"Men of intemperate minds cannot be free"

From a fine essay by Yuval Levin, "Taking the Long Way," about what contemporary conservatives and liberals forget about the necessary precondition for a truly free society:

.... The idea of liberty that both progressives and conservatives generally articulate takes the person capable of freedom for granted without pausing to wonder where he might come from.

An idea of liberty is an essential part of the answer to that crucial unasked question. But it is not the libertarian freedom generally voiced by today’s left and right. Surely liberation from coercion alone does not prepare us for the practice of liberal freedom. To liberate us purely to pursue our wants and wishes is to liberate our appetites and passions. But a person in the grip of appetite or passion can’t be our model of the free human being. Such a person is not someone we would trust with the exercise of great political and economic freedom.

The liberty we can truly recognize as liberty is achieved by the emancipation of the individual not just from coercion by others but also from the tyranny of his unrestrained desire. ....

This older idea of liberty requires not only that people be free to choose but also that they be able to choose well. This liberty arises when we want to do more or less what we ought to do, so that the moral law, the civil law, and our own will are largely in alignment, and choice and obligation point in the same direction. To be capable of freedom, and capable of being liberal citizens, we need to be capable of that challenging combination. And to become ­capable of it, we need more than the liberation of the individual from coercion. We need a certain sort of moral formation. ....

Religious institutions are not just counterbalances but foundations of the liberal order. They command us to a mixture of responsibility, sympathy, lawfulness, and righteousness that align our wants with our duties. They help form us to be free. ....

Not everyone has the good fortune of a flourishing family, or the opportunity for rewarding work, or a liberal education, or a humbling faith, let alone all of these at once. But some combination of these soul-forming institutions is within the reach of most, and the work of reinforcing them, sustaining the space for them, and putting them within the reach of as many of our fellow citizens as possible is among our highest and most pressing civic callings. That calling, rather than a hyper-individualist liberationism, should be the organizing principle of our political life, helping us see what to conserve and how to advance. .... (much more)

Yuval Levin, "Taking the Long Way," First Things, October 2014.

A puzzle story

At CrimeReads Martin Edwards writes an appreciation of the one Dorothy L. Sayers novel that, although a Lord Wimsey tale is—uncharacteristically—a "whodunit":

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote The Five Red Herrings in 1930, at the height of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Yet the book novel (published at the start of the following year and originally known in the United States as Suspicious Characters) stands apart from her other mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. This is because she deliberately set out to write ‘a pure puzzle story’. ....

For all her flair as a crime writer, Sayers was not particularly interested in the whodunit. As she said to Gollancz, ‘Personally, I feel that it is only when the identity of the murderer is obvious that the reader can really concentrate on the question (much the most interesting) How did he do it?’ ....

The secret of her success in capturing the spirit of the place lies in her meticulous attention to detail. Her rural community is infinitely more lifelike than the ‘Mayhem Parva’ type of English village which featured so often in Golden Age novels. Right from the start, we’re left in no doubt that Sayers is writing about a recognizable artists’ colony. As she says in a prefatory note: ‘All the places are real places…and all the landscapes are correct, except that I have run up a few new houses here and there’. An attractive and lavishly detailed map of the area helps readers to follow the action. ....

A truly impressive legacy for a single novel. But one thing is for sure. I’d never fancy driving along those narrow, winding roads at anything like eighty miles per hour – not even if I were trying to establish an alibi for a murder! (more)

Martin Edwards, "On the Trail of The Five Red Herrings, A Sayers Novel That Stands Apart," CriomeReads, August 27, 2024.

A peaceful interlude

Friendship and place

Alan Jacobs discovered The Wind in the Willows as an adult. Me, too. Today, on his blog, he republishes an essay that originally appeared in 2009. I've quoted from it before. Jacobs:

If we must claim that The Wind in the Willows is about something, I would say that it’s mostly about the inter-animating powers of friendship and place. Ratty loves the river, but he loves it more when he can show it to Mole. Ratty has known all along that “there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” but he chants this well-worn fact over and over, dreamily, because in sharing the experience with the novice Mole he finds it coming fully alive to himself once more. Badger’s home is all the more delightful as a refuge from the cold because it is Badger’s home, not just some generic warm spot. Badger’s gruff hospitality allows all sorts of creatures to come and go as they will. And Toad Hall becomes more wonderful than ever when it has been saved from the stoats and weasels, and saved by Toad’s faithful friends. Friends give meaning to a place, and the traits of certain places encourage and strengthen the blessings of friendship.

These are great lessons for anyone to learn, or to remember, at any age. And no book shows us these relations so beautifully as The Wind in the Willows. ....

