Yeshiva University benefactor Zygi Wilf is at it again.

An East Hampton property owner has been flagged for a penalty for injuring or removing trees on public property.

… A code enforcement officer responded [to a complaint] and directed the contractor “to cease all work on the village easement until he gets further direction and/or approval” from the village.

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray to God my clit to take.
For it would be a sin to be
Buried with that filth on me.

Bless my surgeons, make them close
My labia to please my beaus.
Keep me ever in thy sight;
So to all I say good night.

UD‘s mother used to quote the end of these lines a lot – every prospect pleases, / And only man is vile – because she thought the sentiment was funny, and because it seemed to apply to a lot of the places she found herself (UD recalls her reciting it one summer on a crowded Ocean City Maryland beach). UD finally checked the source of the lines – the notorious From Greenland’s Icy Mountains – and now sees that for Reginald Heber “vile” simply meant heathen…

Baylor: A criminal enterprise and a noisily self-regarding Christian university.

Rather like Bernard Madoff and Orthodox Judaism.

There’s everything to be said, criminal-enterprise-wise, for a covering of piety.

Sometimes events are too bizarre for us to assimilate directly, and that is where literature comes in. “We have art,” said Nietzsche, “in order not to perish of the truth.” And in order, he might have added, not to perish of confusion in the face of certain outcomes. When one of this country’s Super Bowl heroes is a killer who scrawls a bible verse on his forehead with a red marker (not with his own blood, as first luridly reported) and then hangs himself from his jail cell window, we need a little assistance.

Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 tale, “Parker’s Back,” helps point us, in the oblique way of art, toward some of the underlying truths, I think, of the Aaron Hernandez story. No one explored the links between violence and piety better than O’Connor.

Like Hernandez, O’Connor’s main character, O.E. Parker, is a big, vain, restless, bellicose, substance-abusing, tattoo-blanketed young man with a weird relationship to religion. He lives in a very Christian environment (this is paralleled in the real world by all the coaches – Urban Meyer at the University of Florida in particular – who tried to Christianize Hernandez) , and everyone’s always trying to draw him to the revival tent; but though he’s willing to listen, and though he marries a starkly fundamentalist woman, he stays aloof. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, except in one instance: “It was himself he could not understand.”

Parker’s tattoos are all-terrain manifestations of obscure furies: “His dissatisfaction [was] acute, and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [on his skin] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare.” When his mysterious rage really acts up, he inks another predator on himself, lets that do the talking, and somewhat calms down: “Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo.” By now, he’s running out of room: “With the aid of mirrors [an] artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl.”

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Aaron Hernandez’s tattoos were more varied than his fictional doppelganger’s: Mom and Dad; symbols of the gang to which he belonged; abstract designs. But in one crucial respect O’Connor’s character and Hernandez were aesthetic twins: Both men sported large images of Jesus on their backs. Parker has his done after a particularly intense bout of typically enigmatic destructive rage. Among a panoply of Jesus images to choose from in his tattoo artist’s book, Parker is irresistibly drawn to “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.”

Looking, with the use of mirrors, at the completed tattoo, he remarks on the way “The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him — still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.” He’s thrilled with the tattoo, and can’t wait to get home to his wife, who, with her pious Christian ways, will, he’s sure, be just as thrilled (she’s appalled at his idolatry). But because he’s so excited, Parker also wants to get rip-roaring drunk, so he delays his return in order to spend some time in a bar/pool hall, where his friends insist on seeing his latest tattoo.

When they laugh at what a religious fanatic he’s become (Parker objects that he hasn’t a religious bone in his body), he “lunge[s] into the midst of them and like a whirlwind on a summer’s day there [begins] a fight that rage[s] amid overturned tables and swinging fists” until he gets thrown out.

“Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary.”

Aaron Hernandez’s back-tattoo was far more benign than Parker’s, a kitschy meek and mild thorns-bearer who gazes up at sympathetic doves and angels.

While Parker seems to have wanted to carry the weight of a permanently judgmental Jesus on his back, Hernandez’s tattoo seems to have been more of a Jesus-has-got-my-back number. Indeed, during his murder trial, prosecutors made much of another religious tattoo of his, a smoking gun on whose muzzle GOD FORGIVES appears. The biblical verse Hernandez wrote on his forehead in death also goes to salvation.

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So what can we say of these actual and fictive macho men, unable to understand or accept their physical nature (reports are emerging that fear of his bisexuality becoming public motivated Hernandez to commit murder), equally unable to take on the reality of a soul, and so desperate in their muteness to express something that they raked their skin with messages?

“My father believed that man by nature was a mess,” writes Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It of his preacher father, “and had fallen from an original state of grace.” Pretty much all of Flannery O’Connor’s characters are a mess, grappling with the quandary of having been born a human being in a world riddled with physical and metaphysical traps.

