Jim Schutze: "So I guess it's this: He's a weird guy."

Rod Dreher has proclaimed that he is "taking a break from blogging on the Catholic scandal" (code for "Not-Sure-How-To-Respond-To-Mark-Shea's-Critique-So-Hiding-For-Now") in order to post tasteful photos and learn Tai Chi. So we will turn to Jim Schultze, a former Dallas colleague of Dreher's, for substantive analysis of his religious viewpoint. Here's a teaser:

My Home Depot source happens to know Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia, and called him to point out, just for grins, that Dreher actually believes in a syncretism of voodoo, Catholicism and vegetarianism (hence, Crunchy!), according to things he wrote here in Dallas.

I am unable to provide a link to The Dallas Morning News story that was perhaps the best example, an October 31, 2004 op-ed epistle headlined "A ghost in the family," but I can summarize: Various trailer-park-seeming misadventures the Dreher clan in Lousiana involving embezzlement, senility and late-life conjugation can be blamed on ghosts that had to exorcised by a Cajun lady who started vibrating violently and burned her hand when she touched the photo of the dead slut who had come back to haunt the socks off Rod. My Home Depot comrade felt that Dreher was not the one to be looking down his Coonass nose at Haitians and wrote to Freedman to tell him.

Read the whole thing; it's amusing.

Re: vegetarianism: I think Mr. Schutze is off here; he doesn't know about the sacramental chickens. However I don't know the word for vegetable-worship either.

Someone in the comments provides a link to the "Ghost in the Family" story, which I just read. Schutze is a bit mistaken on the plot, but not the overall B-movie tenor. It's one of those stories in which the embellishments are painfully obvious and you can just sort of feel the artistic license flowing liberally like gravy over less flavorful mashed potatoes. Kind of reminded me of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman for some doubtlessly oblique reason.