Monday, March 18, 2024

A lucky life

Joseph Epstein writes about "Writing My Autobiography" in the current First Things. I will happily read just about anything he writes:
My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life, with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life. Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life. ....

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America. ....

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past. .... (more)

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Politics in perspective

I've been a political addict ever since I campaigned for candidates in the 1960s—and politics is what I taught for thirty years—but in this year's political environment I sympathize with John Wilson's intended behavior:
I am myself dismayed, to put it mildly, at the prospect of a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, neither of whom I can vote for in good conscience. But I was more appalled and at the same time shamefully entertained by the excessive reaction, especially on the part of those for whom Trump’s candidacy—with a strong possibility of victory—is an occasion for apocalyptic pronouncements. ....

If Donald Trump is elected, it will not mean “the end of democracy.” If Joe Biden is elected, the world will keep turning. That’s not to say that no disasters may lie in store. The unthinkable can become reality overnight, as a look at the day’s news will remind us. But there is something shameful, something sickeningly bogus, in the huffing and puffing of those who claim, for instance, that “what happened in Germany in the 1930s is happening again in the US today.” ....

I am not looking forward to the prospect of the next few months in this election cycle. I won’t be following the “news” religiously (but Wendy and I will be going to church each Sunday). I won’t be watching and listening to the candidates. I am myself a caregiver, and I have to take care of myself in order to do my job; I have to preserve my sanity. Neither will I be living in a bunker or a cabin in the woods. My wife Wendy and our daughter Katy and our dear, aging cat Nina will muddle along. Wendy and I will listen to Anonymous 4 and Anouar Brahem and the blues while we work on jigsaws. I’ll putter away on a review or a column. Via DVD (we’re primitives), Wendy and I, sometimes joined by Katy, will watch old episodes featuring Brother Cadfael and Miss Marple and Perry Mason, black and white noirs and slapstick comedies lovingly restored....

And each day, weather permitting, Wendy and I will walk in the neighborhoods nearby. Wendy will groan when, on a nearby street, we pass the house of a man who has a flagpole with two flags: the American flag and a Trump flag. And on another nearby street, we will laugh as we pass the house with a little white dog who likes to sit on the back of a sofa, and who literally flings himself against the window, barking furiously, as we pass. It’s a wonderful life.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Christians in an anti-Christian culture

From Kevin DeYoung's review of Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture:
...Renn’s “three worlds” thesis isn’t a way to grade the overall Christianity of the country. It’s a framework for understanding how society views the reasonableness of Christian truths, the validity of Christian arguments, and the obligation we all have to live up to a basic standard of Christian virtue. Renn claims that we are living in a negative world, one that is deeply suspicious of Christianity (especially when it comes to issues of sexuality). He makes a persuasive case. ....

Renn argues that none of the familiar models of Christian engagement works in the negative world. The “culture war” strategy, as he calls it, specialized in decrying the erosion of our moral character. This strategy is truly effective only if our views are in the majority. In the positive world, it might be possible to raise the standard of Christian virtue and hope that a winning coalition will rally to our side. By contrast, the “seeker sensitivity” strategy argued for maximum personal and ecclesial flexibility so as not to turn off the suburban would-be churchgoer. This strategy often functioned as if aesthetic style and personal relationships were all that stood in the way of non-Christians’ embracing Christianity. Meanwhile, the “cultural engagement” approach sought to alleviate the concerns of educated city-dwellers: a kind of seeker sensitivity for skeptical cosmopolitan elites. Today’s cultural engagers, Renn believes, have morphed into another form of culture warrior, except that their war is not against the world but against other evangelicals. Renn acknowledges that all three approaches have something to teach us (insofar as courage, kindness, and understanding the people we mean to reach are Christian values); but as all-encompassing strategies, they are outdated.

I was also helped by Renn’s observation that Trump and wokeness are two key polarizers at work in re-sorting evangelicals. At least, if you take “Trump” to be less about voting for Trump (which some evangelicals may do while holding their noses) and more about an aggressive, populist, the-old-rules-don’t-work-anymore approach to cultural transformation, then Renn has hit upon an important point. Evangelicalism is being scrambled along those two axes: Are you opposed to wokeness, and are you opposed to Trumpism? It’s relatively straightforward to be opposed to one and for the other (or at least not terribly bothered by the other); the difficult space for Christians and churches is when you are opposed to both. ....

