One Eternal Day

N.T. Wright on Jesus

2012-02-17T13:26:00.000-06:00

N.T. Wright interviewed about his book Simply Jesus by Milt Rosenberg on WGN in Chicago.

And N.T. Wright on what it means to take Genesis "literally":

Legislating morality

2012-02-17T11:21:00.001-06:00

Via Justin Taylor, Martin Luther King on December 18, 1963:

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion.

Well, there’s half-truth involved here.

Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart.

But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated.

It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.

Speech Transcription - Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 WMU Speech Found - Archives - WMU Libraries

Majoritarian tyranny

2012-02-16T21:38:00.000-06:00

Ross Douthat doesn't think religious freedom should give way simply because a lot of people disagree with how it is exercised. "Catholics, Conscience and Contraception.":

.... The idea that the state should only “tread carefully” on issues of liberty, conscience and freedom of religion in areas where polling data shows significant support for the position or community in question is a recipe for majoritarian tyranny and government overreach. The logic that he’s applying to orthodox Catholics could be applied just as easily to the Amish, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Orthodox Jews, and a host of other groups that don’t have the kind of institutional resources that Roman Catholicism can muster in its own defense. Yes, sometimes state interests are compelling enough to trump religious liberties, and defenders of this mandate have every right to make that case. But the argument that the state’s interests can trump religious liberties so long as the group of people being asked to violate their consciences is small enough is not an argument at all. It’s just a raw appeal to power.

Catholics, Conscience and Contraception - NYTimes.com

"Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

2012-02-16T15:03:00.001-06:00

A Rasmussen poll released today says that "59% of Catholics Disapprove of Obama’s Job Performance." Since the President received a majority of the Catholic vote in the last Presidential election, and since his approval dropped dramatically after the health-care mandate was ordered, Catholic perceptions of what the mandate means is probably his problem here. The report also indicates:

Sixty-one percent (61%) of Evangelical Christians and 52% of other Protestants also at least somewhat disapprove of the job Obama is doing in the White House. The view is much more positive among non-Christians. Among those who profess some other religious affiliation or none at all, 68% at least somewhat approve of the president’s performance.

Regardless of religious affiliation, disapproval is higher among those who regularly attend religious services. Among those who attend services every week or nearly every week, 41% offer their approval of the president while 59% disapprove. Among those who rarely or never attend services, 63% approve and 36% disapprove. ....

Part of the reason has to be a conviction that this is not just about public policy, but about a lack of respect for conscientious religious belief — and today's news may reinforce that impression. Mollie Hemingway on some of the testimony at today's House committee hearing about the mandate and religious liberty:

.... Witnesses include the head of my church body, the Rev. Matthew C. Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod).

Also there: Dr. Ben Mitchell of Union University, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Yeshiva University, Dr. Craig Mitchell of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Roman Catholic Bishop William Lori of Connecticut [link added]. ....

.... At one point, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., suggested that the religious leaders were lying when they said they were concerned about religious liberty and called the hearing "a sham." ....

I believe that the church has much more important work to do than weighing in on politics every day. I can't emphasize how rare it is for our church to get involved. I don't know if the head of our church body has ever testified before Congress before.

And we do think this is a worthy fight. Earlier today Rep. Nancy Pelosi told reporters she believes the federal government should require the Catholic Church itself to pay for free birth control. And Rep. DeLauro claimed, in the hearing, that religious liberty doesn't extend beyond the right to worship. She basically said that so long as religious people keep their beliefs secret and private, she won't bring the boot heel of the state down on us. Why thank you! It's really amazing we're complaining at all, isn't it!

We don't want to engage in these politics, but we will if forced to. And it looks like we're being forced to.

As government grows and affects increasingly more, it becomes impossible not to engage in politics. When government provides everything it will regulate everything and there will be no space for the non-political. See "Freedoms in the Future."

A Lutheran, a Jew, a Baptist and a Catholic Walk Into A Hearing - Ricochet.com

Tolerance

2012-02-15T13:46:00.001-06:00

Quoted by Justin Taylor, from an interview with D.A. Carson, explaining how the definition of "tolerance" has changed — and not for the better:

The old tolerance presupposed another system of thought already in place—Christianity, communism, Naziism, Buddhism, secularism—whatever. The issue then became how much deviation from that system could be tolerated before coercive force is applied. To the extent that one allowed deviation, one was tolerant; correspondingly, where one judges that deviation has gone too far (e.g., almost everyone agrees, even today, that pedophilia goes beyond the pale), then coercive force—in short, intolerance—is a virtue. It was quite possible to disagree strongly with what a person was saying, but still tolerate the opinion that was perceived to be aberrant, on the ground that it was better for society to allow such opinions than to coerce silence from those articulating them.

But invariably, tolerance has its limits. The new tolerance (1) tends to insist that those who merely disagree with others, at least in several spheres, are intolerant, even if no coercive force is applied; (2) tends to make such tolerance the supreme good, independently of surrounding systems of thought; and (3) tends to be remarkably blind in regard to its own intolerant condemnation of everyone who disagrees with its own definition of tolerance. The result is that in many domains, in many discussions, the question is rarely “Is this true?” but “Is anyone offended?” Rigorous discussion of content soon shuts down; truth is demoted; various forms of class warfare are encouraged; in some domains it becomes wrong (supreme irony) to say that anyone is wrong.

The Intolerance of Tolerance – Justin Taylor

As He wants to be worshiped

2012-02-14T15:03:00.000-06:00

The term "regulative principle" of worship is unfamiliar to me, although the concept it describes isn't. I find myself in pretty strong agreement with it as explained by Kevin DeYoung:

.... Simply put, the regulative principle states that “the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself and so limited by his own revealed will” (WCF 21.1). In other words, corporate worship should be comprised of those elements we can show to be appropriate from the Bible. The regulative principles says, “Let’s worship God as he wants to be worshiped.”

....According to DeYoung the "regulative principle" offers these advantages [he expands on each — I've only selected a few sentences]:

...[T]he heart of the regulative principle is not about restriction. It is about freedom.

1. Freedom from cultural captivity. When corporate worship is largely left to our own designs we quickly find ourselves scrambling to keep up with the latest trends. The most important qualities become creativity, relevance, and newness. But of course, over time (not much time these days), what was fresh grows stale. We have to retool in order to capture the next demographic. Or learn to be content with settling in as a Boomer church or Gen X church.

2. Freedom from constant battles over preferences. ....

3. Freedom of conscience. ....

4. Freedom to be cross cultural. ...[A]t its best, the regulative principle means we have simple services with singing, praying, reading, preaching, and sacraments–the kinds of services whose basic outline can “work” anywhere in the world.

5. Freedom to focus on the center. .... “What do we know they did in their Christian worship services in the Bible? We know they sang the Bible. We know that preached the Bible. We know they prayed the Bible. We know they read the Bible. We know they saw the Bible in the sacraments. We don’t see dramas or pet blessings or liturgical dance numbers. So why wouldn’t we want to focus on everything we know they did in their services? Why try to improve on the elements we know were pleasing to God and practiced in the early church?” ....

Another, and to my mind perfectly consistent reflection on worship, is this by Bob Kauflin affirming David Peterson on what Revelation has to say about what we ought to sing in worship:

In summarizing his chapter on Revelation, Peterson makes application to the songs we sing today:
The hymnic material in the book of the Revelation…should alert us to the importance of singing God’s praise in a way that is truly honoring to him and helpful to his people. Do our hymns and songs concentrate on praising God for his character and his mighty acts in history on our behalf? Do they focus sufficiently on the great truths of the gospel? There is always a temptation to focus too much on the expression of our own immediate needs.
This is gold. Our songs should both honor God and help people. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and. We don’t come together merely to sing about how passionate we are for God (although that’s a very good thing!) or to be emotionally affected. Our songs should help us concentrate and focus on God’s character and his mighty acts in history on our behalf, especially the gospel. ....

The Freedom of the Regulative Principle – Kevin DeYoung, David Peterson on Revelation and the Songs We Sing | Worship Matters

You don't have to walk it by yourself

2012-02-13T13:14:00.001-06:00

Via Jared Wilson

"As long as the love of freedom exists..."

2012-02-12T13:19:00.000-06:00

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. Scott Johnson at Powerline posts a couple of appreciations of Lincoln as a man and as skilled advocate. In one of them he quotes a portion of the speech Lincoln delivered on July 10, 1858 while campaigning for the US Senate against Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The speech was delivered extemporaneously.

.... Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty—or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,—with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,—we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves—we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'' and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, (loud and long continued applause) and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. (Applause) ....

Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 2.

Whitney Houston, 1963-2012

2012-02-12T01:43:00.000-06:00

Whitney Houston, dead at 48. Marvelous voice, great performer, sad and messed up life. Here she is in 1991 at the Super Bowl:

Shelter from the blast

2012-02-10T14:39:00.002-06:00

Via Internet Monk, Frederick Buechner on "The Church as Noah’s Ark":

The nave is the central part of the church from the main front to the chancel. It’s the part where the laity sit and in great Gothic churches is sometimes separated from the choir and clergy by a screen. It takes its name from the Latin navis, meaning ship, one reason being that the vaulted roof looks rather like an inverted keel. A more interesting reason is that the Church itself is thought of as a ship or Noah’s Ark. It’s a resemblance worth thinking about.

In one as in the other, just about everything imaginable is aboard, the clean and the unclean both. They are all piled in together helter-skelter, the predators and the prey, the wild and the tame, the sleek and beautiful ones and the ones that are ugly as sin. There are sly young foxes and impossible old cows. There are the catty and the piggish and the peacock-proud. There are hawks and there are doves. Some are wise as owls, some silly as geese; some meek as lambs and others fire-breathing dragons. There are times when they all cackle and grunt and roar and sing together, and there are times when you could hear a pin drop. Most of them have no clear idea just where they’re supposed to be heading or how they’re supposed to get there or what they’ll find if and when they finally do, but they figure the people in charge must know and in the meanwhile sit back on their haunches and try to enjoy the ride.

It’s not all enjoyable. There’s backbiting just like everywhere else. There’s a pecking order. There’s jostling at the trough. There’s growling and grousing, bitching and whining. There are dogs in the manger and old goats and black widows. It’s a regular menagerie in there, and sometimes it smells to high Heaven like one.

But even at its worst, there’s at least one thing that makes it bearable within, and that is the storm without—the wild winds and terrible waves and in all the watery waste no help in sight.

And at its best there is, if never clear sailing, shelter from the blast, a sense of somehow heading in the right direction in spite of everything, a ship to keep afloat, and, like a beacon in the dark, the hope of finding safe harbor at last.

from Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary, HarperCollins, 1988.

Rules and accountability

2012-02-09T11:59:00.002-06:00

A few weeks ago I came across Downton Abbey on Netflix, watched an episode, and was hooked. I watched all of the first season in a few days. The series does much well but something that particularly appealed to me was its refusal to use class as an easy way to assign virtue or vice. There are earnestly ethical, deeply flawed, kind, self-centered, characters at every level of the social hierarchy. And, very realistically, all of those traits can inhabit the very same person. This review offers another reason the series works so well:

On the last episode of the wildly popular PBS drama Downton Abbey, one character tells another: "You've broken the rules, my girl, and it's no use pretending they're easily mended."

The popular British import, set in World War I, portrays the aristocratic Crawley family and the cadre of cooks, maids, and butlers who tend to them, in all their relational and class-based drama. The show is all about rules, whether bowing to class structure or honoring commitments from the past. The rules present the extraordinary obstacles in this show . . . except that they’re not so extraordinary, really, and that’s one of the many reasons this show works. ....

...[M]y favorite aspect of Downton is its emphasis on humans’ agency and accountability despite social and economic barriers. The characters are never excused for their choices by circumstance, class, gender, time period, or even the unfairness of the rules to which they so tightly cling. .... [more]

Her.meneutics: The Power of Choice in 'Downton Abbey'

"The smelly little orthodoxies...."

2012-02-07T14:37:00.000-06:00

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. From "Hard Times Again" by Theodore Dalrymple:

.... Dickens is often reproached for his absence of firm and unequivocal moral, political, and philosophical outlook. He veers crazily between the ferociously reactionary and the mushily liberal. He lampoons the disinterested philanthropy of Mrs. Jellyby (in Bleak House) with the same gusto or ferocity as he excoriates the egotism of Mr. Veneering (in Our Mutual Friend). He suggests that businessmen are heartless swine (Bounderby in Hard Times) or disinterestedly charitable (the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby). He satirizes temperance (in The Pickwick Papers) as much as he derides drunkenness (in Martin Chuzzlewit). The evil Jew (in Oliver Twist) is matched by the saintly Jew (in Our Mutual Friend). As Stephen Blackpool, the working-class hero of Hard Times says, “it’s aw a muddle.”

George Orwell, in his famous essay on Dickens, saw in this philosophical and moral muddle not a weakness but a strength, a generosity of spirit, an openness to the irreducible complexity of mankind’s moral situation, an immunity to what he called “the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.” And indeed, the principal target of Hard Times is such an orthodoxy, namely a hard-nosed utilitarianism combined with an unbending liberalism. (Liberal in the economic, not cultural, sense.)

The principal bearers of the doctrine are Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby. Gradgrind is a teacher whose statement of pedagogical philosophy is surely one of the greatest opening passages of any novel ever written:
Now what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!
By the end of the novel, Gradgrind has learned the insufficiency of facts for the conduct of human life, as he might have done merely by a little self-examination or reflection on the nature of moral and aesthetic judgment. It cannot be said that Gradgrind is a caricature, a character so exaggerated that he never did or could exist: passage after passage in Hard Times parallels almost exactly the account of John Stuart Mill’s education in his Autobiography, published 19 years after the novel. Furthermore, “the minds of reasoning animals” exactly captures the flavor of much recent scientistic writing about the human condition. Like hope in the human breast, scientism springs eternal in the human mind. .... [more]

The American Conservative » Hard Times Again

Diamond Jubilee

2012-02-06T14:41:00.001-06:00

"A long and happy reign":

More than a great crime writer?

2012-02-05T12:44:00.002-06:00

Whether Elmore Leonard is, as Philip Hensher argues, "The Great American Novelist," I leave to others more qualified to judge — but Hensher does identify an important reason I enjoy Elmore's novels so much:

.... Leonard's work is a very long way from the average crime novel, with its sequence of atrocity, mystery, maverick investigator and solution. He is fascinated, for instance, with the mechanics of writing, and wants his readers to share that interest. Characters investigate the textures of dialogue – "'How come,' Raylan said, 'you can't answer a question without asking one?'" (Riding the Rap). They discuss diction in intricate detail – Foley and Buddy reading a newspaper report in Out of Sight: "'They think you may "flee the country."' 'I've had to run like hell a few times,' Foley said, 'but I don't think I've done any fleeing. You ever flee?' 'Yeah. I read one time I fled the scene of a robbery.'" ....

In the absence of detailed description of sex and violence, what fills the novels – joyously, incomparably – is talk. Leonard is rightly celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, but it isn't exactly a realist rendering. Rather, like PG Wodehouse, or Dickens, or Waugh, he has half-heard and half-invented a totally convincing idiolect. No one ever talked so well in reality as Robert Taylor in Tishomingo Blues, telling the story of his life like a Scheherazade in a silk shirt, chain and pleated slacks: "I never got sent down. I went to Oakland University three years and did some dealing to pay for my tuition and books and shit, but only weed. I wouldn't sell heroin to students, fuck up their young minds. Lot of 'em were fucked up to begin with, worrying about what they gonna do when they got out. I took eighteen semester hours of history – ask me a question about it, anything, like the names of famous assassins in history. Who shot Lincoln, Grover Cleveland. I took history cause I loved it man, not to get a job from it."

One source of Leonard's eminence is a semi-jocular "10 Rules of Writing". They constitute good, solid advice on the side of simplicity – "Don't go into great detail describing places and things. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." The magic of his own dialogue, however, is that he never underestimates the potential pleasure of the elaborate, high formality and the abstruse in speech. His characters are allowed to explain what they do in dizzying arcana: "A guy calls, he says 'I like the Vikings and six for five dimes.' Another guy calls. 'Harry, the Saints minus seven thirty times.' He loses, what's the juice, straight ten percent? If they forget the juice they won't even get close to the gross." (Pronto) He allows even the most brutal of his gangsters the right to bicker over terminology – "'We didn't kidnap him,' Louis said, 'we took him hostage.'" (Riding the Rap). And, most of all, he recognises the relish his characters have for single words, such as the splendid moment when the hangdog houseboy Lloyd comes into his heritage at the end of Mr Paradise and takes the guns to massacre the villains with the words: "I told you this ain't your bidness."