In the world of O’Connor, the existence of a salvific god is not at all good news, since it simply oppresses most of us with a sense of failure relative to the obligations a serious religious life demands. (Parker’s soul “was not at all important to him” but “appeared to be necessary.”) Aaron Hernandez came up in the pagan world of gangs and made a smooth transition from that reviled violence to the venerated violence of football (his family thinks most of his problems can be traced to concussions he got on the field), but, as with Parker, he absorbed the idea that although he didn’t seem to have one – or at best, he had a flimsy web of facts and lies – having a soul was as necessary as having a body.

Neither of these men, let us say, had a soul, or even wanted one. Neither had any of the stuff we associate with a soul – like a conscience. Neither could even conceptualize such a thing as a soul, even when they sat down, bloodied after a fight like Parker, and really thought about it. The best they could do was acknowledge the importance of soulfulness to other people and therefore try to mimic the condition. Please the coach, please the wife. The pathetic literalness of their backside Jesuses was the best they could do; it was an offering to a world of believers from a world of pagans — pagans miserable and belligerent at having been expelled from their idolatrous world.

… at Yeshiva University, where his hijinks have long since made him a folk hero. But he’s outdone himself with his latest comments about an invited campus speaker he didn’t like.

The Yeshiva Commentator newspaper asked Schachter why he and one of his fanboys tore down posters publicizing the event.

“I don’t have to be insulted in my own institution. I have rabbanim in New Jersey who are always attacking me, always attacking all the faculty here in the Yeshiva. So it’s bad enough that they attack us in New Jersey, in the newspapers, and so on. We have to invite them into the Yeshiva to be mevazeh all the rebbes? They give an opinion that none of us know anything, they know better than all of us – I think that’s a chutzpah. Congress wouldn’t invite a communist to speak in Congress to explain communism. We’re not interested in communism. [The speaker] represents a different shittah, a total insult to all the rebbes in Yeshiva.”

When pressed if he takes issue with a specific article or statement issued by [speaker] Rabbi Klapper, Rabbi Schachter responded to the author, “You were born yesterday. I’m a little older than you. We have known the man for many years. He doesn’t represent our hashkafah at all! I think there are more important things to write in The Commentator. I said a fantastic shiur [Talmudic study lesson] today and yesterday – why don’t they write that up? Why do they write stupid things? This is not newsworthy. The shiur that I said is newsworthy.”

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Schachter also

object[s] to the study of the Christian Bible, … sees the work of Geoffrey Chaucer as expendable and [thinks] that 50 percent of an art history course is probably ‘avodah zara and gilui arayot’ (idolatry and licentiousness).

Schachter told a gathering of Orthodox leaders that

Jewish communities should set up their own review boards to evaluate any complaints of child sexual abuse and determine whether to bother with the police. This contradicts state laws on mandatory reporting for teachers, counselors, physicians and such.

Schachter further discouraged police involvement by warning that accused abusers could wind up “in a cell together with a shvartze, in a cell with a Muslim, a black Muslim who wants to kill all the Jews.” Shvartze is a harshly derogatory racial term.

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To be read by only those with the very strongest stomachs.

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The women all grab their phylacter
When they hear the approach of H. Schachter
He tells them they’re apes
He covers up rapes
He’s a one-person shonda enactor

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Yeshiva University: A financial and moral ruin overseen by clowns.

“When something becomes a religion, we don’t choose the actions that are most likely to solve [any particular] problem,” said [Jonathan] Haidt, the author of the 2012 best seller “The Righteous Mind” and a professor at New York University. “We do the things that are the most ritually satisfying.”

He added that what he saw in footage of the confrontation at Middlebury “was a modern-day auto-da-fé: the celebration of a religious rite by burning the blasphemer.”

The protesters didn’t use [Charles] Murray’s presence as an occasion to hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him. They swarmed and swore.

The claim here is that a segment of intelligent American college students was – at least for the duration of a gathering – a tribe, swarming and swearing with the righteous, violent, ritually satisfying, ways of its tribe. This is the villagers of The Lottery, assuring themselves of an orderly world and a good harvest by stoning a chosen villager.

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If you’re going to go to college, and you have these tribal tendencies, they can fall roughly two ways – call them Football and Foliage. Foliage refers to private small landscaped tribal grounds, Football public large arena’d grounds. Here’s how one commentator describes and justifies the latter:

Look at the shirtless boys with faces and torsos painted in the school colors; look at the cheerleaders on the fields, the ‘waves’ surging through the stands.

American universities, those temples of reason (at their best), are tribes… If you want your students to become loyal, giving alumni, you must turn them into members of a tribe.

Paradoxically, the temple of reason, if it is to survive financially, must turn its students into a tribe. It must use all of its resources to do exactly the opposite of what universities are supposed to do — sustain and strengthen human reason. Tribal fraternities, tribal football teams, tribal fans — these are the often dangerous ritual actors some public campuses encourage.

Some private campuses offer the ritual satisfaction of enforced intellectual loyalties.

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Andrew Sullivan on religious aspects of the event.

If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you’re a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. If you think that arguments and ideas can have a life independent of “white supremacy,” you are complicit in evil. And you are not just complicit, your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can’t reason with heresy. You have to ban it. It will contaminate others’ souls, and wound them irreparably.