...[C]onservatives need a new way to talk to men and a new way to relate to the Republican Party. With both critiques, Renn doesn’t provide many answers, but he is right to highlight (concerning the former) how traditional complementarian discourse was tailored to second-wave feminism. Regarding the Republicans, he argues that evangelicals have gotten little for their political loyalty except pro-life judges. As he points out, the base of the Republican Party is increasingly made up of non-Christians and post-Christians, and gathers its energy from the dissident right—and from the growing ranks of “barstool conservatives,” who embrace coarse language and a locker room bro culture as much as they oppose left-wing hectoring and nanny-state conformity. This presents a challenge for conservative evangelicals who will never vote for Democrats, but who may find themselves in a party that pays lip service to the Religious Right while becoming more irreligious. ....

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Movies

I own a lot of movies. I have always loved movies and once it became affordable, I started buying them, first as videotapes, and then DVDs. Even though I can now stream films online I prefer the physical media because it can't be messed with by corporations "updating" them and because they are always available to me. I have most of the films I really want and consequently, when I do buy, it is usually an upgrade of one I particularly like and am certain to watch again.

Today I received a "Limited Edition" Blu-ray of The Shootist. It is one of my favorite John Wayne movies. It was his last. His character is dying of cancer as was Wayne. It had a great cast in addition to Wayne: Lauren Bacall, a teenage Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, Hugh O'Brien, Harry Morgan, John Carradine, and more. The director was Don Siegel.

From the description on the case:
John Bernard Books is the stuff of legend, a renowned 'shootist' whose reputation looms large. But it's 1901, and like the old west, John is dying and a reputation like his draws trouble like an outhouse draws flies. As word spreads that the famous gunfighter is on his last legs, the vultures begin to gather; old enemies, the marshal, newspaper men, an undertaker, all eager to see him dead. Other men might die quietly in bed or take their own lives, but J.B. Books will choose his executioner and face down death with a pistol in each hand.
My program for the evening is set.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

A peculiar people

Reading through a collection of quotations from Eric Hoffer, I came across one that seems especially relevant today:
The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.

Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Among the many countries excused for driving out people are Arab countries after 1948, driving out Jews in numbers approximating the number of Palestinians who fled Israel.

A refutation

Today Patrick Kurp refers to one of my favorite Samuel Johnson stories:
The best-known and still unchallenged refutation of the Irish Anglican Bishop George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism — he called it “immaterialism” — is recounted by James Boswell on August 6, 1763:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.’
Dr. Johnson’s demonstration of common sense is at once amusing, convincing, and somehow quintessentially English, the sort of act Jonathan Swift would have applauded... Johnson’s critics have dismissed his logic as fallacious and dubbed his approach argumentum ad lapidem — “argument to the stone” — so freshmen in Philosophy 101 and other sophisticates can feel vindicated. For the rest of us it’s QED. ....

Sunday, March 10, 2024

"Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice"

Douglas Murray's choice this week in his series, "Things Worth Remembering," is a sermon delivered by C.S. Lewis soon after the outbreak of World War II:
When I was at Oxford, I met the actor Robert Hardy, who told me that, as an undergraduate, he was fortunate enough to have had Tolkien as his tutor in Anglo-Saxon literature and C.S. Lewis as his tutor in Medieval English.

Both men became most famous for creating their own fantasy worlds—Tolkien with the Middle Earth of The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis with his Chronicles of Narnia series, which are often thought of as children’s books, but which are much more than that. ....

Lewis was not only a writer of scholarly books and popular fiction. He was also, perhaps, the foremost Christian apologist of the mid-twentieth century. His books and lectures—Fern-Seed and Elephants is a very good place to start—did something that very few people can do today.

Most professors, not least of literature, have no interest in communicating with a wide audience. They play games for other people in their field. They also seem to take exceptionally obvious or untrue ideas and try to spin them out in a way that makes really rather banal observations seem infinitely more complex than they are.

Lewis had the opposite skill—a real skill—which was to distill a lifetime’s learning and make complex and deep ideas not just understandable but relatable. ....
The selection that Murray has chosen is from a sermon Lewis delivered in 1939, “Learning in Wartime.”   Murray:
It is a profoundly important message. Essentially, it is this: do not put off what you have to do in your life until the times are optimal. Because they never were optimal, and they never will be.