Leonard has long been seen as the greatest of crime writers, walking all over even Raymond Chandler, but perhaps the time has come to drop the qualification of genre. In his analysis through laughter of money, crime, spectacle and the play-acting of the powerful, he has created something entirely his own. In his 40-odd novels, his examinations of the way people manipulate language and stories have both recorded and created an aspect of human behaviour. He is just the great American novelist of the great American comedy. [more]

And then their is Justified [FX]

Elmore Leonard: the great American novelist | Books | The Guardian

What is the point?

2012-02-04T17:21:00.001-06:00

Today it is reported that SUNY Buffalo, like Vanderbilt, is demanding that student Christian organizations must not only allow any student to join, regardless of their convictions, but also permit them to run for leadership, and in these groups leaders teach. One wonders if similar requirements apply to groups organized around ideology, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. In any event the report of the Vanderbilt controversy includes something that may particularly interest Packer fans:

...[O]n January 31, the university called a town hall meeting to discuss the issue. Administrators clarified that the policy for student organizations is “all comers”—that is, any student may join and also may run for office. There’s no obligation, they say, for religious organizations to elect nonbelievers to leadership positions, but in the interest of nondiscrimination, no one may be barred from running for office for religious reasons.

It was Jordan Rodgers, the Commodores’ quarterback and an active member of the Fellowship for Christian Athletes (and the younger brother of Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers), who articulated the obvious. “If someone that doesn’t share the faith is teaching [in a leadership role], then what’s the point of even having these organizations?” Rodgers asked at the meeting. “The fact that we are not going to change the fact that you have to affirm your faith in Jesus Christ to be a teacher, to be a leader, to teach new people of any faith that come through our doors...we don’t feel that’s a problem.” ....

The Weekly Standard, February 13, 2012, pp. 2-3.

A purely private freedom?

2012-02-03T12:30:00.000-06:00

Joseph Knippenberg, in "The Obama Admininstration’s Crabbed Vision of Religious Liberty," explains why the administration's arguments in the Hosanna-Tabor case [which the Supreme Court unanimously rejected], and the more recent contraception mandate, reflect a serious misunderstanding of what "free exercise" has meant, and ought to mean:

.... Whenever a church or house of worship ceases to be simply inward-looking, when it in any way engages or serves the wider public, it becomes subject to much the same sort of government regulation as any secular entity. Religious freedom is a purely private freedom. The moment you enter the public sphere, you’re subject to regulation. The public sphere is by definition secular, not pluralistic, with its tone, terms, and limits set by governmental authority.

Now, I don’t mean to argue that religious freedom is or should be absolute, that religious organizations should never be subject to any sort of regulation. I’m at least somewhat comfortable with a compelling state interest test to justify regulation.

But here the Obama Administration seems to go further than that. The logic of its argument in these two cases is that any religious institution that is public-serving has to behave in many instances (those determined by the state) like every other public-serving organization. The religious presence in the public square can’t be distinctive except in ways the government permits.

Pursued consistently across the board (and the Obama Administration hasn’t yet done this), this approach would gravely threaten religious freedom. It’s one thing to say (as some have, though I disagree with them), that if you take public dollars, you have to be thoroughly secular in your operation. Anyone can escape the secularizing effect of public money by refusing to accept it. It’s quite another to say that if you serve the public, your religiosity can’t permeate your efforts and your organization. This would require almost every religious organization I know of to choose between reaching out as a bearer of good news and a helper of widows and orphans and remaining faithful to the very understanding that inspired its outreach. Under these circumstances, a church can’t remain a church. .... [more]

The Obama Admininstration’s Crabbed Vision of Religious Liberty » First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

Helpless

2012-02-02T22:15:00.000-06:00

Via John Hinderaker at Power Line, Eric Falkenstein responds to Charles Murray's new book. Upper middle class unwillingness to affirm the value of their own practices condemns those who would profit the most from adopting them.

.... Murray argues the well-off should set a better example by not apologizing for their squareness, but rather, by advocating their lifestyle and scorning those who fail to live up to it—we need more of what is usually called "blaming the victim." Murray singles out the modern welfare state as the key instigator for our moral squalor, but I rather think our lack of faith in bourgeois values in general was the first mover here. Surely enlarging the dole increases the size of its patronage pool, but I still think policy is more symptomatic than causal. ....

Currently there exists a dominant coalition of the lumpen-proletariat and their patronizing, indulgent, but highly status-oriented advocates who aspire to lead the new reverse dominance hierarchy. ....

.... Currently, they simply hear about how great it is to be a victim, how noble it is to be poor, powerless, or discriminated; to be wronged is the ultimate in righteousness. This simply isn't true and the poor know it. Suffering does have meaning when it cannot be controlled, and in such times a stoic attitude is truly heroic, often taken out of a higher duty to one's neighbors and family. But simply suffering low status because one does not have a job, stopped paying their mortgage, is in jail, or did not learn a trade, is usually the result of simple sloth and shortsightedness, and all their friends and family know it.

Alas, successful people are ashamed to assert they have better genetics, values, and habits—even though they quietly believe it to be true—and so are content to let the media and intellectuals push the delusional idea that success is like when Paris Hilton had sex on a digital camera and built a career out of it: luck, connections, and chutzpah, but no discipline, ingenuity, and perseverance. With such examples it becomes defensible to suggest most of the rich are like that—mere lucky hacks in the game of life. The flip side is that those who are unsuccessful are suffering for no fault of their own. ....

The kind of change Murray is talking about will not happen until productive, successful people again feel pride in their distinguishing learned characteristics, including the willingness to shame people who do not have them. Consider that at the height of America's growth, the most popular form of fiction lionized were Horatio Alger stories, which lionized initiative and material prosperity. ....

The image was used in the Power Line post.

The New Class: Profiting From Decline | Power Line

Groundhog Day

2012-02-02T18:13:00.003-06:00

Mark Krikorian at NRO explains Groundhog Day:

So, why do we watch a giant squirrel predict the weather on February 2? Because it’s 40 days after Christmas, and thus the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord at the Temple (or Candlemas). Simeon said Jesus was “a light to lighten the Gentiles,” so candles are blessed (in Armenia they light bonfires). Farmers would look to see if it was light or cloudy, figuring the rest of winter would be the opposite; Germans used rodents for that purpose, bringing the idea with them when they moved to Pennsylvania — hence, Punxsutawney Phil. ....

Happy Candlemas! - By Mark Krikorian - The Corner - National Review Online

Terrible to contemplate

2012-02-02T17:45:00.001-06:00

From Steven Hayward at Power Line:

...[F]rom a 1921 [G.K. Chesterton] interview with the Cleveland Press:
The men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung [sic] today.

The image is also from the post at Power Line.

GK To the Rescue | Power Line

The whole world turned over

2012-02-01T12:46:00.000-06:00

Via The Anchoress

The Convert, by G.K.Chesterton

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

G. K. Chesterton

No turning

2012-02-01T00:49:00.000-06:00

The Apostle Paul:

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father; to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel—not that there is another gospel, but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, If any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.

Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ.

For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ. [Galatians 1:3-12 RSV]

Illumine our darkness

2012-01-31T13:50:00.000-06:00

Via internetmonk.com, the St. Olaf Choir singing "Light Everlasting":

O Light Everlasting

O Love never failing

Illumine our darkness

And draw us to Thee

May we from Thy spirit

Receive inspiration

As children together

Thy wisdom may see

Make known to all nations

Thy peace and salvation

And help us O Father

Thy temple to be.

by Olaf Christiansen

http://youtu.be/NAa3NC1Fuc4

Freedom

2012-01-31T11:21:00.000-06:00

In 1865 on this date Congress passed the 13th Amendment, sending it to the states for ratification. That amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

Yesterday, Letters of Note posted "To My Old Master":

In August of 1865, a Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdan Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdan — who, since being emancipated, had moved to Ohio, found paid work, and was now supporting his family — responded spectacularly by way of the letter seen below (a letter which, according to newspapers at the time, he dictated). ....
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

Several commenting at Freed by the Civil War, concerned about the authenticity of the letter, did some online research:

I was curious about the authenticity, so I did the dorky two-minute check:

1870 census, Dayton, Ohio:
Jordan Anderson, 45, black, born Tennessee, hostler (means "stableman")
Amanda Anderson, 39, black, born Tennessee
Jane Anderson, 19, black, born Tennessee, attending school
Felix Anderson, 12, black, born Tennessee, attending school ("Grundy"?)
[and some more kids]

Seems to be a real guy.

And,

There's also a P.H. Anderson living at Tuckers Crossroads PO, Wilson County, TN in 1870. In 1860 he owns 32 slaves. Tuckers Crossroads refers to the junction of modern SR-141 and Big Springs Road, which makes him a very good contender to be the owner.

And,

The 1900 Federal Census confirms that Jordan never learned how to read or write (he was 74 by that point) -- but his wife Amanda learned how to read and his children could do both. Jordan died sometime between 1900 and 1910, so he was between 74 and 84, and Amanda died sometime between 1910 and 1920, so she was between 80 and 90. So they did get to live nice long lives, far longer than the average lifespan of their day and especially notable given the hardships of their earlier lives as slaves.

The 1900 Federal Census also says that Jordan and Amanda's son Valentine Winters Anderson (born November 1870) became a physician! The "Directory of Deceased American Physicians, 1804-1929" says he attended Louisville National Medical College, class of 1900, followed by Michigan College of Medicine and Surgery, Detroit, class of 1904. He practiced in Dayton, Ohio.

Guess he got that schooling that his father wanted for him so badly...

Also this from Snopes.

Via Mollie Hemingway at Ricochet.com

Letters of Note: To My Old Master

Great mysteries

2012-01-29T16:48:00.002-06:00

C Michael Patton gives us "The Doctrine of the Trinity in a Nutshell," affirming the importance of the doctrine and explaining why it should be believed. From the essay:

Christians do not believe in contradictions or logical fallacies. Rational thinking and harmony of truth are found in the essence of God’s being, therefore, God cannot exist as a contradiction. Christians do not believe in three God’s for reasons spoken of above. However, we do believe that Scripture has revealed that God, who is one in essence, is three in person. We often talk about this as “one what, three whos.” While this is a great mystery in the Christian faith, there are many mysteries that we are compelled to believe due to necessity and what has been revealed in Scripture. For example, we believe that God created all things out of nothing (Heb. 11:3; doctrine of creation ex nihilo). We believe that God is the sovereign first cause of all things, yet man is morally responsible for his actions. We believe that while Christ was complete in his humanity, he also remained complete in his deity (often called the “hypostatic union”). We believe that the Bible is the product of humans and the product of God. None of these, including the doctrine of the Trinity, are contradictions, but they are great mysteries.

His final paragraph:

No Christian understands the doctrine of the Trinity fully. In fact, if people are not confused to some degree by this doctrine, if someone says, “Ohhhh, now I understand,” it probably means that they have slipped into heresy in their thinking. If we think about it too long, try to solve it, or nuance it according to our desire to comprehend things, we will find ourselves refusing the hand of God who has given the mysterious Trinity to us a description of Himself. While it is impossible that finite beings can fully comprehend an infinite God, we can understand him truly. The doctrine of the Trinity does not give us the full understanding of God, but it does give us a true understanding of God.

The Doctrineof the Trinity in a Nutshell | Parchment and Pen

And the Word was made flesh

2012-01-26T12:51:00.000-06:00

Dean Russell D. Moore on why "The Humanity of Christ Matters":

Several years ago, a brutal stomach virus crept through the seminary community where I serve as dean. One day, knowing that most of the students in my classroom were on the upswing from this sickness, I posed the question, “Did Jesus ever have a stomach virus?”

.... These students were still reeling not just from the discomfort of the stomach flu, but also from its indignity. They had been wracked with vomiting, diarrhea, fever, and chills. They still smarted from the sense of having no control over the most disgusting of bodily functions.

So when I asked this question, these ministers of the gospel hesitated. The stomach virus wasn’t just awful; it was undignified. And thinking of Jesus in relation to the most foul and embarrassing aspects of bodily existence seemed to them to be just on the verge of disrespectful, if not blasphemous.

Why is it so hard for us to imagine Jesus vomiting?

The answer to this question has to do, first of all, with the one-dimensional picture of Jesus so many of us have been taught, or have assumed. Many of us see Jesus either as the ghostly friend in the corner of our hearts, promising us heaven and guiding us through difficulty, or we see him simply in terms of his sovereignty and power, in terms of his distance from us. No matter how orthodox our doctrine, we all tend to think of Jesus as a strange and ghostly figure.

But the bridging of this distance is precisely at the heart of the scandal of the gospel itself. It just doesn’t seem right to us to imagine Jesus feverish or vomiting or crying in a feeding trough or studying to learn his Hebrew. From the very beginning of the Christian era, those who sought to redefine the gospel argued that it doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as really flesh and bone, filled with blood and intestines and urine. It doesn’t seem right to think of Jesus as growing in wisdom and knowledge, as Luke tells us he did. Somehow such things seem to us to detract from his deity, from his dignity.

But that’s just the point. .... [more]

Moore to the Point – The Humanity of Christ Matters

Hanged, not hung

2012-01-26T00:32:00.002-06:00

Mystery on PBS will soon give us the second season of Sherlock, the superbly updated version of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In the final story of the first season Holmes gives a murderer a lesson in proper usage:

Sherlock: "Just tell me what happened from the beginning."
Barry: "We've been to a bar, a nice place, and I was chattin' with one of the waitresses and Karen weren't happy with that, so we got back to the hotel and ended up having a bit of a ding dong, didn't we? She was gettin' at me, saying I weren’t a real man— "
Sherlock: "Wasn’t."
Barry: "What?"
Sherlock: "It’s not weren’t, it’s wasn’t."
Barry: "Oh..."
Sherlock: "Go on."
Barry: "Well, then I don’t know how it happened but suddenly there's a knife in my hands. And you know, my old man was a butcher so I know how to handle knives. He learned us how to cut up a piece—"
Sherlock: "Taught."
Barry: "What?"
Sherlock: "Taught you how to cut up a piece."
Barry: "Yeah, well, then I done it."
Sherlock: "Did it."
Barry: "I stabbed her over and over and over and I looked at her and she weren’t— ... wasn't movin' no more. ... Any more. Hey, you gotta help me, Mr. Holmes! Everyone says you're the best. Without you... I'll get hung for this."
Sherlock: "No, no, Mr. Bewick, not at all. Hanged, yes."

Pictures are hung. People were [are?] hanged.

The Great Game Quotes - Sherlock on BBC One - Fanpop

I fear no more

2012-01-25T15:44:00.000-06:00

Via Denny Burk:

Hymn to God the Father
John Donne [c. 1631]

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sins their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow’d in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done;
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I’ve spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as He shines now and heretofore:
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Hymn To God the Father | Denny Burk

Trust in God. Believe in the Gospel. And don’t be afraid.

2012-01-24T17:54:00.002-06:00

Philadelphia Catholic Archbishop Chaput delivered "A Thread for Weaving Joy" on the anniversary of Roe v Wade in Washington D.C. He concentrated on the tragic abortion of most of the unborn who are diagnosed with Down syndrome. I think what he addresses to Catholics applies equally to every Christian:

.... Catholic public officials who take God seriously cannot support laws that attack human dignity without lying to themselves, misleading others and abusing the faith of their fellow Catholics. God will demand an accounting. Catholic doctors who take God seriously cannot do procedures, prescribe drugs or support health policies that attack the sanctity of unborn children or the elderly; or that undermine the dignity of human sexuality and the family. God will demand an accounting. And Catholic citizens who take God seriously cannot claim to love their Church, and then ignore her counsel on vital public issues that shape our nation’s life. God will demand an accounting. As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long — but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

We live in a culture where our marketers and entertainment media compulsively mislead us about the sustainability of youth; the indignity of old age; the avoidance of suffering; the denial of death; the nature of real beauty; the impermanence of every human love; the oppressiveness of children and family; the silliness of virtue; and the cynicism of religious faith. It’s a culture of fantasy, selfishness, sexual confusion and illness that we’ve brought upon ourselves. And we’ve done it by misusing the freedom that other — and greater — generations than our own worked for, bled for and bequeathed to our safe-keeping. ....

Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in — not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now — is somehow friendly to our faith. What we’re watching emerge in this country is a new kind of paganism, an atheism with air-conditioning and digital TV. And it is neither tolerant nor morally neutral.

As the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observed more than a decade ago, “What was once stigmatized as deviant behavior is now tolerated and even sanctioned; what was once regarded as abnormal has been normalized.” But even more importantly, she added, “As deviancy is normalized, so what was once normal becomes deviant. The kind of family that has been regarded for centuries as natural and moral — the ‘bourgeois’ family as it is invidiously called — is now seen as pathological” and exclusionary, concealing the worst forms of psychic and physical oppression.

My point is this: Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state, and the sovereignty of God. ....

