His works are no longer relevant to the younger generations.

Admittedly he was a genius. But this genius is slowly going out of fashion, and he could also be subjected to questions.

Woke culture is coming. Universal contrition is scheduled.

Colonial Picasso! Patriarchal Picasso! White male Picasso!

As we are rewriting Roald Dahl's novels, what should be done with Picasso's paintings?

• Should we take them down because he behaved badly with his muses?
• Should we hide his iconic lithographs of the corrida, the traditional Spanish bullfight, to comply with the demands of animal rights advocates?
• Should we denounce the artist's "cultural appropriation" and his insensitivity to the suffering of the colonized?
• Will his collection of African masks be returned?

These questions might have seemed absurd at one time. Not anymore.

In fact, the Picasso Museum in Paris, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has taken them seriously, although without ever saying so.

The answer given by Cécile Debray, the director of the Parisian institution, is very clever.

Contrary to what the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam did with poor old Rembrandt and some others Dutch masters, one will not find in her museum those edifying cartels that the deacons and abbesses of woke establishment hasten to pin up everywhere.

Debray first added a touch of fashion by entrusting Sir Paul Smith with a dressing up of her permanent collections.

The British stylist did it with a mixture of energy, vivacity, and humility.

Rather than trying to show off, he took the option of paraphrasing the works, copying and multiplying the motifs, here the checks of a harlequin, there stripes ...

It's a success. Packaging makes the buzz.

A new public is coming. And while we are talking about the decoration, well, we just forget fighting cultural wars.

Well done, right?

Beautiful, efficient, impeccable.

A model approach that could inspire others

Questions of gender or identity remain.

But while any question that haunts its time is by nature legitimate, it's usually the answers that lack consistency.

The reopening of the French museum coincides with a very contemporary but absolutely magnificent exhibition dedicated to American artist Faith Ringgold (New York, 1930).

The retrospective is entitled "Black is Beautiful", which has been translated in French, rather significantly, as "Being a black person is beautiful".

Ringgold, a feminist and civil rights activist, is a great artist.

She is perfectly at home with Picasso.

The Afro-American painter and sculptor dialogues with the Spanish-French artist of "Guernica" and "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon".

The museum has hung some other works among the permanent collections, dealing mostly with postcolonialism, to complement the Picasso's art.

Chéri Samba, born in 1956, Obi Okigbo (1964) and Mickalene Thomas (1971), engage in an admiring dialogue with Picasso.

Borrowing from the great borrower that Picasso was is more fruitful than claiming to correct or trying to cancel. And now the giant looks more contemporary, less "old 20th century".

Faith Ringgold, like Picasso, also "borrowed": from European painting, Tibetan tankas, popular art... Art is a perpetual dialogue.

What is taken does not take anything away, it's always an addition. Masterpieces are mirrors in which we look at ourselves. Our questions may not be those that the artist asked himself.

The Picasso Museum's approach is a model of its kind and could inspire many cultural institutions, exhibition curators and publishers.

Art and literature must not be put under a bell or subjected to a hypocritical mea culpa.

Questioning, shifting, and bringing them together can sharpen the critical mind.

Seeing the Picasso Museum full of teenagers of various identities and young adults, on an ordinary afternoon, was comforting. Betting on intelligence does works.

• Jean-Pierre Denis is a columnist and writer based in Paris. After a long tenure as editor-in-chief of one the leading French Catholic magazines, he is now the publisher of La Croix's international publications.
• First published in La Croix International. Republished with permission.

An older campaign by feminists, including those working in the world of liturgy, sought to shun male pronouns — particularly when either gender is meant — in favour of plural they-them-their usage with singular antecedents.

This increasingly common wording is of course grammatically incorrect given the structure of the English language and can be confusing for readers.

That's now combined with the efforts of transgender and nonbinary advocates to suppress gender-specific adjectives by applying that same singular "they" along with newly crafted pronouns.

A list of such neologisms recommended at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — said to be non-exhaustive — covers ae, e, ey, fae, per, sie, tey, ve xe, ze and zie.

So, for example, with "xe," the variants to parallel she-her-hers-herself are xem-xyr-xyrs-xemself.

As you would expect, references to God himself — or is that "themself"? — are now part of this debate.

Religion News Service ran a column last week from one of its regulars, Mark Silk, headlined "Why our preferred pronoun for God should be 'they.'"

He thinks calling God "they," not "he," and similar verbal tactics have become "imperative."

How would other progressives respond? His proposal was immediately publicized in a tweet from RNS' Roman Catholic columnist, Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, and the online comments began flowing.