Human life, he notes, was always filled with distractions, alarms, panics, and tragedy. That is not what makes it remarkable. What makes life remarkable is that we get on with what we have to do in spite of these things. Alone among the creatures, we have the capability to understand the world around us and to have some sense of where it might be going. That could push us into despair and despondency. But the history of mankind is not that. It is that we did and do remarkable things, in spite of such knowledge. .... (more)

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Growing old

A blog I read every day sends me looking for an essay by Samuel Johnson in The Rambler (1750):
.... Yet, however age may discourage us by its appearance from considering it in prospect, we shall all by degrees certainly be old; and therefore we ought to inquire what provision can be made against that time of distress? what happiness can be stored up against the winter of life? and how we may pass our latter years with serenity and cheerfulness?

If it has been found by the experience of mankind, that not even the best seasons of life are able to supply sufficient gratifications, without anticipating uncertain felicities, it cannot surely be supposed that old age, worn with labours, harassed with anxieties, and tortured with diseases, should have any gladness of its own, or feel any satisfaction from the contemplation of the present. All the comfort that can now be expected must be recalled from the past, or borrowed from the future; the past is very soon exhausted, all the events or actions which the memory can afford pleasure are quickly recollected; and the future lies beyond the grave, where it can be reached only by virtue and devotion.

Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulph of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish, and precipices of horrour.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Holocaust

I watched The World at War as it was being broadcast on PBS in the 1970s and later purchased the DVDs. I used several episodes in my US History classes when teaching the Second World War. The toughest one for students to watch—and for me to watch again and again—was titled "Genocide." It first screened fifty years ago and was one of the first films to document the Holocaust. From History Today:
First broadcast on 27 March 1974, "Genocide" is credited with introducing the Holocaust (a term still not yet in common use) to the British public. It helped to inculcate an awareness of the Nazi "Final Solution" as a crime directed against a specific group. The episode was screened over four years before the US-produced television miniseries Holocaust, often cited as the televisual milestone promoting Holocaust awareness on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Genocide" provides an account of the Nazi persecution of Jews and the Holocaust that is succinct and accessible, yet not oversimplified. This is even more remarkable given that it preceded much of the foundational scholarship on the subject. It included themes such as the influence of racial science and eugenics on Nazi ideology, the rise of the SS, the role of the Einsatzgruppen ("special task forces" – mobile killing squads) in perpetrating what became known as the "Holocaust by bullets" in the eastern occupied territories, and the "Aktion Reinhard" death camps – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. ....

"Genocide" was directed by British filmmaker Michael Darlow. The World at War’s producer, Jeremy Isaacs, had initially wanted to direct "Genocide" but, given that members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, decided against it, fearing that he would be too "emotionally involved". ....

"Genocide" succeeded in its aim to educate a British public still largely ignorant about the nature of the Holocaust. It would also be unfair to judge "Genocide" by the standards of present-day Holocaust scholarship and memorial culture. In some respects, it was a product of its time, but in many, it was far ahead. The episode’s most significant achievement was to clearly explain who the Nazis targeted and why, and how this persecution developed from exclusion, to expulsion, to extermination. However, "Genocide" also inadvertently encouraged a degree of understanding, perhaps even sympathy, for those who perpetrated the Holocaust. These men were allowed to position themselves as mere "cogs" who had been placed in an impossible situation by a brutal, totalitarian regime; a regime in which the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was conceived, masterminded, ordered, and approved of by a tiny coterie of the most senior Nazis.
This episode of The World at War can be seen on YouTube but, as you can see, only on YouTube as it is age-restricted:


Joseph Cronin, "Holocaust at 50," History Today, March 3, 2024.

You can run, but you can’t hide

ALMIGHTY God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Thee, and worthily magnify Thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.
In its present form, it goes back to the brilliant English scholar Alcuin, who worked with Charlemagne in the late eighth century to create a Christian civilization in Western Europe. Let’s say around 790. There is some doubt as to whether the prayer has older origins, perhaps back to Gregory the Great, around 600. ....

In the 1540s, Anglican reformer Thomas Cranmer took this Collect – as he did so much else from the medieval service books – and incorporated it into the regular liturgy of Common Prayer....

Several things come to mind about this collect, but above all the sense of rigorous and absolutely honest self-examination. It comes close to creating the mood of final judgment: whatever fronts or false faces you put up, God sees behind them. Or if you like melodrama, you can run, but you can’t hide. ....