The great Green Bay Packer theologian, Vince Lombardi, liked to say that real glory consists in getting knocked flat on the ground, again and again and again, and getting back up — just one more time than the other guy. That’s real glory. And there’s no better metaphor for the Christian life. Don’t give up. Your prolife witness gives glory to God. Be the best Catholics you can be. Pour your love for Jesus Christ into building and struggling for a culture of life. By your words and by your actions, be an apostle to your friends and colleagues. Speak up for what you believe. Love the Church. Defend her teaching. Trust in God. Believe in the Gospel. And don’t be afraid. Fear is beneath your dignity as sons and daughters of the God of life. .... [more]

A Thread for Weaving Joy

Women and children first

2012-01-23T15:39:00.000-06:00

The behavior of the captain and many of the crew of the Costa Concordia brings forth these reflections by Mark Steyn. He is right. None of the progress society has seen required the loss of the kind of honorable behavior he describes here:

.... In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic. When James Cameron made his movie, he was interested in everything except what the story was actually about. .... In my book, I cite First Officer William Murdoch. In real life, he threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship — the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. ....

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.

In fact, “women and children first” can be dated very precisely. On Feb. 26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:
We’re most of us liars, we’re ’arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be, But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ’ope it won’t ’appen to me).
Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ’oped it wouldn’t ’appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.” From a grandmother on the latter: “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.” .... [more]

The Sinking of the West - Mark Steyn - National Review Online

Joy comes with the morning

2012-01-21T08:07:00.000-06:00

Sing praises to the LORD, O you his saints,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment,
and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
Psalm 30:4-5 [ESV]

Pro family

2012-01-20T14:13:00.002-06:00

The current National Review explains why the Wall Street Journal is wrong when it faults Senator Santorum for advocating increasing the tax deduction for dependent children:

Senator Santorum has a tax plan that, among other things, triples the personal deduction for children. Other candidates, such as Speaker Gingrich and Governor Perry, have similar provisions in their plans, but for some reason our friends at the Wall Street Journal have been particularly troubled by Santorum, zinging him in both an editorial and a Kimberley Strassel column. .... Making it easier for families to raise children is a mere “hobbyhorse” of Christian conservatives, in their view, and provisions of the tax code that recognize the costs of parental investment in children amount to special favors for those “Americans fortunate enough to have a child” (as Strassel puts it). The Journal does not treat low taxes on capital gains as special favors for those fortunate enough to have investment portfolios, even though they too look like preferential treatment to the untutored eye. It is right not to: Treating capital-gains income like labor income would create a bias in favor of consumption. For the tax code to treat parental investments in children like consumption would, likewise, create a bias against parents—whose financial sacrifices swell the future coffers of Social Security and Medicare while earning them no additional benefits from those programs. Expanding the child credit, or increasing the child deduction, is not a special favor but the reduction of an unfair tax. All conservatives should ride that hobbyhorse.

As someone who is not "fortunate enough to have a child" I have never objected to tax provisions or negotiated contract provisions that advantaged families with children. I've always thought they were something to be encouraged.

No more Narnia?

2012-01-20T12:55:00.001-06:00

The quality of the Narnia movies varied a great deal. Each film had strengths and weaknesses. I liked The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe best. But even so I looked forward to more. There may not be another and if there is it may be years away. "'Narnia 4' Movie in Limbo":

Fans of popular book series The Chronicles of Narnia have been left in limbo over when, or even if, they will see a new movie from the franchise on the big screen.

Walden Media, which produced the first three Narnia films – “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” (2005), “Prince Caspian” (2008) and “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” (2010), apparently no longer hold the rights to the movies. What is more, the C.S. Lewis Estate must wait a number of years before they can resell them to Walden or another studio....

'Narnia 4' Movie in Limbo; Likely Several Years Before Production Begins, Christian News

A new upper class?

2012-01-20T12:29:00.000-06:00

Charles Murray knows that we have never had a "classless society" but argues that the class divergences now are qualitatively different—and more problematical—than those that existed as recently as the 1960s.

.... When two parts of America behave markedly differently with regard to marriage, the socialization of their children, their work habits, their criminality, and their religiosity, they differ on some of the most fundamental dimensions of life. Taking the white population ages 30–49 as a whole, those whose behavior is intrinsically problematic for the civic culture—men who are not making a living, women who are raising children without fathers, those who commit crimes, and those who are simply social isolates—amount to about 20 percent of the population. That, in rough terms, is a reasonable way to think of the size of the new white lower class.

It would be bad enough if America experienced just a new lower class pulling away from mainstream America. But during the same half century, a new upper class developed that pulled away from the other direction. They were new not just because they were getting richer, but because they constituted a class that shared distinctive tastes and preferences that increasingly isolated them from everyone else. ....

.... The problem is not the lifestyle of the members of America’s new upper class, which in many ways is attractive, but the degree to which the new upper class has become sealed off from the rest of America.

.... The members of America’s new upper class tend not to watch the same movies and television shows that the rest of America watches, don’t go to kinds of restaurants the rest of America frequents, tend to buy different kinds of automobiles, and have passions for being green, maintaining the proper degree of body fat, and supporting gay marriage that most Americans don’t share. Their child-raising practices are distinctive, and they typically take care to enroll their children in schools dominated by the offspring of the upper middle class—or, better yet, of the new upper class. ....

Worst of all, a growing proportion of the people who run the institutions of our country have never known any other culture. They are the children of upper-middle-class parents, have always lived in upper-middle-class neighborhoods and gone to upper-middle-class schools. Many have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn’t have a college degree, never hunted or fished. They are likely to know that Garrison Keillor’s monologue on Prairie Home Companion is the source of the phrase “all of the children are above average,” but they have never walked on a prairie and never known someone well whose IQ actually was below average.

When people are making decisions that affect the lives of many other people, the cultural isolation that has grown up around America’s new upper class can be disastrous. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale law professors. It is a problem if Yale law professors, or producers of the nightly news, or CEOs of great corporations, or the President’s advisers, cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. .... [more]

Belmont & Fishtown by Charles Murray - The New Criterion

A theological house of cards

2012-01-19T16:16:00.000-06:00

Michael Patton gives us useful and helpful advice about "Dealing with the Doubting" — advice that is as useful to those who are doubting [each of us, I suppose, at one point or another] as to those ministering to doubters. A couple of quotations from a much longer essay:

.... The last thing the doubting need are cliché answers. In fact, these will almost always make the crisis worse. People normally go through these trials because they are thinking deeply about their faith. They are critically examining it, possibly for the first time. Sound-bite answers only reinforce a naive picture of the faith. People in the crisis have a new ability to tell if you are being fake, even when you don't know it yourself.

Be ready. Be honest about your faith. Enter into the crisis with them and find answers together. ....

It could be something as small as someone at school ridiculing them for believing that a donkey talked, discovering an apparent discrepancy in what Christ said in Matthew compared to Mark, or hearing a science class presentation on the theory of evolution. However, for those who have never been prepared for this crisis, they cannot discriminate between essentials and non-essentials. For many, everything is essential. Their theology is a house of cards. Once one card falls, no matter how small, the entire house comes tumbling down.

We can do much to lessen the effects of this crisis if we can help those going through it gain some perspective. Someone may be questioning the legitimacy of his belief in the rapture, whether to include the Apocrypha in the canon, whether hell is eternal, whether God changes his mind, whether Christ can work through other religions, or the inerrancy of Scripture. Whether the crisis of faith is brought about due to intellectual or emotional reasons, start by encouraging doubters to consider core issues of the faith and then move out from there. I think the primary core issue of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Christ. All dominoes fall from there. It is also the easiest to rest our intellectual head on. I have yet to meet someone who was going through a prolonged crisis of faith who was well established in the historicity of Christ's resurrection. .... [much more]

Dealing with the Doubting – The Gospel Coalition Blog

Common sense and education

2012-01-17T14:43:00.000-06:00

Common sense is always fighting a head-wind in the schools. Teachers are victimized by fads and trendy nonsense but much less so than students. The two stories below provide at least some encouragement.

First, from the Washington Post, "In schools, self-esteem boosting is losing favor to rigor, finer-tuned praise":

For decades, the prevailing wisdom in education was that high self-esteem would lead to high achievement. The theory led to an avalanche of daily affirmations, awards ceremonies and attendance certificates — but few, if any, academic gains.

Now, an increasing number of teachers are weaning themselves from what some call empty praise. Drawing on psychology and brain research, these educators aim to articulate a more precise, and scientific, vocabulary for praise that will push children to work through mistakes and take on more challenging assignments. .... [more]

And then, from The New York Times Sunday, skepticism about one of the most dreaded faculty in-service experiences: "brainstorming." From "The Rise of the New Groupthink":

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. ....

Our schools have also been transformed by the New Groupthink. Today, elementary school classrooms are commonly arranged in pods of desks, the better to foster group learning. Even subjects like math and creative writing are often taught as committee projects. In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question. ....

...[B]rainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. ....

But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.” .... [more]

In schools, self-esteem boosting is losing favor to rigor, finer-tuned praise - The Washington Post, The Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com

Unalienable rights

2012-01-16T12:48:00.001-06:00

"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the 'unalienable Rights' of 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'"
Martin Luther King, August 28, 1963

"The only thing I could do...."

2012-01-16T12:31:00.000-06:00

Andrew Klavan, who has become one of my favorite authors, was interviewed by Teen Ink primarily about the creative process — how he goes about writing books and screenplays. One of the questions, though, was about his conversion. Klavan:

.... It wasn't a kind of Road to Damascus shock. It was a really long journey.

I was born and raised a Jew. So I had a long way to go. I was not born into that fold, as it were. I kind of lost my faith, very early on. I walked away from religion. I felt it was dishonest. I felt I was being dishonest by trying to participate in any religion at all.

I went through a period where I was an atheist. That wasn't very long. Mostly I was just an agnostic who just thought that there was no way you could know the answers, so there was no point in thinking about it.

But I do a lot of reading and thinking about these things, and over time I began to realize that the answer that you can't know is incomplete. What I was really saying was that you can't prove anything, which is different than not being able to know or believe.

Ultimately what happened was I experimented with a prayer. You know, I said a prayer of thanks for all the good things in my life: my wife, my children, my work. It was very short. It was just a thank you. I found that the response that came to me was so electric, so enlightening, so powerful that it woke me up. Suddenly I was not only experiencing the things that were happening; I was experiencing gratitude on a new level. I was experiencing life on a new level.

So, I continued to pray. As I prayed, my relationship with God developed and deepened, until finally, I realized (it was quite a shock, I have to tell you) that I wanted to be baptized. I realized that I had come to faith in Jesus Christ.

Really, it's funny, I know some people come to God through Christ, but I came to Christ really through God, by understanding that the God that I believed in was the God of Christ.

That was a very shocking revelation because it meant leaving the religion of my birth, possibly offending people in my family, my friends. But it was the only thing I could do to live an honest and authentic life.

Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this too I believe, that unless I first believe, I shall not understand.

Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033 – 1109)

Author/Screenwriter Andrew Klavan | Celebrity Interview About author/writer, professional and screenwriter

Ideal, not sentimental

2012-01-16T12:10:00.000-06:00

Anthony Esolen likes Norman Rockwell:

.... I know I’m not supposed to do this. As a college professor, I have a duty to pretend to others that I derive real satisfaction from poems whose sentences cannot be parsed, from sculptures that look like green blobs from a bad space-alien movie, from spattered canvases, from photographs of sullen people doing things with their bodies that even machines shouldn’t have to suffer, and from philosophies that propose the justice of letting a baby die to save a certain number of dogs, the number determined by precise calculation. I’m supposed to nod appreciatively as all these emperors pass by.

The truth is, I can’t stand the lot of them. But as I said, I delight in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. I don’t pretend to be able to judge their technical mastery. They sure seem to me to be subtle and complex as compositions, but I’ll have to defer to others who know the business better. ....

Esolen discusses the dismissive accusation that Rockwell's work is just sentimental illustration. He disagrees and illustrates his appreciation of Rockwell with, for example:

.... his illustrations of the four seasons. All four feature a boy, his whiskered grandfather, and a spaniel mutt. Now this already is peculiar. Why should we care about an old man who probably doesn’t do anything important anymore, if he ever did, and a small boy, and a tag-along dog? The Greeks didn’t care for them; the piety-mouthing Romans never cared for them. The modern intellectual ignores them, as does the modern poet.

But Rockwell lavishes them with attention. In spring, we see them going fishing. The old man is carrying the tackle over his shoulder and is looking into the distance, while the boy is almost bent double as he races, barefoot, with eagerness, and the dog scampers along. In summer, the three of them are on the grass. The old man is on his back, dozing peacefully, while the boy is sitting and plucking the petals off a wild daisy, maybe thinking about a pretty girl he likes. In autumn, there’s a pile of leaves, and the boy leans over it intently, about to light the leaves on fire, while the grandfather, leaning on the rake, pretends not to be watching too closely, and the dog crouches, fascinated by what’s about to happen. Then at last in winter, of all times, when one might expect that age would finally wither for good, our three heroes are on a frozen pond, and the boy in the background, his hands on his knees and his skates askew so he can stand still, gapes with glad surprise while the old man, like a real athlete, executes a perfect figure eight, and cocks his head with pride. He’s a boy again, he is! And the dog barks, his silly legs slipping sideways out from under him. ....

...[T]heir whole attitude toward the world is open. The old man looking off into the distance in spring, or falling asleep in the summer, is a man capable of contemplation, as is the boy, lost in thoughts of love; and even the humble dog accepts things cheerfully as they come. This is a world capable of great sorrow — we know that the old man will die, and the boy will grow up and know his share of disappointments — but also, and more important, a world of great beauty and joy. It is a world in which the adult may aspire to the condition of the child, not in sentimentality, but in fundamental openness to the gifts of God. .... [more]

What Makes Norman Rockwell Possible? | Crisis Magazine

Saving Grace

2012-01-15T20:19:00.000-06:00

The Cinch Review calls attention to this:

A whole slate of videos have been uploaded to YouTube by the Melbourne Mass Gospel Choir featuring that 80 voice choir performing the gospel songs of Bob Dylan. Their channel is at this link, where you can explore them all....

.... Make all the jokes you want about a bunch of elderly white Australians singing black American gospel music (and black American gospel music composed by Robert Allen Zimmerman, at that). Make any joke you want but then just listen to it. .... [more]

For instance:

T.S. Eliot, Baker Street Irregular

2012-01-15T13:21:00.000-06:00

I am thoroughly enjoying Dirda's On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling [this is my fifth post about the book]. About halfway through the Kindle edition I found this passage about T.S. Eliot and Sherlock Holmes:

.... During my freshman year I also grew besotted with T.S. Eliot, and boldly decided to read everything from the early essays in The Sacred Wood to the later verse-dramas. At some point I discovered that Eliot revered the Sherlock Holmes stories. At a party one evening, some friends asked him to name his favorite passage of English prose, and the great poet answered by virtually performing the following exchange:
"Well," cried Boss McGinty at last, "is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?"
"Yes," McMurdo answered slowly. "Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards."
Was Eliot joking with his audience by choosing this climactic passage from The Valley of Fear? At least a little, I suspect. Nonetheless, Eliot reportedly reread the Holmes canon every couple of years, was an honorary member of the Trained Cormorants of Los Angeles, and looked—as Vincent Starrett observed—more like the Great Detective than many of the actors who played him.

Moreover, Eliot wrote at length about Holmes in the Criterion, modeled "Macavity, the Mystery Cat," aka the Hidden Paw, after that other Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty, and in "East Coker" quite pointedly evoked the atmosphere of The Hound of the Baskervilles by alluding to the novel's ominous Grimpen Mire: "in a dark wood, in a bramble / On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold." While Eliot famously insisted that great poets steal, I was nonetheless taken aback when I first came across this striking exchange between Thomas Becket and a diabolical Tempter in Murder in the Cathedral:
THOMAS: Who shall have it?
TEMPTER: He who will come.
THOMAS: What shall be the month?
TEMPTER: The last from the first.
THOMAS: What shall we give for it?
TEMPTER: Pretence of priestly power.
THOMAS: Why should we give it?
TEMPTER: For the power and the glory.
In "The Musgrave Ritual"—one of Holmes's earliest cases—an aristocratic family preserves for centuries a queer litany, which, of course, provides the key to a riddle and the solution to a strange disappearance:
"Whose was it?"
"His who is gone."
"Who shall have it?"
"He who will come."
("What was the month?"
"The sixth from the first.")....
"What shall we give for it?"
"All that is ours."
"Why should we give it?"
"For the sake of the trust."