Silk is the director of Trinity College's Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, former editor of its now-defunct Religion in the News magazine and well-known on the beat otherwise — for instance as a one-time reporter and editorial writer on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of "Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America" (1995).

Your biblical sources could explore the idea as follows:

Theologians would agree with Silk's starting point, that although male singular personal pronouns are used in English to refer to the God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, "God is not gendered" according to the teaching of all three faiths.

Why our preferred pronoun for God should be 'they' https://t.co/neL2e6lOyB via @RNS @directorsilk
— Thomas Reese, S.J. (@ThomasReeseSJ) September 29, 2021

How might we get around this?

"It" instead of "he" doesn't work because God is personal. Silk acknowledges that speaking of God by his preferred plural "they" instead of "he" could seem to "undermine monotheism," the belief in the one and only God that is at the heart of all three of these world religions.

A problem? "No," Silk insists, because in the Hebrew Bible, the plural form Elohim refers to Israel's God and collectively to other gods. He says experts can ponder whether this "signifies an embedded polytheism in ancient Judaism."

The "New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible" is among resources that explain Elohim in plural form "is the usual name of the one true God," expressed "as the plural of majesty," and also serves in Scripture as the common noun for plural divinities in general.

Looking to the past, one such project that pretty much flopped was the production of "inclusive language" rewrites of the standard three-year lectionary cycle of Bible readings by the National Council of Churches that were issued by several mainline Protestant book houses in 1983-1985.

With "his" forbidden, the repeated guttural sounds became almost comical as in, for example, Isaiah 62:8: "God has sworn by God's right hand and by God's mighty arm."

In the effort to shun "kingdom," the NCC's "reign of God" sounded like precipitation, not sovereignty. Eyebrows arched especially when the NCC team began the Lord's Prayer with the alternate reading "O God, Father and Mother, hallowed be your name." As with Silk's "they," critics complained that this seemed to evoke a belief in two deities, not one.

• Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for AP, Christianity Today and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.
• Published in Religion Unplugged. Reproduced with permission.

In his new book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, Rod Dreher - author of the New York Times bestselling hit The Benedict Option - warns that increasingly extreme leftwing ‘woke' groups pose a serious threat to the freedoms enjoyed in Western society.

However, speaking to a small group of journalists and representatives from Catholic associations following the Rome presentation of the book, Dreher said he sees new threats also coming from the right.

The main concern, in Dreher's view, is "wokeness, the soft totalitarianism of the left, but that's not the only threat.

We've seen emerge on the right fanatical illiberalism that has the same qualities, but from the right. I'm talking about QAnon, which is all about conspiracy theories."

QAnon is an umbrella term referring to a widespread set of internet conspiracy theories that allege that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, most of whom are on the left.

Once a small fringe group no one paid much heed to, QAnon has now gone mainstream, with believers playing a key role in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots, and their activities have become increasingly violent.

"What I'm really afraid of," Dreher said, "is that this radical left-wing in power is going to inspire the radical right, especially the racist right, to rise up and make conflict."

"As Christians, we have to reject all totalitarianism, all anti-Christian doctrines, whether it's from the woke left or the racist right," he said.

Dreher gained international fame for his 2017 work, The Benedict Option, in which he argues that Christians can "no longer live business-as-usual lives in America," and must develop "creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them."

In his new book, Dreher goes further, arguing that a form of "soft totalitarianism" is overtaking the West, posing a threat to Christian culture through the subtle imposition of a leftist ideology, any opposition to which could potentially result in a hefty fine, a jail sentence, or the loss of one's business. Continue reading

In 2005, his research for the BBC's Newsnight identified the young David Cameron's appeal to the public as a potential Conservative leader.

The following year, the Connecticut-born consultant sent a wave of turbulence coursing through the Labour conference in Manchester with his claim — again, based on focus groups — that the then-home secretary, John Reid, would be a more popular successor to Tony Blair than Gordon Brown.

Though he no longer describes himself as a Republican, Luntz's influence upon that party's presentation and image at every level of American politics has been so great over the years that he features as a character in Adam McKay's film about Dick Cheney, Vice.

All of which is to say: his work is worth heeding.

Frank Luntz

In a survey for the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank published this week, based on 3,000 interviews, Luntz concludes that "wokeism" is set to become the most significant dividing line in British politics.

Indeed, more striking than North versus South, London versus the rest of the UK, or young versus old — on course, depressingly, to match the culture wars that have long afflicted the US.

For instance: a third of Labour voters already support the "cancellation" of people who hold views with which they disagree.

