 of Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church (trans. Harold Knight, The Westminster Press, 1953, 41-45). I’ve broken up paragraphs for ease of reading and copy-edited them lightly. Annotations are in square brackets.

“Oh,” today’s Catholic might protest, “we don’t believe that anymore!” Really? Then what would be left of Rome’s much vaunted theological unity, her alternative to Protestant “anarchy”?

Who believes that the Jesuits of the 16th century would not have every LGBTQ-friendly Jesuit of the 21st, along with their Vatican allies, burnt at the stake?

Who believes that Leo XIII (r. 1878 to 1903) would not have excommunicated Leo XIV?

I expound the scriptural basis of Sellers’s dispensationalist ecclesiology—non-Darby/Scofield, I hasten to add!—in Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, which I expect to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press. It’s in the interior design phase. Continue reading “Emil Brunner was no Christian Individualist, but he had Rome’s number, and Otis Q. Sellers took careful note”