Genre reading

2012-01-14T16:34:00.002-06:00

Continuing to read Michael Dirda's On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, this paragraph appears in the chapter "Twilight Tales":

.... Gradually, I was becoming aware that in one generation—in effect, during the lifetime of Arthur Conan Doyle—there appeared most of our pattern-establishing masterpieces of science fiction, horror, fantasy, and adventure. Recall just some of the English-language books published in the forty years between 1885 and 1925: King Solomon's Mines, Kidnapped, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Time Machine, Dracula, Kim, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Five Children and It, Peter Pan, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Man Who Was Thursday, Tarzan of the Apes, Flatland, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, The War of the Worlds, Trent's Last Case, Riders of the Purple Sage, The Wind in the Willows, Captain Blood, and dozens of others. ....

Do boys and girls still read books like this? How much I envy any person who has not — because there are few experiences like reading a book like Kidnapped or The Wind in the Willows or The Time Machine or Dracula or The Prisoner of Zenda or The Thirty-Nine Steps or The Hound of the Baskervilles for the first time.

Reading and young minds

2012-01-13T12:06:00.001-06:00

One of the most enjoyable [and dangerous] things about Kindle is the ease of instantly possessing a book. I'm already reading On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, the book to which I refer in the post just below. From Dirda's Preface:

Graham Greene famously observed that only in childhood do books have any deep influence on our lives. "In later life, we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already." But when we are young, "all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water they influence the future."

Remembered pleasure

2012-01-13T11:53:00.000-06:00

Upon reading this review I immediately bought the book. The experiences of both the author and the reviewer seemed to so closely to parallel my own as a youthful reader, including the reluctance to re-visit some authors out of fear that they wouldn't stand up to the remembered pleasure. From "The Sheer Joy of Genre Reading: Dirda’s ‘On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling’", by Curtis Evans:

I was fascinated by Dirda’s account of his own experiences with fiction, which date back to the 1950s, the great era of pulp paperbacks and E.C. Comics. Dirda’s seminal childhood reading material was somewhat loftier than, say, Vault of Horror, but he still got from it that same delicious frisson of fright:
The Hound of the Baskervilles . . . was the first ‘grown-up’ book I ever read–and it changed my life…Romantic poets regularly sigh over their childhood memories of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower. But what are daisies and rainbows compared to…sleek and shiny paperbacks?… With a dollar clutched in my fist, I pedaled my red Roadmaster bike to Whalen’s drugstor, where I quickly picked out two or three candy bars, a box of Cracker Jack, and a cold bottle of Orange Crush. After my family had driven off in our new 1958 Ford, I dragged a blanket from my bed, spread it on the reclining chair next to the living room’s brass floor lamp, carefully arranged my provisions near to hand, and crawled expectantly under the covers with my paperback of The Hound–just as the heavens began to boom with thunder and the rain to thump against the curtained windows…. The Hound of the Baskervilles left its teeth marks in me and seriously aroused my then still slumbering passion for reading. I was no longer the same ten-year-old when I reached its final pages.
Dirda goes on to discuss other amazing genre discoveries he made, after Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle showed him the way:

G.K. Chesterton’s clerical Father Brown (“each story chronicled a crime utterly beyond human ken”)

Sax Rohmer’s diabolical Dr. Fu Manchu (Dirda writes that he dare not go back and reread the Fu Manchu tales, “lest I be seriously appalled by my youthful taste”)

Howard Haycraft’s Boys’ Book of Great Detective Stories (where Dirda “first read the stunning Thinking Machine classic, ‘The Problem of Cell 13′ “)

Ernest Bramah’s blind detective, Max Carrados (see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/01/all-hail-max-12-cases-for-max-carrados.html

“The highly scientific Dr. Thorndyke of R. Austin Freeman”

If you’re a longtime fan of this amazingly rich period of mystery genre fiction, from the 1890s to World War One and beyond, to the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s, Dirda’s book makes entrancing reading.

I read all of those, including, of course, Conan Doyle, except for the Haycroft — but I read "The Problem of Cell 13" in some other collection and then went on to read more of Futrelle's "Thinking Machine" stories. I've posted about many of these authors here and most, having fallen into the public domain, are available online. Curtis Evans writes about a few of these authors and others here and here. One of the most enjoyable accounts of the "Golden Age" mystery writers was by the above mentioned Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story.

The Sheer Joy of Genre Reading: Dirda’s ‘On Conan Doyle, or, The Whole Art of Storytelling’ | The American Culture

A reader-friendly Bible

2012-01-12T13:57:00.004-06:00

My ESV Single Column Legacy Bible (TruTone, Brown/Saddle) arrived from Amazon in two days. It's a bit thicker and heavier than I anticipated but I'm very pleased. It's a reader's Bible — not a study Bible — and will serve admirably for that purpose. None of the usual apparatus interrupts the flow of the text. The page here was scanned from my copy.

Mark Bertrand at the "Bible Design Blog" hasn't reviewed this Bible yet but he has published some questions and replies from an executive at Crossway, Randy Jahns. Two of the exchanges:

Q. What is the story behind the Single Column Legacy ESV? How did the idea originate?

The original project was conceived under the working title of “Reader’s Thinline Bible.” The goal was to create a single-column, text-only, reader’s edition that focused on an inviting readable page and beautiful design.

Our Bible typesetter relied heavily on Canadian typesetter Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style as he developed the page design. Essentially, we tried to follow the "Renaissance Ideal" or "perfect page" layout. This layout refers to a set of principles called the “canons of page construction” that all focus around a 2:3 ration of page geometry. Jan Tschichold reintroduced this typographic ideal in the twentieth century, calling it a method “upon which it is impossible to improve” and which produces “the perfect book.” We stuck closely to this design philosophy, although we did have to make a few adjustments for the sake of overall page count. ....

Q. The most striking things about the page spread are that there are no cross-references and even the section headings are moved to the margin. What was the thinking behind these choices?

From the initial idea of having a Reader’s Thinline, we wanted the Bible text itself to be beautiful on the page, with simple and effective design. Our goal was to achieve clean blocks of uninterrupted text that would aid in the reading experience, which is why we moved the headings into the margin. This also added the benefit of slightly shortening the overall page count. ....

Bible Design and Binding: Single Column Legacy ESV (Part 1): Interview with Crossway

"Men of intemperate minds cannot be free"

2012-01-12T12:55:00.000-06:00

This day in 1729 was the birthday of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), political philosopher, statesman, abolitionist, friend of liberty, conservative.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Speech at a County Meeting of Buckinghamshire (1784)

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Letter to M. de Menonville (October 1789)

Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to any thing but power for their relief.
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Edmund Burke - Wikiquote

Free exercise

2012-01-11T16:30:00.000-06:00

In a unanimous decision today the Supreme Court defended religious liberty. For the moment those in government who would decide for us who we must accept as our religious teachers and clergy have been thwarted. A couple of summaries of the significance of the decision:

Richard Garnett:

.... Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in Hosanna-Tabor Church v. EEOC vindicates clearly and strongly a crucial constitutional principle: The First Amendment protects religious liberty by forbidding governments from second-guessing religious communities’ decisions about who should be their teachers, leaders, and ministers. The chief justice’s opinion for the Court is well-reasoned, welcome, and correct. ....

.... The question for the Court was whether the Constitution’s protections for religious liberty allow secular courts to consider lawsuits brought by “ministers” against religious institutions, organizations, and communities. .... In today’s opinion, the Supreme Court affirmed what the overwhelming majority of lower federal courts and state courts in the United States have already ruled, and rejected the well-outside-the-mainstream view advanced by the Obama administration’s lawyers. This last point is worth emphasizing: The administration’s lawyers had pressed an extreme view — one that no other court, and few scholars and experts, had embraced — and they convinced no one. ....

Ed Whelan:

The opinion thus rejects the remarkably hostile contentions of the Obama administration that there is no general ministerial exception and that religious organizations are limited to the right to freedom of association that labor unions and social clubs enjoy. That latter contention, the Chief explains,
is hard to square with the text of the First Amendment itself, which gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations. We cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.
.... In one concurring opinion, Justice Thomas expresses his view that courts should “defer to a religious organization’s good-faith understanding of who qualifies as a minister.” In a second concurrence, Justice Alito, joined by Justice Kagan, calls for the inquiry to “focus on the function performed by persons who work for religious bodies,” rather than on whether a religious organization uses the term “minister” or has a concept of ordination.

At Christianity Today

A Win for Religious Freedom - By Richard Garnett - Bench Memos - National Review Online, Major Victory for Religious Liberty Against Obama Administration Attack - By Ed Whelan - Bench Memos - National Review Online

The calm before the storm

2012-01-11T13:25:00.001-06:00

From a bench at B.B. Clarke Beach, Madison, Wisconsin, at about noon today. Lake Monona is frozen over but the temperature is almost 50, the wind is calm and the sun shines. I'm sitting comfortably wearing a T-shirt. Tomorrow, they tell us, the high will be in the low twenties and much snow beginning this evening.

"Boomers," our parents, and authenticity

2012-01-10T15:27:00.000-06:00

Yesterday responding to a letter about his negative reaction to Mark Driscoll’s latest book, Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk made some useful distinctions:

.... I am a member of a generation (Baby Boomers) that has promoted the idea that qualities like vulnerability are key to a healthy life and relationships. The accepted wisdom is that the generations before us were “uptight” and kept secrets. Our parents and grandparents lived in a culture of “shame” that valued a respectable outward appearance, while the reality underneath was often not so pretty. Taboos were strong and subjects like sex were not talked about freely and openly. It wasn’t the Victorian Age, but it might as well have been.

But that is not all. Feelings of all kinds were not shared aloud. It was considered bad form, a loss of self-control, an admission of weakness. “Keeping up appearances” was paramount. We feared shame more than hypocrisy. We feared loss of status and the disapproval of our peers. We didn’t like drawing attention to ourselves. We hated to think that people might pity us or think we were not self-reliant. ....

I know these folks well. I grew up among them. I have always had a healthy representation of them in my churches. As a hospice chaplain, I now visit with them daily. This is what I hear and have heard my whole life about “vulnerability.” ....

He discusses the reaction to my parents' generation: that "authenticity" and "vulnerability" and "transparency" were better — and he affirms that — but then:

I think that the practice of “vulnerability” as personal transparency may have gone to seed. ....

Vulnerability defined as “letting it all hang out” is not necessarily the same thing as serving others personally and humbly in my weakness. “Telling my story” may be more about meeting my own needs than about ministering to others. Sharing my feelings and personal experiences can be an act of humility and generosity, or a selfish attempt to put myself in the spotlight. It can keep me from listening well to what another is saying. It can prevent me from understanding my friend’s needs by keeping the focus on my own “need” to share. I may be so intent on sharing the details of my life that I fail to see that what I share about myself may be irrelevant to my friend’s situation. My story may give them a completely misleading idea about what it means for their journey.

Being vulnerable or transparent, sharing my feelings, speaking honestly and openly about my own mistakes and failures, confessing my doubts and fears and limitations, acknowledging my weaknesses, being willing to laugh at myself, shed tears without shame, admit my need for help, and say, “I don’t know” — these are essential qualities of humility and honesty. These qualities won’t look the same in everybody, they will be channeled through our individual personalities and temperaments. But they are necessary if we are to relate to one another well.

But…

Vulnerability must always be limited and guided by love. To love means to be with another and for another for their benefit. If allowing a glimpse inside my life through telling my story or sharing my feelings will accomplish that, then I should do so thoughtfully and with care and discernment. But I may be called to simply listen, ministering by my silence and presence. It may be more important for me to point my friend away from me in order to provide help. What is essential is that I am committed to loving others by laying down my life for them. But “laying down my life” does not always mean “sharing every detail of my life.”

The love that limits and guides vulnerability is a virtuous love. Sharing my life transparently with others is limited by love that recognizes a place for privacy. Certain details of life are private. Some things are not meant to be shared with anyone but kept in my own heart. Other things are meant only to be shared with those who share my private spaces. Without that, intimacy with the appropriate people in our lives is not possible. ....

Virtue and the Limits of Vulnerability | internetmonk.com

Tebowing

2012-01-09T13:06:00.001-06:00

I thoroughly enjoyed Denver's victory yesterday largely — and not to my credit — because I knew it would annoy those who object to his very public expressions of faith. Elizabeth Scalia, a Catholic who blogs at Patheos, writes today about how to interprete "Tebowing":

.... Father James Martin, asked the question by the WaPo, goes full-Jesuit on the story:
All this raises the inevitable question, and one that I’ve been asked numerous times over the last few months: Is God answering Tim Tebow’s prayers?

Well, in good Jesuitical fashion the answer is: Yes, no, and I don’t know.
He’s right on all counts: yes, God is hearing and answering Tebow’s prayers, because he hears and answers all of our prayers. No, we cannot possibly understand what the answer really is, and being a public Christian is not a free pass to success, and who can know the mind of God, anyway?

Lost in all of this is the simple truth that a person’s relationship with God, no matter how publicly lived, is still profoundly personal and deeply, mysteriously unknowable.

I suspect Tebow, when he prays during a game, is praying “thy will be done” and “praise be to you”, and any contemplative will tell you that these simple prayers, when prayed regularly and heartfully before the start and end of every activity, become profound and intimate interactions.

But to many–perhaps to most—Tebow’s actions are interpreted to be little more than “God, help me complete this pass” and “Hey, thanks for the completed pass!” and, as Fr. Martin suggests, that view can easily mislead and distort the reality of Tebow’s faith and the whole point of the life of faith, in general. This is why I rather dislike the intense interest in Tebow and God and Answered Prayers: I think it is helping to put a very shallow spin on a practice of true depth.

Our answered prayers often confuse us; sometimes we wonder if we really wanted what we ended up with. In truth, the answer to our prayers is always—in the long run—an affirmative, but often it can seem like “no,” and either way, in 1 Thessalonians 5:18 we are told to “give thanks in all circumstances,” — a tall order that, with obedience, can bring great peace and a deepening of joy, at least in my experience, and I’ll bet in yours, too.

Giving thanks for what we perceive to be a “no” is the perspective-changer that helps us understand the hidden “yes.” .... [more]

Tim Tebow: Luke 12:8 or 1 Thess 5:18? « The Anchoress

"I had a father who read to me"

2012-01-05T22:36:00.002-06:00

John was resident at the same assisted-living facility where my mother spent her last years. My brother would occasionally assist him getting back to his rooms. My brother and I have often since wished that we had talked more to those who were resident there. John would have been a good one. This week John's daughter remembered his delight in reading and reading to her. From the Milton Courier:

"I had a father who read to me." That is a derivation of the last line of a poem titled The Reading Mother, by Strickland Gillian. It's the piece I read at my father's memorial service last September. He was 95 when he died. after falling and breaking his hip. He had a book on the table next to his chair that he never had the chance to finish. ....

My fondest memories growing up are of sitting on the living room couch next to my father as he read to me. At first they were the Little Golden books, with characters like Uncle Wiggly or Donald Duck. But soon he was reading chapter books that required a week or more to finish. Even when I became a capable reader on my own we continued this practice until I became a teenager. ....

The love of books, for both knowledge and entertainment, is the best gift my father could have given to me. My life would be diminished without the ability to learn on my own or entertain myself through the power of the written word. ....

The final stanzas of this compelling poem are,"You may have tangible wealth untold; Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. Richer than I you can never be. I had a Mother who read to me."

It's a new year. Please consider enriching your children beyond buying things that may break or lose their value. Give a lifetime of success and happiness to your children. Read to them!

I agree. I had a father who read to me.

Milton Courier, January 5, 2012

The ESV "Single Column Legacy Bible"

2012-01-05T15:16:00.001-06:00

I've enjoyed using the English Standard Version [ESV] of the Bible for a number of years now — not as a result of any judgement I'm capable of making about the scholarship involved, although those competent to make such judgements seem to like it, but because it is just so very readable. There are a number of very good editions available [including a a free one for Kindle], and today Crossway announces another, and perhaps the nicest one they have so far published:

The Single Column Legacy Bible has just arrived in the Crossway warehouse and will start shipping over the coming weeks. We’re excited about this new edition for at least four reasons.

1. It features a fresh, new design. .... It’s based off the Renaissance ideal for a perfect page...., which means there’s a precise layout of the text and the margins – what Renaissance thinkers considered perfect proportions. ....

2. We aimed for a high standard of excellence in production. .... The paper, binding, and printer were all carefully selected to ensure the quality of this edition.

3. It’s our first Bible that uses line-matching. Line-matching is a process that aligns the text on both sides of a page, minimizing the see-through of text. ....

4. It’s designed specifically for undistracted reading. Because we wanted this to be an ideal “reader’s Bible,” we chose a single-column format and opted to not include cross-references, introductions, or other special features (although there are maps and a concordance in the back). We also placed the section titles in the margin instead of in-line with the text. The result is an edition where the reader can move smoothly from passage to passage without jumping around or being distracted by added textual divisions. ....