It is a near-perfect prayer for any and all Christian denominations. That is partly because it is so rooted in the Biblical tradition, and specifically the Psalms. See Psalm 139:
You have searched me, Lord,
   and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise;
   you perceive my thoughts from afar…
Psalm 51 has also left its echoes. ....
Jenkins on how the prayer illustrates the usefulness of liturgy: 
  • Like the best parts of any liturgy, the Collect takes essential points about the Christian approach to life, and puts them in simple and memorable form.
  • It says these things better, more comprehensively, and more concisely than we could ever do ourselves.
  • By saying the words repeatedly, week by week, we learn and internalize them, and learn how to approach our own mental processes. ....
  • And as we say the words, we are aware of a tradition that takes us back well over a millennium, and perhaps far longer. We say them together with Thomas Cranmer and Alcuin.
  • We see and understand the chain of continuity, and place ourselves within that continuity.

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

IVF

If Ryan T. Anderson is right, everyone has gone bonkers over the significance of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision regarding IVF:
The media didn’t just overreact to a judge’s mentioning God as the source of the sanctity of life. They falsely claimed IVF was about to be banned—and Republicans fell for the claim. In reality, the Alabama civil (not criminal) case was brought by the parents of IVF children, not opponents of IVF. The clinic keeping their embryonic children in cryopreservation had not provided adequate protection, so a patient managed to wander in and remove several embryos, causing their deaths. The parents sued to hold the clinic accountable for the wrongful death of their children. And the Alabama Supreme Court held that a statute protecting minors (including, as precedent held, embryos in the womb) contained no exception for embryos outside the womb. Far from attempting to ban IVF, the parents who brought this lawsuit were trying to protect frozen embryonic children, and rightly so.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Hypochondria of the mind

A few days ago, in "Worry less. Ruminate less..." I quoted someone to the effect that an obsession with emotions is debilitating. Theodore Dalrymple makes a related case here:
What is mental health? The only definition I can think of is the absence of outright lunacy. Unfortunately, it has come to mean any deviance from a state of perfect equanimity and satisfaction. A long time ago, I noticed that the word ‘unhappy’ had disappeared from the everyday lexicon, in favour of the word ‘depressed’. For every person now who claims to be unhappy there are a thousand who say that they are depressed, and this is irrespective of the conditions that are making them so. ....

But the semantic change from unhappiness to depression, in so many cases absurd and even laughable, is not without its deleterious effects. If you are unhappy, you seek the causes and, if you have what used to be called inner resources, confront them. (Unfortunately, there are circumstances, truly tragic, in which this is not possible.) But if you claim to be depressed, you pass the responsibility over to professionals who are expected to do something to or for you that will remove the depression as a diseased appendix is removed. ....

Of course, there are fashions in diagnosis. A generation ago it was multiple personality – The Three Faces of Eve kind of thing – and the DSM 5 suggested that the prevalence might be as high as 1.5 per cent of the adult population, that is to say one in every 66 people. Multiple personality has since become very rare.

These days it is gender dysphoria that is fashionable, with child gender-identity referrals increasing from 210 per year in 2011 to 5,000 per year in 2021. Either there must be something new in the water supply, or we are dealing with a socio-psychological epidemic. ....

The ever-expanding gamut of psychiatric diagnosis encourages the belief that all departure from a desired state of mind is a medical condition susceptible to medical or some other technical solution. This results in a propensity to hypochondria of the mind, with people taking their mental temperatures, as it were, as hypochondriacs take their blood pressure. But it precludes honesty or genuine reflection and leads to the search for bogus cures of bogus diseases. A corollary is the neglect of those who genuinely require care, who drown in a sea of inflated need. ....

Thursday, February 29, 2024

"Human defectives"

His name is all over Madison. The University has chosen not to remove it from one of its more prominent buildings but, instead, install a plaque. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this morning:
[Charles] Van Hise received four degrees from UW-Madison, including the first Ph.D. degree granted by the university. He is the university's longest serving leader, serving as president from 1903 until his death in 1918. During his tenure, UW-Madison established a graduate division, founded a medical school and increased its faculty from 200 to 750 professors. ....

[Van Hise's] interest in [eugenics] came from reading Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species. Letters between Van Hise and his wife show he was curious about how to apply the ideas of animal evolution and natural selection to the human race, according to Luccini Butcher.

Van Hise lectured on eugenics, gave public speeches and talked to legislators. In one of his speeches, he said “[h]uman defectives should no longer be allowed to propagate the race" and sterilization "might be the proper method."

In another speech, Van Hise said “[w]e know enough about the breeding of animals so that if that knowledge were applied to man, the feeble minded would disappear in a generation, and the insane and criminal class be reduced to a small fraction of their present numbers.”

Van Hise wasn't the only academic espousing eugenics during this time. Edward Ross, a UW-Madison sociologist, also advanced the idea.