… [At one point,] the students start clapping in unison, and you can feel the hysteria rising, as the chants grow louder. “Your message is hatred. We will not tolerate it!” The final climactic chant is “Shut it down! Shut it down!” It feels like something out of The Crucible. Most of the students have never read a word of Murray’s — and many professors who supported the shutdown admitted as much. But the intersectional zeal is so great he must be banished — even to the point of physical violence.

This matters, it seems to me, because reason and empirical debate are essential to the functioning of a liberal democracy. We need a common discourse to deliberate. We need facts independent of anyone’s ideology or political side, if we are to survive as a free and democratic society. Trump has surely shown us this. And if a university cannot allow these facts and arguments to be freely engaged, then nowhere is safe. Universities are the sanctuary cities of reason. If reason must be subordinate to ideology even there, our experiment in self-government is over.

Liberal democracy is suffering from a concussion as surely as Allison [Stanger] is.

David Garland, Baylor University’s president, speaks:

I don’t know any school that has been as transparent as we have and taken the extraordinary actions we have… We’ve also published, on our website, findings of fact which in many ways are findings of fault… From a Christian perspective, we’ve confessed our sins, tried to repent and tried to make restitution.

Deadspin’s Tom Ley responds:

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen someone pack so many lies into so few sentences. [The] findings of fact report that Garland deems to have been such an extraordinary act of transparency was nothing more than a 13-page summary of the law firm Pepper Hamilton’s investigation into the school’s failure to handle sexual assault allegations. That summary contained almost no specifics, and there is no written record of Pepper Hamilton’s full investigation because the school asked the firm to deliver its report to the regents orally.

As for Garland’s appeal to look at his school’s actions from a Christian perspective, all he’s doing here is pulling the same sleight of hand that so many institutions that operate under the umbrella of Christianity have pulled so many times before: He’s taking the concept of redemption to mean that properly-identified Christians, like himself, always have a free pass waiting for them. This is how a hollow document, a few scapegoat firings, and engaging in legal battles with victims become repentance. Being a good Christian means whatever the good Christian wants it to mean, and David Garland fancies himself a good Christian.

Baylor University’s director of sports ministry will leave the school this summer…

[Wes] Yeary testified in defense of former football player Sam Ukwuachu, who was later convicted of sexual assault. Yeary said he would be comfortable with Ukwuachu returning to his home and being around his children.

Yeary also testified that Ukwuachu’s victim told him about the assault. He said he told her that if she would have called him on the night of the rape, he would have given her a ride home.

Yeary was allegedly involved in a separate case involving former Baylor football player Devin Chafin, who was dismissed from the football team June 1.

In a Title IX lawsuit against the university, Dolores Lozano accuses Baylor officials of not adequately responding to her claims of domestic violence against Chafin.

Lozano reported an assault to Yeary, the suit alleges, and Yeary then gave her literature to assist her in spiritual self-worth and preservation.

… Ira Rennert, once again reminds students at the Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute how it’s done.

Loot, loot, loot; and then when you’re caught, appeal, appeal, appeal.

Go to it, kids!

Texas Christian University’s most militant Disciples of Christ are to be found on its football team, where select players routinely fan out among the non-football-playing student population on campus and beat the shit out of them.

The bloodied president of the team’s booster club, The Flagellants, recently issued a statement: “For the greater glory of God.”

… and Blotto God …

If your university worships football, then Johnny Manziel and Richie Incognito and Jameis Winston and so many others in the pantheon shock and appall you again and again as they spit on the divinity you have granted them and leave your school as lost as the nation of North Korea will be, should The Dear Leader ever be called home.

The latest scene of disillusion and devastation is the University of Oklahoma, whose quarterback is a drunk who gets in fights with cops and then, when they try to arrest him, flees. A local scribe puts this football-god violence in the context of all the other such violence in the program and concludes it’s a real shame and something should definitely be done about it.

These are tough days for Sooner football. Not as tough as the final days of the Switzer Era when guns and drugs and woes abounded, and yet, the release of the Joe Mixon video and the revelation that Dede Westbrook was twice arrested for domestic violence before arriving in Norman has stained the program.

Stained? Woe unto thee, scribes and Pharisees! Be careful, when thou liest safe and soft, lest thou forget Baylor.

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UD thanks two of her readers for the Jameis Winston link.

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The tweets are coming in.

Positive for Oklahoma fans is at least Baker Mayfield wasn’t charged with punching any women.

All in good time my little pretty; all in good time.

Kim “Knock Them Right in the Face” Mulkey.

… Marine Le Pen’s refusal to meet with a Muslim leader because he insists she wear a veil to the meeting is magnifique.

“You can pass on my respects to the grand mufti, but I will not cover myself up,” she said.

Absolutely. Lots of women are compelled to veil themselves; they need to see high-profile women around the world refusing to. It might help.

It’s a little late to start worrying about that.