Crossway's product page for the Single Column Legacy Bible. The images are from the Crossway site. The page image ought to give a good sense of the layout.

The Amazon link: ESV Single Column Legacy Bible (TruTone, Brown/Saddle, Timeless Design)

4 Reasons We’re Excited About the Single Column Legacy Bible | Crossway

Manners

2012-01-04T13:53:00.001-06:00

One of those commenting on yesterday's Iowa caucus results linked to this, a book by Senator Santorum's wife compiled for children — according to Amazon — "3 and up." Even though I'm somewhat older than that I've ordered it. I am sufficiently deficient in some of the areas it addresses that I have no doubt it will do me good. From the Amazon description:

In Everyday Graces: Child's Book Of Good Manners (Foundations), Karen Santorum has produced for parents and teachers a wonderfully rich and instructive anthology. Her volume speaks to the regrettable fact that the subject of manners is not much discussed anymore, and good manners seem practiced even less. Yet, good manners are a prerequisite for the growth of moral character; they are the habits of conduct and behavior by which we express in the most ordinary circumstances our fundamental respect for others, whether parents, friends, colleagues, or strangers. It is evident, then, that when we fail to instill good manners in our youth we invite a decline of civility and a coarsening of our common life. Under such headings as "Honor Your Mother and Father", "Please and Thank You", "No Hurtful Words", "Good Behavior in Sport", and "Showing Respect for Country", Mrs. Santorum has arranged a collection of stories and poems that will develop and enrich the moral imagination. Some of her selections are well known; others are forgotten gems that deserve a new hearing. Authors include Hans Christian Anderson, Beatrix Potter, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, M. Montgomery, C.S. Lewis, Max Lucado and Arnold Lobel, to name only a few. Karen Santorum writes that this anthology "grew out of the frustration of not being able to find a book on manners that instructs through stories rather than by rules of dos and don'ts." Each of her selections has been tried and tested on her own children, and each is introduced and concluded by her own thoughtful commentary. The result is an informality and intimacy that is inviting and infectious. Everyday Graces will be useful both as a bedside book and as a reference for home, school, and church library.

The introduction is by Joe Paterno.... but Bono liked it, too.

Amazon.com: Everyday Graces: Child's Book Of Good Manners (Foundations) (9781932236095): Karen Santorum: Books

How then should we vote?

2012-01-03T10:03:00.001-06:00

2012 promises to be a particularly contentious political year. Here Kevin DeYoung addresses how, as Christians, "we should try to think Christianly about the issues and candidates before us"

.... On the one hand, I’m concerned that some of us think there is a Christian position on every issue—as if the Bible determines the one and only God-honoring decision regarding rates of taxation or how to respond if Iran closes the Straits of Hormuz. But on the other hand, I fear other Christians are so loathe to seem partisan, or they consider politics so unclean, that they don’t dare bring Christian principles to bear on their political thinking. This too is a mistake. ....

He then lists some of the principles he believes Christians should apply in making realistic political judgements [I particularly like number 6]:

Man is made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26-27). No matter how small or frail or old or impaired every human being has value and dignity. Government should protect human life and punish those who harm it (Rom. 13:4; Gen. 9:6).
Man is made to work (Gen. 2:15). We ought to maximize incentives for hard work and remove incentives that encourage laziness (2 Thess. 3:6-12).
Part of being human, as opposed to God, is that we are subject to appropriate authorities. This includes subjection to government and the requirement to pay taxes (Rom. 13:1-7).
Humans are motivated by self-interest. Jesus understands this when he tells us to love our neighbors as we already love ourselves (Matt. 22:39). Self-interest is not automatically the same as greed or covetousness, which is why Jesus doesn’t hesitate to motivate the disciples with the promise of being first or the guarantee of reward (Matt. 6:19-20; Mark 10:29-31). Granted, our self-interest is not always virtuous. The work of the gospel is to teach people how their self-interest (joy) can square with God’s interest (glory). But the best policies are those that can harness the power of self-interest for the greater good.
Humans are not just consumers on the planet; we are creators too. The physical world is a gift and a tool. We have the ability to spoil, but also the responsibility to subdue (Gen. 1:28).
Because of Adam’s sin, the world is fallen (Rom. 5:12; 8:18-23). Things are not the way they are supposed to be. Utopia is not possible. Therefore, political decisions must deal with trade-offs, weighing pros and cons of various policies. We cannot eliminate the realities of living in a fallen world (John 12:8), but good policies can help mitigate some of the worst of them. [my emphasis]
Human nature is bent toward evil (Gen. 6:5; Jer. 17:9). This means we cannot count on the goodwill of others or of other nations, no matter how well-intentioned we may be or how much we may mind our own business. The question is not where war comes from. That is to be expected given our nature. The question is what institutions and policies are most effective at establishing peace.

Christian Principles for Realistic Politics – Kevin DeYoung

"Things fall apart..."

2012-01-02T14:50:00.001-06:00

"Jonathan Sacks has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth since September 1991...." according to the biography at The Office of the Chief Rabbi. In "The Limits of Secularism" he argues that not only does religion address fundamental questions that secularism cannot but that it is important for the survival of society. A few excerpts from a much longer article:

.... Religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? We will always ask those three questions because homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal, and religion has always been our greatest heritage of meaning. You can take science, technology, the liberal democratic state and the market economy as four institutions that characterise modernity, but none of these four will give you an answer to those questions that humans ask.

Science will explain how but not why. It talks about what is, not what ought to be. Science is descriptive, not prescriptive; it can tell us about causes but it cannot tell us about purposes. Indeed, science disavows purposes. Second, technology: technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn't help us know what to say. As for the liberal democratic state, it gives us the maximum freedom to live as we choose, but the minimum direction as to how we should choose. The market gives us choices but it does not tell us what constitutes the wise or the good or the beautiful choices. Therefore, as long as we ask those questions, we will always find ourselves turning to religion. ....

The fundamental argument that I make in my book The Great Partnership, subtitled "God, Science and the Search for Meaning", is that science and religion are extreme cases of two different ways of thinking about the world. .... To summarise 120,000 words in a single sentence: "Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts things together to see what they mean." ....

.... We need religion and we need science. We need science to explain the universe and we need religion to explain the meaning of human existence. We stand to lose a great deal if we lose religious faith. We will lose our Western sense of human dignity. I think we will lose our Western sense of a free society. I think we will lose our understanding of moral responsibility. I think we will lose the concept of a sacred relationship, particularly that of marriage, and we will lose our concept of a meaningful life. I think that religious belief is fundamental to Western civilisation and we will lose the very heart of it if we lose our faith. ....

...[I]ndividuals may live good lives without religion — the moral sense is part of what makes us human — but a society never can, and morality is quintessentially a social phenomenon. It is that set of principles, practices and ideals that bind us together in a collective enterprise. The market and the state may be driven by the pursuit of interests but societies are framed by something larger and more expansive, by a shared vision of the common good. Absent this and societies begin to fragment. People start thinking of morality as a matter of personal choice. The sense of being bound together — the root meaning of "religion" — in a larger enterprise starts to atrophy and social cohesion is lost. The West was made by what is nowadays called the Judeo-Christian heritage which gave it its unique configuration of values and virtues. Lose that and we will lose Western civilisation as we have known it for the better part of two millennia. ....

I once defined faith as the redemption of solitude. It sanctifies relationships, builds communities, and turns our gaze outward from self to other, giving emotional resonance to altruism and energising the better angels of our nature. These are some of the gifts of our encounter with transcendence, and whether it is love of humanity that leads to the love of God or the other way round, it remains the necessary gravitational force that keeps us, each, from spinning off into independent orbits, binding us instead into the myriad forms of collective beatitude. A society without faith is like one without art, music, beauty or grace, and no society without faith can endure for long. [read it all]

The Limits of Secularism | Standpoint

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T16:06:00.001-06:00

Via Conjubilant With Song:

O God, whom neither time nor space
Can limit, hold, or bind.
Look down from heav'n, Thy dwelling place
With love for humankind.

Another year its course has run,
Thy loving care renew;
Forgive the ill that we have done,
The good we failed to do.

In doubt or danger, all our days,
Be near to guard us still;
Let all our thoughts and all our ways
Be guided by Thy will.

O help us here on earth to live
From selfish strife set free;
To us at last in mercy give
Eternal life with Thee.

Horace Smith, 19th cent.; alt.
Tune DUNFERMLINE (C.M.)
Scottish Psalter, 1615

Conjubilant With Song: Another Year Its Course Has Run

For all those we miss

2011-12-31T23:44:00.001-06:00

"Mem's of 7th day B'pt Church"

2011-12-30T11:47:00.001-06:00

Dissenting took a bit more political courage in the days before the secret ballot. In "Abraham Lincoln and Pope County" C.A. Crisp, who has a "hobby of finding cemeteries" in Pope County in southernmost Illinois, notes reference to an 1860 voter who was distinctly in the minority — and proud of it.

"…The 1860 election records show that Abraham Lincoln received only 127 votes in Pope County, while Stephen A. Douglas, received 1,202 votes…Opposition to Lincoln’s election in 1860 was so strong that one farmer in the northwestern section of the county was assaulted physically at the polls when he showed up to vote for the 'Rail Splitter.' Matthew Bracewell lived to a ripe old age and never regretted the way he cast his vote…" Pope County History and Families, Vol. 2, page 16, ‘The Civil War in Pope County’ - submitted by Ricky T. Allen.

The small cemetery where Matthew Bracewell and Irenne, his wife, were buried is located almost 4 miles west of Delwood. It is in a small grove of trees surrounded by a field. On his tombstone it reads:

"Mem’s of 7th day B’pt Church" ....

Matthew’s ripe old age was 81 years 1 month and 5 days.

Abraham Lincoln and Pope County | Pope County, Illinois Cemeteries

Tinker, Tailor, ....

2011-12-29T12:51:00.001-06:00

I haven't yet seen the new film of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The cast list is full of fine British actors [Gary Oldman as Smiley, Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones, etc.] and I will certainly see it at some point — but the reviews I've read thus far do give pause. Those who loved the book find inexplicable changes in the film and argue that too much plot is pressed into too little time. Reading about the new version did inspire me to re-watch the superb 1979 BBC miniseries. Alec Guinness was George Smiley in that one, with such players as Anthony Bate, Ian Richardson, Ian Bannen, Bernard Hepton, and Alexander Knox. It was perfectly written, cast, and acted. It does take about six hours but it is much easier to keep everything in mind watching it in a long evening instead of the seven weeks it took on Masterpiece Theater in 1980. The BBC Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is available from Amazon and can be rented from Netflix — although not Netflix streaming for some reason.

ESV on Kindle

2011-12-28T19:50:00.000-06:00

Kindle owners who prefer the English Standard Version [ESV] should know that it is available free for the Kindle here at Amazon: The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.

This single Truth

2011-12-25T08:30:00.000-06:00

No love that in a family dwells,
No caroling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

John Betjeman

Wondrous Love

2011-12-24T08:30:00.000-06:00

Filippo Lippi, Medici Nativity, 1455-59

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.
[Luke 2:6-7]

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To lay aside His crown for my soul, for my soul,
To lay aside His crown for my soul.
What Wondrous Love is This

Of the Father's love begotten

2011-12-23T23:39:00.000-06:00

Arguing

2011-12-23T14:09:00.001-06:00

G.K. Chesterton:

"If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy (1908)
Conversations@Intersections: G.K. Chesterton's Madman

Why December 25?

2011-12-23T09:33:00.001-06:00

Mollie Hemingway, commenting on news articles common to this season:

For instance, everyone knows that Dec. 25 was an arbitrary date stolen from Pagans celebrating Saturnalia, right?

Wrong!

You can read William Tighe's fuller treatment of the topic here, but I'll summarize for you.

Early Christians chose what is now Dec. 25 (calendars have changed a bit, obviously) as the likely date of Christ's birth based on a widely held belief of that era that great prophets were conceived and died on the same date. They called this "integral age." Early Christians calculated that Jesus died on what would work out to March 25 -- the date for Passover of the year of his death.

You add 9 months and what do you get?

My favorite part of this story? In all likelihood, Aurelian probably set his sun festival for the same date in an attempt to co-opt what was already becoming a minor Christian feast day. The actual Pagans of that era had their sun festivals in August.

No, my actual favorite part of the story is probably that these myths about how the date was chosen were started by Christians. One was a Protestant trying to undermine the liturgical calendar. The other was a Benedictine monk trying to show how you could co-opt the culture without it causing harm. If only they knew ...

Is Christmas A Pagan Holiday? - Ricochet.com

"To save a race by sin undone"

2011-12-23T08:30:00.000-06:00

A Blesséd Christmas!

O Heavenly Word of God on high,

Whose love has brought salvation nigh,

And from the Father's heart didst come

To save a race by sin undone.

All praise, eternal Son, to thee

Whose advent sets thy people free,

Whom with the Father we adore

And Spirit blest, for evermore.

Latin, 10th century

"A restless desire for change"

2011-12-22T12:20:00.000-06:00

Via Justin Taylor [and others], P.D. James:

We live in an age notable for a kind of fashionable silliness and imbued with a restless desire for change.

It sometimes seems that nothing old, nothing well-established, nothing which has evolved through centuries of experience and loving use escapes our urge to diminish, revise or abolish it.

Above all every organisation has to be relevant—a very fashionable word—to the needs of modern life, as if human beings in the twenty-first century are somehow fundamentally different in their needs and aspirations from all previous generations.

A country which ceases to value and learn from its history, neglects its language and literature, despises its traditions and is unified only by a common frenetic drive for getting and spending and for material wealth, will lose more than its nationhood; it will lose its soul.

Let us cherish and use what we still precariously hold.

Let us strive to ensure that what has been handed down to us is not lost to generations to come.

P.D. James, “Through All the Changes Scenes of Life: Living with the Prayer Book,” in The Book of Common Prayer: Past, Present and Future: A 350th Anniversary Celebration, ed. Prudence Dailey (Continuum, 2011), p. 51.

"Tidings of comfort and joy"

2011-12-22T08:30:00.000-06:00

God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay,

Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day;

To save us all from Satan’s power when we were gone astray.

O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy;

O tidings of comfort and joy.

Far over the Misty Mountains

2011-12-21T16:15:00.001-06:00

In a year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTSoD4BBCJc

"For to do us sinners good"

2011-12-21T08:30:00.000-06:00

The holly and the ivy, When they are both full grown Of all the trees that are in the wood, The holly bears the crown.	The holly bears a prickle As sharp as any thorn; And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ On Christmas day in the morn. Chorus
Chorus: Oh, the rising of the sun, The running of the deer. The playing of the merry organ, Sweet singing in the quire.	The holly bears a bark As bitter as any gall; And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ For to redeem us all. Chorus
The holly bears a blossom As white as lily flower; And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ To be our sweet Savior. Chorus	The holly and the ivy, Now are both well grown, Of all the trees that are in the wood, The holly bears the crown. Chorus
The holly bears a berry As red as any blood; And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ For to do us sinners good. Chorus

The Holly And The Ivy

"Evermore and evermore!"

2011-12-20T08:30:00.000-06:00

Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the worlds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He,
Of the things that are, that have been,
And that future years shall see, evermore and evermore!

He is found in human fashion, death and sorrow here to know,
That the race of Adam’s children doomed by law to endless woe,
May not henceforth die and perish
In the dreadful gulf below, evermore and evermore!

O that birth forever blessèd, when the virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bare the Savior of our race;
And the Babe, the world’s Redeemer,
First revealed His sacred face, evermore and evermore!

O ye heights of heaven adore Him; angel hosts, His praises sing;
Powers, dominions, bow before Him, and extol our God and King!
Let no tongue on earth be silent,
Every voice in concert sing, evermore and evermore!

Christ, to Thee with God the Father, and, O Holy Ghost, to Thee,
Hymn and chant with high thanksgiving, and unwearied praises be:
Honor, glory, and dominion,
And eternal victory, evermore and evermore!
[Prudentius, 5th Century]

"Thou who wast rich"

2011-12-19T08:30:00.000-06:00

Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour, All for love's sake becamest poor; Thrones for a manger didst surrender, Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor. Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour, All for love's sake becamest poor.	Thou who art love beyond all telling, Saviour and King, we worship thee. Emmanuel, within us dwelling, Make us what thou wouldst have us be. Thou who art love beyond all telling, Saviour and King, we worship thee.
Thou who art God beyond all praising, All for love's sake becamest man; Stooping so low, but sinners raising Heavenwards by thine eternal plan. Thou who art God beyond all praising, All for love's sake becamest man.