UW-Madison in 1910 established the country's first department of experimental breeding, which was initially led by Leon Cole, another eugenicist. The department is today called the genetics department.

Academics gave the eugenics movement legitimacy and helped drive the Wisconsin sterilization law passed in 1913. The law forced sterilization for "undesirables" at the discretion of medical professionals. The state conducted nearly 2,000 sterilizations, the 11th highest in the country.

Wisconsin repealed its sterilization law in 1978. ....

Eugenics was not widely supported when the law was in place, Luccini Butcher said. Many people saw it as an overstepping by the state. The Catholic Church, in particular, opposed forced sterilization. .... (more)

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

"Worry less. Ruminate less..."

Introducing an excerpt from Abigail Shrier's new book, Bari Weiss writes:
American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an also alarming 14 percent.

What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children.

What’s going on?...
Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity. ....

When I first heard the term social-emotional learning, I assumed a hokey but necessary call for kids to get a grip. Or maybe it was the new name for what they used to call character education: treat people kindly, disagree respectfully, don’t be a jackass. Proponents insist it arrives at those things, albeit through the somewhat circuitous route of mental health. .... Through a series of prompts and exercises, SEL pushes kids toward a series of personal reflections, aimed at teaching them “self-awareness,” “social awareness,” “relationship skills,” “self-management,” and “responsible decision-making.”

Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to inaugurate the school day with an “emotions check-in.” ....

I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of the practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated.

If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead?

“I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.”

There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them.

Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge.

“If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said. .... (more)

Monday, February 26, 2024

Breaking the rules

This is about three of Agatha Christie's best, in each of which she broke the rules. There are spoilers.
The most famous mystery novel of all time, Murder on the Orient Express, was published on New Year’s Day, 1934. In America, it was published as Murder on the Calais Coach, to avoid confusion with Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, which had been published in the U.S. as Orient Express. ....

Christie had already upended the mystery genre eight years earlier with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the killer is revealed to be the one character who is typically not allowed to be the murderer. Now she was doing it again. The typical mystery is focused on one singular question: Which of these suspects is the murderer? Christie’s innovation in Orient Express was to contrive a solution — major spoiler alert! — in which everyone is the murderer.

To revolutionize a genre once is astonishing, but to do it twice? Now you’re just showing off. And Christie wasn’t done. In her best novel, 1939’s And Then There Were None, she came tantalizingly close to devising a mystery in which no one is the murderer. (I’m one of those cantankerous fans who pretend this book’s explanatory epilogue simply doesn’t exist.) ....

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Courage

According to Western tradition:
"...the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues refers to the union of two sets of virtues. The four cardinal virtues, from ancient Greek philosophy, are prudence, justice, temperance (or restraint), and courage (or fortitude). The three theological virtues, from the letters of St. Paul of Tarsus, are faith, hope, and charity (or love).
Peter Kreeft:
The four cardinal virtues – justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) – come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws.

These four are called "cardinal" virtues from the Latin word for "hinge." All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three "theological virtues"), which are the flower of these.
Courage may not be the greatest of virtues but it is the necessary one:
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
— C.S. Lewis

Courage is the greatest of all the virtues. Because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.
— Samuel Johnson

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
— Winston Churchill

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Hell

I enjoy browsing through books of quotations, collections from many sources like H.L. Mencken's  A New Dictionary of Quotations (it was new once), but I also have books of quotations from individual authors who have proven to be eminently quotable, for instance, Samuel Johnson, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis. One of my favorite quotable authors is Dorothy L. Sayers, who never minces words, especially regarding Christian doctrine. Today I was looking through a book of Sayers' quotations, A Matter of Eternity, published by Eerdmans in 1973, and came across this:
...there seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to "the cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell", or "the childish and grotesque mediaeval imagery of physical fire and worms"....

But the case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of Hell is not "mediaeval": it is Christ's. It is not a device of "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the Church: It is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from "mediaeval superstition", but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. If we are Christians, very well; we dare not not take the doctrine of Hell seriously, for we have it from Him whom we acknowledge as God and Truth incarnate. If we say that Christ was a great and good man, and that, ignoring His divine claims, we should yet stick to His teaching very well; that is what Christ taught. It confronts us in the oldest and least "edited" of the Gospels: it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching than one realises, until one reads the Evangelists through instead of merely picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ.
Originally from Introductory Papers on Dante, 1953.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Tolkien has endured

From a review of Tolkien's Faith:
The year 2023 marked 50 years since the death of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, and 2024 will mark 70 years since the publication of the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, which holds the title of the best-selling novel ever written. Fantasy and science-fiction authors mostly come and go, but Tolkien has endured. Why is this so? What is different about him?