No less strikingly, 52 per cent of them believe that "the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation".

On the Conservative side, that conviction is shared by only 19 per cent, compared with 81 per cent who still believe that this is a country of "equality and freedom".

Among all voters, the trend is clear — 40 per cent believe that cancel culture enforces a "thought and speech police" that has the potential to wreck lives — though 25 per cent think it is right that those who infringe modern speech codes should "face the consequences".

More than half of adults under 30 say they have indeed cancelled someone — ceased communication with them — because of their opinions.

"The problem with woke and with cancel culture is that it is never done. The conflict and divisions never end," Luntz said.

"This is not what the people of the UK want — but it's coming anyway."

This should be no real surprise to Londoners.

We have watched as London's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been engulfed by ugly attacks on his ethnicity, religion, and identity — becoming, as he put it in May, a reluctant "poster boy" for the new culture wars.

And we have watched as London's schools, colleges and publishing houses have been swept by bitter and often fatuous rows over who gets to say what about whom, and what constitutes acceptable speech in 2021.

Luntz's point is that this trend is as regrettable as it is strong — and, in this respect, he is right.

So much good has already come from the new social justice movements: from the #MeToo campaign, via the simple assertion that Black Lives Matter, to the increasing recognition that gender diversity is a feature of the 21st-century social landscape.

In the global protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, there was a collective determination that the battle against racial and social injustice should be accelerated.

All too quickly, however, that resolve mostly dissipated into noisy but inconsequential arguments about statues, the propriety of taking the knee, the allegedly offensive names of schools and streets, even the work that art gallery shops should stock.

Such rows are deeply divisive — but lead nowhere. They do not improve the lives of the disenfranchised or the disempowered by a jot. Continue reading

This can bring a certain clarity and resolve as more people grasp what is happening.

The stories of woke toxicity coming out of elite secular prep schools follow similar patterns: a top-down implementation of extreme "antiracism" and gender ideology in the curriculum, progressive parents speaking out in anonymity due to fear of reprisal, and students feeling pressured to affirm and parrot the new creed.

It's not just happening at secular schools.

In the fall of 2020, at Loyola Academy, a tony Catholic prep school outside of Chicago, parents began whispering to one another about the loud and swiftly-escalating political ideology pressing into all corners of their kids' education.

The high-paid diversity consultants brought in for the sake of training faculty and students were an early warning sign.

Teachers including their gender pronouns in Zoom meetings was another.

Students were racially segregated for school assignments on privilege.

A working-class student was bewildered to learn that because of his skin colour he is an oppressor to his peers, some of whom live in multi-million-dollar homes.

In a video recording of one of the diversity training sessions, a student asks a consultant what he thinks of the phrase "ACAB" (All Cops Are Bastards).

After seeming to not know what the acronym stood for (despite it being commonly written on signs and chanted at Black Lives Matter rallies) he went on to authoritatively misinterpret the plain meaning of the words.

"When you hear something like ‘ACAB,' it's a reflection of anger," he instructed.

"A lot of times I think the mistake that people make, people take it personally. But we're actually asking structural questions."

I wonder — if students were chanting, "All Diversity Consultants Are Idiots" would that be taken personally or structurally by the diversity consultant?

This exchange between student and consultant introduces to the students' minds one key woke tactic and a central woke dogma.

The tactic is to make people doubt their ability to interpret reality and plain language without a woke expert shepherding them to the approved interpretation.

The dogma is that there is no such thing as a universal principle.

What all reasonable people know to be grotesque — collectivized personal vilification — is deemed to be acceptable when deployed by some people, but not by others.

Most kids have an innate sense of fairness and intuit that a principle must be applied universally if it is to be a principle at all.

Undoing that moral understanding is done by design, and is an essential step in re-educating them into the ideology.

Marxism Syndrome By Proxy

Upon watching this school diversity video, one mother described it as "chilling," especially seeing the effects of these ideas as they took hold of the students and reverberated into the larger school community.

Once unified, many families report the school now is fractured and marked by suspicion.

"People did not feel the school was ripped apart by racism, but now they do. It is heartbreaking," the mother relayed.

"There are a handful of people who are driving this and not allowing moderating voices. This doesn't represent the community or many of the teachers, or the coaches. This is not a racist institution. Our families have always stepped in and stepped up to make sure everyone feels included and is looked after."

In the movie The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment plays a child who can see dead people. A young girl who had been chronically sick during her short life reaches out to Osment's character from beyond the grave to give him a videotape, instructing him to show it to her father.