Thou Who Wast Rich Beyond All Splendour

Watered down Evangelicalism

2011-12-16T13:43:00.001-06:00

Timothy Tennent, President of Asbury Seminary, on "Watered Down Evangelicalism":

In his 1937 landmark book, The Kingdom of God in America, Richard Niebuhr memorably described the message of Protestant liberalism as “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." In the ensuing years Niebuhr’s statement has become one of the more well known summaries of the failure of Protestant liberalism to properly reflect the apostolic message. Tragically, Niebuhr’s devastating critique is on the brink of being equally applicable to contemporary, evangelical Christianity. Who has lost sight more of the depth of human sin, the certainty of God’s judgment and the call to repentance and transformation at the feet of a crucified savior than today’s populistic, evangelical churches? .... [more]

The Clarion Call to Watered Down Evangelicalism « The Bible and Culture

Knowing

2011-12-16T13:08:00.001-06:00

In an interview at Christianity Today about his new book Alvin Plantinga argues that there is no real reason to believe religion and science are incompatible but he does think "naturalism" and science are.

In the last, much briefer section of the book, you discuss whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between naturalism and the theory of evolution.

I think that's an extremely interesting and important point, though to argue for it properly is quite complicated; it's hard to do in a brief compass. The basic idea, which is far from being original, is that if you are a naturalist and think that we have come to be by evolutionary processes, then you will think that the main purpose of our cognitive processes, our mental faculties, is survival and reproductive fitness, not the production of true belief. Evolution doesn't give a rip about whether your beliefs are true. It only cares whether or not your actions are adaptive, whether they contribute to your fitness. From the point of view of evolution together with naturalism, you wouldn't expect that our faculties would be really adjusted to truth or aimed at truth. They would just be aimed at fitness.

But if this is true, if our minds are aimed at mere survival, not at truth, then it's not probable that our minds should be reliable—that is, produce an appropriate preponderance of true over false beliefs; and if that is so, then one who believes both naturalism and evolution should reject the thought that our minds are reliable. But that's a crippling position to be in. Nietzsche is among the people who have suggested this problem. Some contemporary philosophers—Thomas Nagel, for example—have voiced the same worry, and so did Darwin himself. [more]

C.S. Lewis made a similar argument in Chapter 3 of Miracles, parts of which are quoted here, including this:

"…a strict materialism refutes itself for the reason given long ago by Professor Haldane: 'If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ (Possible Worlds, p. 209 […] [Naturalism] offers what professes to be a full account of our mental behaviour; but this account, on inspection, leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.[…] It is agreed on all hands that reason, and even sentience, and life itself are late comers in Nature. If there is nothing but Nature, therefore, reason must have come into existence by a historical process. And of course, for the Naturalist, this process was not designed to produce a mental behaviour that can find truth. There was no Designer; and indeed, until there were thinkers, there was no truth or falsehood. The type of mental behaviour we now call rational thinking or inference must therefore have been 'evolved' by natural selection, by the gradual weeding out of types less fitted to survive." .... [more]

Q & A: Alvin Plantinga on Conflict Resolution with Science | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction, C.S. Lewis' argument against naturalism - New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Evangelizing respectfully

2011-12-14T14:30:00.001-06:00

From Chicago Lutheran bishop Wayne Miller's introduction to a discussion of the topic "Should We Evangelize?":

.... The mass exodus from the current manifestation of mainstream liberal Christianity suggests the possibility that even if history doesn’t exactly repeat itself, history rhymes. Christian virtue that retreats or hides from Christian evangelism inevitably withers by cutting itself off from the source of its own love and power. And by bearing witness to its own goodness while keeping the source of that goodness hidden in the shadows so as not to offend anyone, our virtue bears witness to a lie.

The challenge to Christianity in a pluralistic cultural landscape is NOT to figure out how to be Christian without evangelizing. The challenge is to learn how to evangelize respectfully. And the reason we must learn to evangelize respectfully is not merely so that we can all tolerate our neighbors in a state of detached peaceful coexistence. We must cultivate respectful evangelism because a style of evangelism that is violent, manipulative, dominating, controlling or otherwise disrespectful is a force that drives others away from the love and power of Jesus instead of inviting them into it. Paradoxically, evangelistic activity that alienates or devalues others becomes the very barrier that authentic evangelism is sworn to dismantle.

Respectful evangelists must begin their work by listening openly and honestly to those who differ, and then continue by taking responsibility for the clarity and conviction of their own identity and their own witness, rather than by trying to control another person’s response to their witness. .... [more]

Evangelizing the Contemporary Urban Metropolitan Landscape

I hate small talk

2011-12-14T11:15:00.001-06:00

I have long thought of myself as an intensely shy person who successfully developed certain coping mechanisms. But I may well just be an introvert. I certainly identify with many of the characteritics of introverts described here:

Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk.
This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days.

Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
Shyness has nothing to do with being an Introvert. Introverts are not necessarily afraid of people. What they need is a reason to interact. They don’t interact for the sake of interacting. If you want to talk to an Introvert, just start talking. Don’t worry about being polite.

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

Myth #4 – Introverts don’t like people.
On the contrary, Introverts intensely value the few friends they have. They can count their close friends on one hand. If you are lucky enough for an introvert to consider you a friend, you probably have a loyal ally for life. Once you have earned their respect as being a person of substance, you’re in.

Myth #5 – Introverts don’t like to go out in public.
Nonsense. Introverts just don’t like to go out in public FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the complications that are involved in public activities. They take in data and experiences very quickly, and as a result, don’t need to be there for long to “get it.” They’re ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharging is absolutely crucial for Introverts.

Myth #6 – Introverts always want to be alone.
Introverts are perfectly comfortable with their own thoughts. They think a lot. They daydream. They like to have problems to work on, puzzles to solve. But they can also get incredibly lonely if they don’t have anyone to share their discoveries with. They crave an authentic and sincere connection with ONE PERSON at a time.

Myth #7 – Introverts are weird.
Introverts are often individualists. They don’t follow the crowd. They’d prefer to be valued for their novel ways of living. They think for themselves and because of that, they often challenge the norm. They don’t make most decisions based on what is popular or trendy.

Myth #8 – Introverts are aloof nerds.
Introverts are people who primarily look inward, paying close attention to their thoughts and emotions. It’s not that they are incapable of paying attention to what is going on around them, it’s just that their inner world is much more stimulating and rewarding to them.

Myth #9 – Introverts don’t know how to relax and have fun.
Introverts typically relax at home or in nature, not in busy public places. Introverts are not thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies. If there is too much talking and noise going on, they shut down. Their brains are too sensitive to the neurotransmitter called Dopamine. Introverts and Extroverts have different dominant neuro-pathways. Just look it up.

Myth #10 – Introverts can fix themselves and become Extroverts.
A world without Introverts would be a world with few scientists, musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers, doctors, mathematicians, writers, and philosophers. That being said, there are still plenty of techniques an Extrovert can learn in order to interact with Introverts. (Yes, I reversed these two terms on purpose to show you how biased our society is.) Introverts cannot “fix themselves” and deserve respect for their natural temperament and contributions to the human race. In fact, one study (Silverman, 1986) showed that the percentage of Introverts increases with IQ.

Thanks to The Anchoress for the reference.

10 Myths About Introverts | CarlKingdom.com :: Writer. Director. Artist.

Can science explain everything?

2011-12-13T17:20:00.001-06:00

A summary of an interesting discussion at the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

There’s a new bully on the intellectual block, shoving scholars around. Lots of them are caving into the threats. The bully’s name is “scientism,” the belief that science has a monopoly on all real knowledge. All other knowledge, scientism asserts, is simply opinion, irrationality, or utter nonsense.

That was the perspective Ian Hutchinson, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offered at an event titled “Can Science Explain Everything?” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science this week. Lisa Randall, a professor of physics at Harvard University, had a different take. ....

Science has two key elements, reproducibility and clarity, Hutchinson said. Reproducibility means essentially that an experiment done in one place by one person can be repeated somewhere else by someone else. Clarity refers to the unambiguous nature of science’s measurements, descriptions, and classifications. History is an example of a discipline that has produced real knowledge that is not scientific knowledge, he said. History at its best is based on facts, but historians cannot reproduce Henry VIII’s exploits to find out if accounts of them are true.

Mr. Hutchinson listed other phenomena that may be “true” but that he believes are outside of science’s scope: the beauty of a sunset, the justice of a verdict, or the terror of a war. Many humans may share similar perceptions of these phenomenon but the basis of those perceptions will lack clarity. “Ambiguity is an intrinsic part of these things,” he said. ....

In audience questions after the two talks, one person cut to the chase and demanded “yes” or “no” answers to the evening’s challenge: “Can science explain everything?”

“No,” said Mr. Hutchinson.

“We don’t know,” said Ms. Randall.

Can Science Explain Everything? - Percolator - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"To desire to be out of the world"

2011-12-12T16:35:00.001-06:00

James V. Schall on an early John Donne sermon:

.... Donne tells us that “There cannot be a greater unthankfulnesse to God then to desire to be Nothing at all, rather then to be that, that God would have thee to be; To desire to be out of the world, rather then to glorifie him, by thy patience in it.” The desire to be “nothing,” Chesterton said somewhere, is the ultimate rejection of being, of existence, of what is. It is the real temptation of the suicide. ....

Here Donne objects to the whole Stoic tradition that showed its superiority over reality by refusing to acknowledge that any pain could or should touch its will. This was really a classic form of pride. Those who prefer nothing and those who are not affected by reality suffer from the same disorder of soul. Without being flippant, they could be said to lack “cheerfullness”; they think everything depends on themselves. ....

Donne ends his sermon by recalling the passage from Psalm 38: “Thine arrows were followed and pressed with the hand of God; The hand of God pressed upon them in that eternall decree, in that irrevocable contract, between thy Father and thee, in that Oportuit pati, That all that thou must suffer, and so enter into thy glory.” This is the alternative Donne sees to the “nothingness” or to a stoic pride that shows its sober superiority even to God by refusing to acknowledge even suffering.

In a passage worthy of Handel’s music to accompany it, and indeed from the same source in the Book of Revelation, Donne assures us of a “confidence” in God’s “decree.” We can rely on those already “in heaven.” We can “joyn” them “with that Quire in that service, in that Anthem, Blessing, and glory, and Wisdome, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever, and ever, Amen.”

...[M]uch modern preaching is mainly about improving this world with little attention to the direction of Donne’s sermon. We think that we can and should bypass all suffering as if it were a proof, not of the importance of our lives, but of their uselessness and but occasion for our defiance of reality.

In the end, we must confess a certain envy of those who “joyn” that “Quire” as it sings the great refrain—“glory, and Wisdome, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto our God for ever, and ever.” What strikes us, looking at such exalted words, is that they are not directed to ourselves, but, freely, yes, cheerfully, to what is not ourselves. Such striking words were spoken at Lincoln’s Inn, London, in the spring of 1618, by a man who loved letters and psalms. No reason can be found why his words do not remain with us in our time or in any time. None of us, to recall his heritage, is an island, sufficient to himself. That fact alone is a sufficient basis for our cheerfulness. .... [more]

The sermon: John Donne - For Thine Arrowes Stick Fast in Me

The University Bookman: On Instruction in Cheerful Forms

Lesser evil?

2011-12-12T01:08:00.001-06:00

One of the great moral issues of the last century, at least among non-pacifists, has been the decision of President Truman to drop nuclear bombs on the Japanese cites Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rules of war long advocated by Christian theologians had forbidden the intentional killing of non-combatants. Here Wilson Miscamble, a priest and professor at Notre Dame, responds to those who condemn Truman's decision in "The Least Evil Option":

.... Some evidence suggests that Truman also worried that he had blood on his hands. In this, of course, he hardly stood alone among the participants in the enormous, ghastly struggle of World War II. Well over fifty million people lost their lives in that conflict, which descended to new lows of barbarism in both European and Pacific theaters. Restraints that previously had directed soldiers to spare non-combatants were thrown off as the Allies battled to defeat their powerful foes. As a number of writers have noted, a “moral Rubicon” had been crossed long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945: Churchill and Roosevelt both approved the harsh endeavors to break the morale of their foes, which they hoped would ultimately secure victory and save lives. The devastating Tokyo fire-bombings took place on FDR’s watch, after all.

Surprisingly, however, in the moral assessments of the war, Churchill and FDR escape much of the condemnation heaped on Harry Truman for using the atomic bombs. Truman’s critics should refrain from putting him in some singular dock of history. They might instead carefully consider the responsibility of the Japanese government for its people’s fate. In moral terms, the Japanese leadership had a responsibility to surrender by June of 1945, when there existed no reasonable prospect of success and when their civilian population had suffered so greatly. Instead, the neo-samurai who led the Japanese military geared up with true banzai spirit to engage the whole population as combatants of sorts in a national kamikaze campaign. Their stupidity and perfidy in perpetrating and prolonging the war should not be ignored.

Of course, the question remains: Was it right? I suggest that, in retrospect and within the privacy of his heart, Truman likely understood that he had been forced by necessity to enter into evil. And so, I argue in my book, he had. He ordered the bombing of cities possessing significant military-industrial value, but in which thousands of noncombatants, among them the innocent elderly and the sick, women and children, were annihilated. Evaluated in isolation, each atomic bombing was a deeply immoral act deserving of condemnation. The fact that the bombings entailed the least harm of the available paths to victory, and that it brought an end to destruction, death, and casualties on an even more massive scale, cannot obviate their evil; it should, however, satisfy those who accept a utilitarian approach to morality, in which good ends can justify certain immoral means. I am not in that number.

Yet I remain sympathetic in evaluating Truman and his decision. He was a person who knew that the confusing fog of war sometimes places the policymaker in circumstances where he has neither a clear nor an easy “moral” option. Perhaps Truman had his A-bomb decision in mind when he wrote fifteen years later, in a discourse on decision-making (in his Mr. Citizen), that “sometimes you have a choice of evils, in which case you try to take the course that is likely to bring the least harm.” That is how his decision regarding the atomic bombs should be assessed.

From the perspective of over six decades, Truman’s use of the bomb, when viewed in the context of the long and terrible war, should be seen as his choosing the least evil of the options available to him. .... [more]

The Least Evil Option: A Defense of Harry Truman « Public Discourse

A mysterious affair

2011-12-11T13:40:00.001-06:00

I spent a significant amount of time in college and graduate school reading every book Agatha Christie wrote. I have always been more inclined to read a good mystery than just about anything else — especially something I ought to be reading. This LA Times column is by someone who reads through a cycle of Christie's books every year. I've only read them once but I do understand:

.... It's hard to beat Dame Christie, who died in 1976 at age 85. With deft and cheerful economy, she could conjure a character in three sentences, set an intricate plot moving in five and plumb the depths of the human soul using snatches of overheard conversation and a bottle of hat paint. ....

There are many mystery writers who owe Christie something. The genre was popular long before she took a stab at it with The Mysterious Affair at Styles (which sat in the publisher's office for five years before it was accepted for a pittance and published in the early 1920s), but it was much more hidebound.

There are those who dismiss Christie simply because she was so prolific, because her books eschew the epic or deeply psychological in favor of a story best told quickly and with deceptive ease.

And yes, the genre has changed, grown darker and more brutal (a shift Christie deplored as early as 1975), but as a die-hard fan I don't want to hear the words "formulaic" (she invented that formula) or "predictable" (I defy anyone to find a more surprising motive for murder than the one in The Mirror Crack'd or better crimes than those committed in Curtain or Murder on the Orient Express).

And I don't want to hear the term "cozy." Christie was not cozy. She earned the title the Queen of Crime the old-fashioned way — by killing off a lot of people. Although never graphic or gratuitous, she was breathtakingly ruthless. Children, old folks, newlyweds, starlets, ballerinas — no one is safe in a Christie tale.

Some of her books are truly great — Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, The Secret Adversary, Murder on the Orient Express, Curtain to name a few — and some are not. But even the worst (The Blue Train, The Big Four) bear the marks of a master craftsman and make us appreciate the successes, and the woman behind them, that much more.

It was the character Miss Marple who became the most vivid symbol of Christie's worldview.

With her white hair, cornflower blue eyes and gentle ways, Miss Marple took a lively interest in the world around her but knew from experience, alas, that pretty much everyone was capable of anything, including murder.

People can be wonderful creatures, my dear, she would inevitably say, but still it pays to keep your wits about you.

It's a dictum that has lost neither its social nor literary resonance, though it's difficult to think of anyone since who has wielded it more effectively. .... [more]

Agatha Christie's pacing, talent were second to none

Anti-Intellectualism

2011-12-10T17:19:00.001-06:00

Via Instapundit [whose title I borrowed], a theory that may explain why so many very bright people are so often wrong. Frank J. Fleming:

If something is simple, then dumb people will believe it.
And if dumb people believe something, then soon some conclude that smart people should believe something else.
There’s a flaw in that philosophy.