For answers, we would do well to look at the recent work of Holly Ordway, whose 2023 biography Tolkien’s Faith constitutes a significant breakthrough in Tolkien scholarship. ....

Fantasy novels will typically feature a muscle-bound alpha with a bikini-clad babe on the cover. At the very least they will exalt the smart, or the fast, or the lucky. Tolkien’s hobbits aren’t like that at all: He celebrates small, decent folk. Frodo, the Ringbearer himself, doesn’t even really get to be extraordinary: At the end, he succumbs to temptation and fails in his quest, which is saved only by the mercy he has shown to Gollum, a creature even more miserable and lowly than himself. In other words, his premise is based on the Christian values of humility and mercy. As Tolkien himself wrote, “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.” ....

Tolkien was not ignoring the modern world by writing of a world of handicraft, virtue, nature, friendship, and, ultimately, religion. He was saying that these represented the answers to our problems, the enduring and true answers. The Lord of the Rings is just as much about modern war, totalitarianism, global surveillance, and the dangers of technology — our “smartphones” grow daily more similar to the Ring in their power over us — as it is about the medieval world.

Modern thinkers such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali have recently made the case that without Christianity there will be no resistance to the forces of disintegration operating in our culture today. ....

Thursday, February 22, 2024

Doing the right thing

Russian president Vladimir Putin murdered another Christian this week. It was just another day in Putin’s supposed project of protecting “the Christian West” from godlessness. After all, they tell me, one can’t create a Christian nationalist empire without killing some people.

Before the world forgets the corpse of Alexei Navalny in the subzero environs of an Arctic penal colony, we ought to look at him—especially those of us who follow Jesus Christ—to see what moral courage actually is.

Navalny was perhaps the most-recognized anti-Putin dissident in the world, and he is now one of many Putin enemies to end up “suddenly dead.” He survived poisoning in 2020, recuperated in Europe, and ultimately went back to his homeland despite knowing what he would face. Speaking of his dissent and his willingness to bear its consequences, Navalny repeatedly referenced his profession of Christian faith. ....

“The fact is that I am a Christian, which usually sets me up as an example for constant ridicule in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, because mostly our people are atheists, and I was once quite a militant atheist myself,” Navalny said (as rendered by Google Translate). “But now I am a believer, and that helps me a lot in my activities because everything becomes much, much easier.”

“There are fewer dilemmas in my life, because there is a book in which, in general, it is more or less clearly written what action to take in every situation,” he explained. “It’s not always easy to follow this book, of course, but I am actually trying.”

Specifically, Navalny said, he was motivated by the words of Jesus: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6, NASB).

“I’ve always thought that this particular commandment is more or less an instruction to activity,” Navalny said. “And so, while certainly not really enjoying the place where I am, I have no regrets about coming back or about what I’m doing. It’s fine, because I did the right thing.” .... (more)

Monday, February 19, 2024

"How rich God is in mercy..."

In 1944 Sheed & Ward, a Catholic house, published The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, translated by Ronald Knox. Knox was a very interesting person. He was Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford in the 1920s and '30s. He was a classical scholar, broadcaster, apologist, and author of several mysteries, a founding member of the Detection Club. C.S. Lewis called him "the wittiest man in Europe." I recently got a copy of his New Testament translation. This is from his version of the second chapter of Ephesians:
HE found you dead men; such were your transgressions, such were the sinful ways you lived in. That was when you followed the fashion of this world, when you owned a prince whose domain is in the lower air, that spirit whose influence is still at work among the unbelievers. We too, all of us, were once of their company; our life was bounded by natural appetites, and we did what corrupt nature or our own calculation would have us do, with God's displeasure for our birthright, like other men. How rich God is in mercy, with what an excess of love he loved us! Our sins had made dead men of us, and he, in giving life to Christ, gave life to us too; it is his grace that has saved you; raised us up too, enthroned us too above the heavens, in Christ Jesus. He would have all future ages see, in that clemency which he shewed us in Christ Jesus, the surpassing richness of his grace. Yes, it was grace that saved you, with faith for its instrument; it did not come from yourselves, it was God's gift, not from any action of yours, or there would be room for pride. No, we are his design; God has created us in Christ Jesus, pledged to such good actions as he has prepared beforehand, to be the employment of our lives.
Ronald Knox, The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Sheed & Ward, 1944.