At the girl's wake, Osment's character presents the video to the dad, who is shocked to find that it contains footage of his wife intentionally spiking her daughter's meals with some sort of poison that causes and maintains the sickness that eventually kills her.

Through this scene, many people were introduced to Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a mental disorder whereby a caretaker invents, exaggerates and often causes an illness in a child.

People with MSBP seem attentive and motivated by care and compassion. They can recite a litany of alleged poor symptoms, and demand tests and procedures to "cure" the child. All the while they skirt data and evidence that run afoul of the illness narrative.

In reality, though the child thinks she is sick, it is the caretaker, not the child, who really is sick (though the child might truly become sick as a direct result of the actions of the "compassionate" caretaker).

Usually, the only way this stops is if people who sense that something is amiss have the care and the courage to challenge the caretaker's narrative.

Many parents at Catholic schools, from high schools to even some grammar schools, have been rightly sensing that there is something very unjust in this justice movement.

Injustice can and should be fought, but why, they wonder, do the schools need to go beyond the canon of Catholic social teaching to address this?

The Church has a sophisticated, thorough and historically radical body of teaching — theological and philosophical — upholding the universal dignity of all persons and condemning racism as an intrinsic evil.

What do woke consultants and critical theory add that the Church has not covered?

This question remains unanswered because it cannot be answered in an honest way.

As I write in my book, Awake, Not Woke (TAN Books), the truth is that critical theory does not add to the Church's teaching. It assaults it in three fundamental ways. Continue reading

Black Americans originally popularized the term to describe an awareness of racism and social injustice, but it has been muddled by overuse in political jargon.

The political right, in turn, has sought to weaponize it.

For example, in the Catholic magazine The Crisis, Jonathan B. Coe made the accusation that "the Woke...have taken God off the throne of their hearts and minds and put themselves there. Instead of being submitted to a divine metanarrative (e.g., Scripture and Tradition), they are submitted to their own narrative."

The broad repudiation of "wokeness," however, violates a model of moral praxis affirmed in the Catholic tradition: the pastoral cycle, or "see-judge-act."

The concept of the pastoral cycle has always been implicitly present in our faith tradition, but St Pope John XXIII formally recognized it in "Mater et Magistra," thanks to the influence of Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, the founder of the Young Christian Worker movement, and the liberation theologians of Latin America.

He wrote, "First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of…[social] principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles" (No. 236).

This approach directs us to invoke our faith principles in a given situation only after we have immersed ourselves in the embodied experience of our neighbours, especially those who have been made vulnerable.

Whatever problems may be inherent in the concept of wokeness—David Brooks, for example, has argued that woke people prioritize the appearance of solidarity rather than practical action—it is fair to say that developing an awareness of the reality of our neighbours is relevant to the first step of the pastoral cycle: seeing.

Issues like climate change and systemic racism are labelled pejoratively by the political right as part of a "woke" agenda, but those concerned about such things have identified real and present threats.

There is overwhelming evidence that climate change is human-induced and must be curtailed.

Huge majorities of Black and Indigenous Americans tell us that systemic racism corrupts our institutions, and statistical data reflects this.

If the woke are overly concerned with perception, the "unwoke" have failed to perceive at all.

To be sure, there are some issues where this dynamic is reversed.

Affirming the dignity of the unborn comes readily to mind: The reluctance on the part of many on the political left to explicitly recognize that dignity is a grave moral oversight. Whatever side of the aisle we find ourselves, it can be tempting to accuse political opponents of being insufficiently aware of reality or to weaponize wokeness (or "unwokeness") as a way of pushing through policies that respond to a superficial understanding of an issue.

For example, we might insist on particular measures to reduce carbon emissions without concern for the people who will may lose their jobs in the process, or demand prohibitions on abortion that we assume will protect the unborn, despite studies indicating that better financial and social support for mothers is more effective at curbing abortion rates.

Failing to recognize such realities can distort our evaluative framework and make dialogue impossible.

Our faith requires more from us.

It is not enough to give the appearance of solidarity or to consider an issue from only one perspective.

Our political and moral lenses should not inhibit us from seeing the world through the eyes of the vulnerable—even, or perhaps especially when doing so challenges our dominant worldview.

We are called to seek out diverse and marginalized viewpoints, observing the complexities of human life in addition to studying empirical data.

Rather than clinging determinedly to our own convictions, we should immerse ourselves in the experience of our neighbours.

When we skip the "seeing" step of moral engagement, analyzing situations from a predetermined perspective or proposing solutions without first immersing ourselves in the experience of the vulnerable, we ensure that our actions never will respond sufficiently to a given issue. Continue reading