Instapundit » Blog Archive » FRANK J. FLEMING

"What our good God for us has done"

2011-12-09T11:03:00.000-06:00

Via Justin Taylor, Allison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma:

Seventh Day Baptists

2011-12-07T18:45:00.000-06:00

Pastor Steven James of the Verona, NY, Seventh Day Baptist Church shared this video on YouTube. It was produced in 1993 as a way to publicize Seventh Day Baptists. It is somewhat dated and it is sometimes obvious that non-professionals provide the voices and acting, but that is also part of its appeal. A Choosing People: The Seventh Day Baptist Story [as of right now the beginning of the program is repeated at about the six minute mark, but it then continues with the entire content]:

What is the mission of the church?

2011-12-07T12:52:00.001-06:00

I recently posted a portion of Mark Galli's "Why We Need More 'Chaplains' and Fewer Leaders." That column has recieved some polite pushback and here Galli responds, explaining what he believes the mission of the Church is and why he is not attracted to the "missional" approach:

.... The one New Testament letter that spells out the purpose and function of the church is Ephesians. And Ephesians is about nothing if it is not about worship, “to the praise of his glory.” The mission of the church there is to worship. And this, of course, accords with the ultimate “mission” and destination of the church: worship in heaven (Rev. 4, for example). The mission of the church on earth—if it is to have integrity--must reflect its ultimate “mission” and destination, otherwise what in the world are we evangelizing people for? Merely to become evangelists? No, we evangelize people so that they might join the heavenly throng and worship—forever and now.

The other mission of the church in Ephesians, of course, is bringing to maturity the members of the church, to the full stature of Christ, so that everyone in the church will live in the unity of love. There is, in fact, very little missional language in Ephesians as we use the term missional today. The only time that happens, (like in chapter 3) is when Paul talks about his unique calling. But nowhere does he suggest that his calling is to be adopted by everyone. He understands his calling as unique. But when it comes to talking about the church’s general calling, things missional are hardly to be found.

Now let me be clear: ONE of the callings of the church is to send certain people out in mission! Thus the gifts of apostleship and evangelism. But only some members have these gifts. It’s not the way the entire church’s purpose is ever talked about. I would even argue that the Great Commission is the commission to apostles (those like the original 12 who are “sent out”), but not such to each and every member of the church. It is only the church’s commission because apostles are identified and supported by the church. The church, as such, has a fuller, more complete “mission”: worship of the living God and bringing people to maturity and unity in Christ. As noted, this is a fuller vision because this is what we will do for eternity. To worship and grow together in unity is our reason for existence, from beginning to end (Eph. 1). ....

.... I have deep admiration for the motives and passion of those committed to the missional movement, in its varied forms. So much of what goes on in the name of missional is right and good and frankly inspiring (albeit intimidating: the commitment of some missional leaders is amazing). I just happen to think this model makes unrealistic demands on most church members, creates needless guilt, inculcates pride, and in the long run leads to despair. .... Okay, I’m being dramatic. But I still think the missional model has pastoral and theological problems. I want what missional leaders want: a healthy church that displays the love of Christ to the world. I just think the missional approach, as I understand it, will backfire soon enough, because it traffics too much in contemporary cultural assumptions about what is important, useful, effective, and so forth.

I think there is a reason the early church, when it thought about what it meant to be a church, put the emphasis on worship, catechesis, and the presbyter/overseer as shepherd and teacher of the flock, not the general of an army. .... [more]

It Takes A Church...: Mark Galli Responds: Pastors in a changing world--Leaders or Chaplains?

"A date which will live in infamy"

2011-12-07T09:00:00.000-06:00

Seventy years ago today the Japanese attacked targets all across the Pacific including Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where the US Pacific fleet was based. The attack was devastating, sinking or damaging eight battleships, three cruisers and three destroyers. 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 wounded. It was a surprise attack on a nation at peace. The next day President Roosevelt went before Congress to ask for a Declaration of War:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. ....

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

Last night Japanese forces attacked Wake Island.

And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island. ....

Although several films have been made about the attack, the most accurate account of what actually happened remains 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora!. It is also a very good film. A review of the new Blu-ray DVD of the film can be found here.

"A Date Which Will Live in Infamy": FDR Asks for a Declaration of War

Losing the past

2011-12-06T02:11:00.001-06:00

I confess to a temperamental sympathy with Viscount Falkland's "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." When questioning tradition the presumption should be in favor of the of the past — innocent, if you will, until proven guilty. Obviously tradition cannot stand if it contradicts truth but the case needs to be made.

That came to mind as I read what Kevin DeYoung wrote about the discomfort many older people have felt about continual innovation in worship.

.... The worship wars could have been mitigated greatly if younger generations wanting newer songs had taken the time to remember memory. Church leaders may say, “It’s about reaching young people.” Or, “We need music that resonates with the culture.” These may even be good reasons to change some things. But we have to realize that those who grew up with hymns don’t just lose the songs they prefer, they lose continuity with their past. They lose a whole lifetime worth of experiences–happy times, sad times, birth, marriage, death–a thousand bits of life that get embedded in the songs we’ve always sung.

None of this means we can’t sing new songs. Praise God that we can have new songs to be filled with new memories for a new generation. But we have to do more than honor the past. We have to sympathize with those who lose their connections to the past, in church of all places. More than that, we have to remember the past and make an effort to preserve what is best from it. We forget at our own peril. For the Church’s memories should be our memories. And our memories are not just our own, but belong to those who come after us. We must not hide them from our children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders he has done (Psalm 78:4).

Chesterton:

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”

And

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

Remembering Memory – Kevin DeYoung

Entrepreneur or chaplain of souls?

2011-12-05T16:53:00.001-06:00

Mark Galli at Christianity Today explains "Why We Need More 'Chaplains' and Fewer Leaders":

.... It's becoming increasingly common to infer that when a pastor becomes a "chaplain," the church is in trouble. A few years ago, one website encouraging "innovative" ministry listed five types of pastors that a church might call: Catalytic, Cultivator, Conflict-Quelling, Chaplain, and Catatonic. The page clarified that "each of these types carries positives and negatives," but it seemed clear that the further one went down the list, the more problematic was the pastor. At the top of the list were Catalytic pastors, who are "gifted in the prophetic and tend to be charismatic leaders. These pastors have lots of energy and are focused on the mission of the church … that is, reaching the community for Jesus Christ. In the 'right' church, they'll grow it without a doubt."

A Chaplain pastor, on the other hand, was mired near the bottom. A Chaplain pastor is "wired for peace, harmony, and pastoral care. This is the type of pastor that has been produced by seminaries for several decades, though a few … a very few … seminaries are retooling. Chaplain pastors eschew change and value status quo. They don't want to stir the waters; rather, they want to bring healing to hurting souls." And if that weren't bad enough, "Chaplain pastors don't grow churches. In fact, a Chaplain pastor will hasten a congregation's demise because they tend to focus on those within the congregation rather than in bringing new converts to Jesus Christ."

The assumptions here are all too common, I'm afraid. So we hear in many quarters that pastors should be leaders, catalysts, and entrepreneurs, and the repeated slam about pastors who are mere chaplains. ....

It's...interesting to note the way Jesus framed how his disciples should think about their ministries: "And Jesus called them to him and said to them, 'You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles like to be seen as "leaders," "entrepreneurs," "catalysts for growth," and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many' " (Mark 10:42-45).

Okay, I paraphrased a bit. But I'm not convinced the paraphrase is false to the sense of Jesus' words. In any case, it seems clear that Jesus was a chaplain of souls, and that he encouraged his disciples to think of themselves in the same way.

One wonders where we got our other ideas about the pastorate. For centuries, the pastorate was thought to be about "the cure of souls"—souls being understood not as the spiritual part of us, but as the fullness of our humanity. The pastor has traditionally been thought of as one who does ministry in the midst of a people who are sick and dying, and who administers in word and sacrament, in Scripture and in prayer, the healing balm of the Lord.

So who told us that the pastor is primarily a leader/entrepreneur/change agent and anything but a curer of souls? And why do we believe them? .... [more]

Why We Need More 'Chaplains' and Fewer Leaders | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction

"Never judge, never criticize, never take a position"

2011-12-04T12:49:00.001-06:00

Anyone teaching in the humanities or the social sciences has had an experience much like this:

In "Moments of startling clarity: Moral education programming in Ontario today,” Stephen L. Anderson recounts what happened when he tried to show students what can happen to women in a culture with no tradition of treating women as if they were fellow human beings with men:
I was teaching my senior Philosophy class. We had just finished a unit on Metaphysics and were about to get into Ethics, the philosophy of how we make moral judgments. The school had also just had several social-justice-type assemblies—multiculturalism, women’s rights, anti-violence and gay acceptance. So there was no shortage of reference points from which to begin.
I decided to open by simply displaying, without comment, the photo of Bibi Aisha. Aisha was the Afghani teenager who was forced into an abusive marriage with a Taliban fighter, who abused her and kept her with his animals. When she attempted to flee, her family caught her, hacked off her nose and ears, and left her for dead in the mountains. After crawling to her grandfather’s house, she was saved by a nearby American hospital. I felt quite sure that my students, seeing the suffering of this poor girl of their own age, would have a clear ethical reaction, from which we could build toward more difficult cases.

The picture is horrific. Aisha’s beautiful eyes stare hauntingly back at you above the mangled hole that was once her nose. Some of my students could not even raise their eyes to look at it. I could see that many were experiencing deep emotions.

But I was not prepared for their reaction.

I had expected strong aversion; but that’s not what I got. Instead, they became confused. They seemed not to know what to think. They spoke timorously, afraid to make any moral judgment at all. They were unwilling to criticize any situation originating in a different culture.

They said, “Well, we might not like it, but maybe over there it’s okay.” One student said, “I don’t feel anything at all; I see lots of this kind of stuff .”

Another said (with no consciousness of self-contradiction), “It’s just wrong to judge other cultures.”
Anderson reflects,
While we may hope some are capable of bridging the gap between principled morality and this ethically vacuous relativism, it is evident that a good many are not. For them, the overriding message is “never judge, never criticize, never take a position.”
One reason might be this: For thousands of years, most thinkers assumed that virtue was something specific; it could be described, and could be distinguished from not-virtue (vice). Courage, for example, was a virtue—a cardinal virtue. Cowardice was a vice. One ought, they said, to aim for courage because it is intrinsically worthy, and avoid cowardice because it is intrinsically a disgrace. Those thinkers are—in the students’ terms—judgmental!

In recent decades, a new view has taken root. The new view is that courage and cowardice have no intrinsic reality. Neither does the classical virtue of justice or the vice of injustice. It all depends on how you feel about things, which in turn depends on your culture. That underlies the students’ inability to move from “I feel bad” to “This is wrong.”

One outcome has been the popular convention that all cultures are of equal value. If Afghan men see their treatment of women as just, then it must be so. We lack any legitimate basis for saying it isn’t. .... [more]

Thanks to Tom Gilson for the reference.

Is it still wrong if another culture says it is right? A teacher’s surprising discovery | TheBestSchools.org Blog

"The battle...is not to the strong alone"

2011-12-02T13:12:00.000-06:00

Thomas Kidd, the author of Patrick Henry: First Among Patriots, on the subject of his book:

.... Perhaps the best example of an openly conservative Christian among the major founders was Patrick Henry. Henry, a lifelong Anglican (or Episcopalian, as they were called after the war), weaved faith into his speeches in a way that resonated with rank-and-file Patriots. Perhaps that is why Henry became the most inspiring orator of the Revolution: he knew how to speak the people's language, and during the Revolution, that was a language shaped by the Bible.

Thirty years before the Revolution, the revivals of the Great Awakening had shaken the colonies and converted thousands to evangelical faith. Henry himself had been profoundly influenced by the revivals as a teenager, and later, many said that he spoke like a preacher. Henry's most famous speech, the "Liberty or Death" oration, came in 1775 as Virginia was considering whether to take up arms in light of the British threat against American liberty. The speech, delivered at Richmond's St. John's Church, was a politicized version of a revival sermon. No highbrow political theory or Enlightenment philosophers were in it, just moral exhortations delivered in the literal language of the Bible.

A number of phrases in "Liberty or Death" came straight from the holy text, but one might easily miss those references today, because in the Bible-soaked culture of Virginia in 1775, Henry did not need to cite chapter and verse. People knew the Bible when they heard it. America's millions, "armed in the holy cause of liberty," Henry thundered, "are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us." At the speech's dramatic conclusion, Henry declared, with arms raised toward heaven, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" ....

Fom "Liberty or Death!":

.... Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable — and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, "Peace! Peace!" — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Column: Founders would say 'In God We Trust' – USATODAY.com, The History Place - Great Speeches Collection: Patrick Henry Speech - Liberty or Death!

A snow day

2011-12-01T12:02:00.001-06:00

Kevin DeYoung's kids got a snow day today in Michigan. I remember as a student, and later as a teacher, feeling just as he describes. Unlike a vacation a snow day is free - because unexpected there are no plans, not even obligations you have placed on yourself. From "Heaven is Your Snow Day":

.... When I was a child I figured only kids liked snow days. But now I know parents and teachers are just as thrilled. No need to get up early. No lunch to pack. Nowhere to take the kids. The little ones will be ecstatic. They’ll be throwing snow balls and making forts. The older ones will welcome the day off.

Everyone wishes for a snow day. Everyone cheers its arrival–especially the unexpected blanket of mirth in November.

We got the word around 6:00–no school. A day for rest. A day for play. A day together. A day where everything dying gets covered in white and everything beautiful sparkles.

If you aren’t from around here, you might not understand the title of this post. But trust me, heaven has to be like the best snow day ever. In midst of darkness, in the midst of cold and gloom, in the midst of danger and foreboding skies, you hope and hope. You wonder if tomorrow might be the day. You wonder if it might all be worth it. You wonder if you’ll wake up to hear happy news. You wonder if tomorrow is your snow day. And when it comes, you will play and sing and spend your hours among angels.

To all who are crestfallen, brokenhearted, afraid, or alone, take heart: winter may last for the night, but a snow day comes in the morning.

Heaven is Your Snow Day – Kevin DeYoung

"Preach the gospel at all times...."

2011-11-30T22:05:00.001-06:00

Aaron Rogers, asked in a radio interview how, given the controversy over Tim Tebow, he feels about publicly sharing his faith:

"Well I started playing before Tim, so these are things I’ve thought about for a long time, and I think one thing that I try to look at when I was a younger player, and I mean, in high school, junior college, and Division I, I was always interested in seeing how guys talked in their interviews, talked about their faith, or didn’t talk about their faith. And then the reactions at time, I know Bob Costas at one point was critical about a player thanking Jesus Christ after a win, questioning what would happen if that player had lost, or do you really think God cares about winning and losing. That's all to say that I feel like my stance and my desire has always been to follow a quote from St. Francis of Assisi, who said, 'Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.' So basically, I’m not an over-the-top, or an in-your-face kind of guy with my faith. I would rather people have questions about why I act the way I act, whether they view it as positive or not, and ask questions, and then given an opportunity at some point, then you can talk about your faith a little bit. I firmly believe, just personally, what works for me, and what I enjoy doing is letting my actions speak about the kind of character that I want to have, and following that quote from St. Francis.’’

And Kurt Warner's advice to Tebow:

"You can't help but cheer for a guy like that," Warner told the newspaper. "But I'd tell him, 'Put down the boldness in regards to the words, and keep living the way you're living. Let your teammates do the talking for you. Let them cheer on your testimony.

"I know what he's going through, and I know what he wants to accomplish, but I don't want anybody to become calloused toward Tim because they don't understand him, or are not fully aware of who he is. And you're starting to see that a little bit. ....

"There's almost a faith cliche, where (athletes) come out and say, 'I want to thank my Lord and savior,' " Warner told The Republic. "As soon as you say that, the guard goes up, the walls go up, and I came to realize you have to be more strategic.

"The greatest impact you can have on people is never what you say, but how you live. When you speak and represent the person of Jesus Christ in all actions of your life, people are drawn to that. You set the standard with your actions. The words can come after."

Update 12/2: Apparently the quotation from St. Francis is bogus. Mark Galli:

I've heard the quote once too often. It's time to set the record straight—about the quote, and about the gospel.

Francis of Assisi is said to have said, "Preach the gospel at all times; when necessary, use words."

This saying is carted out whenever someone wants to suggest that Christians talk about the gospel too much, and live the gospel too little. Fair enough—that can be a problem. Much of the rhetorical power of the quotation comes from the assumption that Francis not only said it but lived it.

The problem is that he did not say it. Nor did he live it. And those two contra-facts tell us something about the spirit of our age. .... [more]

Packers' Rodgers on Suh, Vanden Bosch and his own beliefs - JSOnline, Christianity Today: Kurt Warner to Tebow: Tone Down the Faith Talk

The pagan origin of Christmas?

2011-11-30T11:33:00.001-06:00

As we begin Advent it seemed to me appropriate to once again remind my Christian friends that there is nothing wrong with celebrating the Season. Re-posted from December 5, 2008:

In 2003 Touchstone published "Calculating Christmas", by William Tighe. Since, every now and then, people appear in our churches who fall into the category he defines as "the fringes of American Evangelicalism" and vehemently oppose Christmas or some aspect of its traditional observance, and since atheists are also apt to charge that the day is really a pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice, the article may be helpful in setting the record straight. Read it all.

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian’s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.

There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August 28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome. And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with solstices or equinoxes. [the explanation]

The conclusion:

Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church during or after Constantine’s time. It is wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it arose entirely from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical date of Christ’s death.

And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. ....

The Biblical Archaeology Review provides "How December 25 Became Christmas," indicating that the date probably owes more to certain Jewish customs than to any pagan influence.

Touchstone Archives: Calculating Christmas

The unfortunate influence of John Stuart Mill

2011-11-29T15:05:00.000-06:00

Roger Kimball contends that John Stuart Mill's On Liberty won the war of public opinion even though it had been effectively refuted by James Fitzjames Stephen. "Sifting and winnowing" doesn't always work.

.... Mill’s essay was ostensibly about the relation between individual freedom and society. Mill famously argued that the only grounds on which society was justified in exercising control over its members, whether that control be in the form of “legal penalties” or simply “the moral coercion of public opinion,” was to “prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”
James Fitzjames Stephen

This part of Mill’s argument quickly attracted searching criticism. The British judge James Fitzjames Stephen, for example, went to the heart of the problem when he observed that Mill assumed that “some acts regard the agent only, and that some regard other people. In fact, by far the most important part of our conduct regards both ourselves and others.” As for withholding “the moral coercion of public opinion,” Stephen observed that “the custom of looking upon certain courses of conduct with aversion is the essence of morality.”

Stephen’s criticisms of Mill were published in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which appeared about a decade after On Liberty. Many of the criticisms are devastating. Intellectually, Stephen made mincemeat of Mill. But that has hardly mattered. Mill’s doctrines have taken the world by storm, while Stephen has receded to become a footnote in intellectual history.

Why? One reason is that Mill said things that people wanted to hear. Mill seemed to be giving people a permanent vacation from the moral dictates of society. How often have you heard the argument “It’s not hurting anyone else” put forward as a justification for self-indulgence?

But it was not simply what he said about the relation between individual freedom and social control that made On Liberty such an influential tract. Much more important was the attitude, the emotional weather, of the book.

On Liberty is only incidentally a defense of individual freedom. Its deeper purpose is to transform the way we regard established morality and conventional behavior as such. In brief, Mill taught us to be suspicious of established morality not because what it says is wrong (maybe it is, maybe it isn’t) but simply because it is established.

Think about that. The tradition that Mill opposed celebrated custom and established morality precisely because they had prevailed and given good service through the vicissitudes of time and change; their longevity was an important token of their worthiness.

John Stuart Mill
Mill overturned this traditional view. Henceforth, the customary, the conventional was suspect not because it had failed but simply because if was customary and conventional. Consider, to take but one example, what has happened to the word “prejudice.” When was the last time you heard it used in a neutral or positive sense? And yet originally “prejudice” simply meant to prejudge something according to conventional wisdom. It was in this sense, for example, that Edmund Burke extolled prejudice, writing that “prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”

Mill was instrumental in getting us to associate “prejudice” indelibly with “bigotry.” He wanted to take the wisdom out of the phrase “conventional wisdom.” He repeatedly argued against the “despotism of custom” — not because it was despotic, but simply because it was customary. ....

The fate of Mill’s teaching harbors a number of important lessons. One lesson concerns the relative weakness of reasoned arguments when they are pitted against a doctrine that exercises great emotional appeal. Critics like James Fitzjames Stephen and David Stove pointed out fatal weaknesses in Mill’s teaching about freedom. By any disinterested standard, Mill lost the argument. But he won the battle for our hearts and allegiance. If you think that is a merely academic phenomenon, consider the recent career of the phrase “hope and change.” .... [more]

Roger’s Rules » Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Danger signs

2011-11-28T18:29:00.001-06:00

Danger signs in church leadership. Each point is elaborated in the original post:

One or two of these in isolated instances are likely handle-able. A pattern of any one or any combination of these signs in a pastor or the leadership culture of a church likely indicate a stalled or dying movement.
Insulation from criticism and/or interpretation of any criticism as attacks or insubordination.
Paranoia about who is and who isn't in line.
Need to micromanage or hold others back from leadership opportunities or other responsibilities.
Impulse to horde credit and shift blame.
Progression has become reaction.

The Gospel-Driven Church

"And lo...."

2011-11-28T01:12:00.001-06:00

Even in the '60s the networks were completely clueless about the American people. From "The Gospel According to Peanuts":

.... Few headlines about network television make me giddy. Fewer still make me hopeful that all is good in the world. But back in August of 2010, I read the following headline from the media pages with great excitement: "Charlie Brown Is Here to Stay: ABC Picks Up Peanuts Specials Through 2015." The first of these to be made, the famous Christmas special, was an instant classic when it was created by Charles Schulz on a shoestring budget back in 1965, and thanks to some smart television executives, it will be around for at least another five years for all of us to see and enjoy.

What people don't know is that the Christmas special almost didn't happen, because some not-so-smart television executives almost didn't let it air. You see, Charles Schulz had some ideas that challenged the way of thinking of those executives 46 years ago, and one of them had to do with the inclusion in his Christmas cartoon of a reading from the King James Bible’s version of the Gospel of Luke. ....

...[T]he executives did not want to have Linus reciting the story of the birth of Christ from the Gospel of Luke. The network orthodoxy of the time assumed that viewers would not want to sit through passages of the King James Bible. ....

As Charlie Brown sinks into a state of despair trying to find the true meaning of Christmas, Linus quietly saves the day. He walks to center of the stage where the Peanuts characters have gathered, and under a narrow spotlight, quotes the second chapter of the Gospel According to Luke, verses 8 through 14:
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men.
.... And that's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown, Linus concluded. ....

When CBS executives saw the final product, they were horrified. They believed the special would be a complete flop. CBS programmers were equally pessimistic, informing the production team, "We will, of course, air it next week, but I'm afraid we won't be ordering any more."

The half-hour special aired on Thursday, December 9, 1965, preempting The Munsters and following Gilligan's Island. To the surprise of the executives, 50 percent of the televisions in the United States tuned in to the first broadcast. The cartoon was a critical and commercial hit; it won an Emmy and a Peabody award. .... [more]

The Gospel According to Peanuts - National Review Online

How do we know what we know?

2011-11-27T12:40:00.000-06:00

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence 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." [Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson]

Tom Gilson summarizes the thesis of Alvin Plantinga's new book in the title of his review: "There’s No Good Argument For Design, But Who Needs One?" His description of Plantinga's argument reminded me of the exchange between Boswell and Samuel Johnson quoted above. Gilson on Plantinga:

.... Plantinga’s specialty is in epistemology, the philosophical study of how we know, and how we know that we know. He applies this to the question of whether we can know that nature is intelligently designed, just by examining it. Following detailed and rather technical discussions....he concludes that the arguments in favor of design are not compelling. ....

That argument swings both ways, of course. If Plantinga is right, and if there is no good argument for God in nature’s design, there is also no good argument against God in nature. Plantinga mentions that in this context but he does not dwell much on it. ....

...[I]f there is no design argument, does that mean no design, and no designer? No. For Plantinga it’s much simpler than an argument. Design is just apparent in the world. We can see it, as we can see that the world wasn’t created intact in its current form just five minutes ago, that our memories are at least somewhat trustworthy, that there are other people (other minds) in the world besides ourselves. No argument could prove these things true, yet we know them trustworthy knowledge regardless. These are “basic beliefs:” things we know without having to call upon a string of inferences to support that knowledge.

We can see design just as clearly, says Plantinga.
The same goes if you are on a voyage of space exploration, land on some planet which has an earth-like atmosphere, but about which nothing or next-to-nothing is known, and come across an object that looks more or less like a 1929 Model T Ford. You would certainly see this object as designed; you would not engage in probabilistic arguments about how likely it is that there should be an object like this that was not designed.
(The emphasis is added.) Of course Plantinga knows that perception of this sort can be mistaken. He goes on to analyze ways we can judge whether it is mistaken.... [more]

Plantinga: There’s No Good Argument For Design, But Who Needs One? - Thinking Christian

Truer truth

2011-11-23T14:44:00.000-06:00

Peter Wehner on why the response to Penn State demonstrates the reality of moral law:

...[T]he near-universal condemnation toward Penn State is a healthy sign. It demonstrates that moral relativism, while trendy in some quarters, is ultimately unserious, and that even a culture that can idolize non-judgmentalism has its limits.

We all recognize a moral law, whether we admit it or not. Everyone you know believes raping young boys is wrong. Let C.S. Lewis take it from here. "The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard," Lewis wrote, "saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other; the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are in fact comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others."

Professor Lewis went on to say, "If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something — some Real Morality — for them to be true about.

That fact that we don’t always act on Real Morality might be an indication of lack of courage or of not seeing what makes us uncomfortable. But on reflection, we all know these are moral failures on our part.

Penn State, the Starry Heavens Above and the Moral Law Within « Commentary Magazine

A "thinking worshiper"

2011-11-22T17:00:00.000-06:00

On November 22, 1963 C.S. Lewis died, the news of his death entirely overshadowed by the assassination of President Kennedy that same day. Jared Wilson writes today about "Three Things I've Learned from Lewis." Two of the three:

1. Wonder. My first introduction to Lewis was not the Chronicles of Narnia, actually, but as a child, Out of the Silent Planet. It was completely weird and wonderful. When I got to Narnia shortly thereafter -- I was about 8 or so, probably -- I consumed each book one after another lustily, like a compendium of Turkish delight. ....

2. Reason. Even Lewis's fiction is chock-full of logic. "Don't they teach that in schools any more?" the Professor says to the Pevensies when they don't believe Lucy's fantastic story. Lewis's faith was full of wonder but was, also, entirely reasonable, and in the 80's when the apologetic industry was dominated by Josh McDowell and burgeoning creation science (Lee Strobel hadn't hit the scene just yet), I was ingesting The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity. And probably the most influential non-fiction work of his for me is his collection of essays named after "God in the Dock." The article "Myth Became Fact" is one of my all-time favorite short pieces, fiction or non, and offered a complementary weight to one of my favorite lines in Perelandra, which I quote probably way too much in all the stuff I write. (Ransom understood that myth is "gleams of celestial beauty and strength falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.") Lewis helped me make sense of this polytheistic, pluralistic world. His classic trilemma in Mere Christianity just made sense. His own logic and reason is not airtight of course, but he approached Christianity not just as a worshiper but as a thinking worshiper, and he therefore becomes an invaluable asset for relentlessly scrutinizing young men and women who are sorting out their faith. ....

The Gospel-Driven Church: Three Things I've Learned from Lewis

"Emotion, rhetorical persuasion, and social pressure"

2011-11-22T14:24:00.001-06:00

Jonathan Leeman doesn't do altar calls and explains why not and what he does instead:

...[W]hy wouldn't I give an altar call? In short, I believe that this particular man-made practice, this 19th-century innovation, has produced more bad than good for Christian churches in the West. The altar call relies on the powers of emotion, rhetorical persuasion, and social pressure to induce people to make a hasty and premature decision. And producing professions is not the same thing as making disciples. Surely a number of factors are responsible for the many nominal Christians that typify Christianity in the West, but I believe that the altar call is one of them. ....

The alternative to giving altar calls is sticking with the practices we see modeled in Scripture:
Invite people throughout your sermon to "repent and be baptized" like Peter did in Jerusalem (Acts 2:38). But when you do, don't just stand there waiting with emotionally charged music playing, staring them down until they relent. Rather, make several suggestions about how and where to discuss the matter further.
Ask people what they believe when they present themselves for baptism, just like Jesus made sure the disciples knew who he was (Matt. 16:13-17; also, 1 John 4:1-3).
Make sure they understand what following Jesus entails (Matt. 16:24f; John 6:53-60).
Explain that the fruit of their lives and persevering to the end will indicate whether or not they really believe (Matt. 7:24f; 10:22).
You might even explain that Jesus has commanded your church to remove them from its fellowship if their life moving forward does not match their profession (Matt. 18:15-17).
Yes, let's pray hard for conversions. But then let's do everything that Scripture requires of us in the long work of making disciples---a work that generally requires lots of teaching, lots of time, lots of invitations, lots of meals together, and finally the commitment of an entire church body.

You Asked: Should Churches Perform Altar Calls? – The Gospel Coalition Blog

Defending - not apologizing for - the faith once given

2011-11-21T02:18:00.001-06:00

C Michael Patton explains why, even given C.S. Lewis's departures from what is considered normative evangelical theology, we are inclined to approve of him but not Rob Bell:

.... Here comes the question I got Tuesday night a the Credo House “Coffee and Theology” study: “So why do we love C.S. Lewis but hate Rob Bell?”

This is the great question I hope to answer briefly.

First of all, no one hates Rob Bell (or at least, no one should). But, speaking for myself, I am very comfortable handing out C.S. Lewis books by the dozens, while I don’t keep a stock of Bell’s books on hand. There is not a book that Lewis wrote that I don’t encourage people to read and grow from. Even A Grief Observed, where Lewis attempts to retain his faith in God while questioning everything in the middle of a crucible of doubt and pain, is one of my favorite books to give to people who are hurting. But I doubt I would ever recommend one of Bell’s works to establish someone in the faith. In fact, I might only recommend them for people to see “the other side.” Let me put it this way (and I must be very careful here): While I fully embrace and endorse the ministry of C.S. Lewis, I do not endorse or embrace the ministry of Rob Bell.

You see, while C.S. Lewis has a great deal of theological foibles, his ministry is defined by a defense of the essence of the Gospel. The essence of who Christ is and what he did are ardently defended by Lewis, saturating every page of his books. His purpose was clear: to defend the reality of God and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. All other things set aside, this is what you leave with every time you read Lewis. The problematic areas are peripheral, not central. One has to look hard to find the departures from traditional Protestant Christianity. They are not the subjects of his works and do not form the titles of his books.

However, with Rob Bell, the essence of who Christ is and what he did seems to be secondary. ....[more]

Why Do We Love C.S. Lewis and Hate Rob Bell? | Parchment and Pen

Climate does change

2011-11-19T17:38:00.001-06:00

In about 2005 the advocates of a radical response to "global warming" apparently decided that talking about "climate change" would be more persuasive. In the current print edition of The Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum and William Anderson explain why.

.... There’s a simple epistemological process by which, as we move up the genus-species tree, we arrive at ideas that cover more cases but convey less information: Lots more mammals exist in general than marmosets in particular, but mammal doesn’t tell us as much about the beast in question as marmoset does. Move up high enough into the linguistic arbor, and you arrive at terms that refer to all but mean none: thing, for example, or being.

Or climate change, as far as that goes. The great emotional gain of the shift from global warming to climate change was that the name had become so generic that nothing imaginable could prove it wrong. Every shift in weather is a confirming instance. The only problem left was the pesky little scientific one that, well, nothing imaginable could prove it wrong. In its public use, in the mouths of activists and the titles of organizations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the phrase had come to describe something non-falsifiable. ....

.... In politics, the notion that climate change can’t be falsified — everything only serves to confirm it, nothing imaginable can contradict it — has been a marvelous boon. In science, the fact that climate change can’t be falsified seems to prove, mostly, that climate change isn’t science: There’s no way to test for it, no way to quantify it, and no way to demonstrate it. ....

.... Perhaps the greatest reason for any of us to feel skepticism about climate change, however, is the unchanging politics of those who employed it to advance their agendas. Are we wrong to suspect that most global warming activists are merely using global warming as the latest in a long series of tools with which to demand fundamental changes in Western civilization?

Think of it this way: The premise of catastrophe produces the conclusion that the political and economic underpinnings of Western civilization must be discarded. Governments must take control of economies. Capitalism must give way. All decisions must be made by our scientific and political elite, for only they can save us from doom.

Now, in a purely logical world, the rejection of the premise would mean that we don’t have to accept the conclusion. If A, then B and not A together produce nothing. But the people who’ve been lecturing us for more than a decade now about global warming and climate change didn’t start by holding A. They began by holding B — the conclusion, the proposition that Western civilization must change. And it is, literally, a non-falsifiable proposition: If global warming and climate change help lead to it, then hurray for global warming and climate change. If not, well, then, they’ll find something else. ....

Joseph Bottum and William Anderson, "Unchanging Science: Among other things the global warming crusaders got wrong: skepticism is a virtue, not a vice," The Weekly Standard, November 28, 2011, pp. 26-29.