...[F]or Ratty and Mole on the river, or enjoying their sun-illumined picnics, I must have Ernest Shepard, best known as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Pooh stories. He catches the joy of the friends, their unadulterated blissful delight in the shape of their little world, as no one else does. ....

And now, for me, it’s back to a reading of the story that I wish I had known in my childhood. (And yet would I have loved it then?) The river holds more than enough excitement, after all, and so does The Wind in the Willows. When Mole asks Ratty about the Wild Wood, he receives just a few broken, reluctant, uninformative sentences. And when he asks about what might be found on the other side of the Wild Wood, he gets only this quite proper rebuke: “‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to it again, please.’" (more)

Alan Jacobs, "Beyond the Wild Wood," The Homebound Symphony, August 27, 2024.

An intriguing image

I've posted about the Shroud of Turin on this blog several times. In 2009 I wrote:

The Shroud of Turin is the one religious relic that has intrigued me over the years, not as an object of reverence, but because of the possibility it could be authentic. Might there be an actual image of Jesus as well as evidence for His execution and possibly even the resurrection which had been preserved until a time when science could authenticate it? I should have known better — controversy about this sort of thing never ends and there is never enough evidence to erase all doubt. Nevertheless, the seemingly inexplicable nature of the image, the things a medieval artist would have been unlikely to know like the wounds on the wrists rather than the palms and the similarity to actual Roman methods of crucifixion, made the possibilities of the Shroud extremely interesting. .... (more)

Yesterday the New York Post published an AI-generated image based on the shroud:

Olivia Land, "Face of Jesus? AI recreates stunning likeness of Shroud of Turin image that many believe to be Christ," New York Post, August 22, 2024.

Boundaries

Foundations of Faith quotes St Augustine: “In the essentials, unity, in the non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity.” He then lists the categories his professor used to classify doctrine:

• Essential Doctrine 
• Cardinal Doctrines 
• Non-Essentials
• Tertiary and Peripheral

What is essential, and what is not?

Essential Doctrines are doctrines that put you outside of the faith if you deny them. To reject these teachings means you are not a Christian, and the word “Heresy” is usually invoked for this category of error. Examples of essential doctrines are the deity of Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and believing in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. ....

Non-essential doctrines are the ones that usually distinguish denominations. The Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the Pentecostals are all brothers and sisters in Christ. Still, they hold doctrines that are significant enough to impact how they worship and, therefore, opt to attend different churches. Examples of non-essential doctrines include questions such as, “Does the gifts of tongues continue or cease after the Apostles? Predestination or libertarian free will? Baptism—infant or believers? Covenant theology or dispensational? And questions surrounding the rapture. These can significantly impact our worship, but the wrong answers to these questions rarely put us outside of the faith. .... (more)

My denomination—Seventh Day Baptist—holds that the Sabbath should be observed from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, the Biblical Sabbath, but would categorize that belief as important and correct but "non-essential," in the sense that those who disagree with us are not heretics and thus the doctrine belongs in category three of this taxonomy.

Doug Eaton, "4 Categories of Doctrinal Weight in Christian Theology," Fight of Faith, August 20, 2024.

"Without our aid..."

Re-posted, updated, from a very early post here:

Know that the LORD is God indeed;
Without our aid He did us make;
We are His flock, He doth us feed,
And for His sheep He doth us take.
Old 100^th

In the KJV, verse 3 of Psalm 100 reads "Know ye that the LORD He is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture." Old 100^th reworks the second phrase to read "Without our aid He did us make." I've always liked that. It is an important reminder, particularly to those of us inclined to the sin of Pride, which is to say all of us.

In the late 1980s, browsing through CDs in a music store in London, I came across Psalms of Scotland by the Scottish Philharmonic Singers. It is a wonderful collection, beautifully sung, of twenty selections from the Scottish Psalter. The image here is of that CD. I was pleased to discover this morning that the recording is still available from Amazon here.

There have always been those who believe that only the Psalms should be sung in church. Like Watts, the early Seventh Day Baptist hymn writer, Joseph Stennett, was consequently very careful to establish the Biblical basis for hymns that were not paraphrases of the Psalms. Although singing only the Psalms seems needlessly restrictive, they should certainly be an important part of worship. That is, after all, what they are intended for, and there is a rich heritage to enjoy.

Humility and hope

Re-posted.

Many books have contributed to my understanding of Scripture and clarified what it means to be a believer — and especially, perhaps, what it means to live as a believer. C.S. Lewis, no doubt, has influenced my understanding of the faith more than any other author. But there have been many others: Chesterton, Sayers, Stott, Philip Yancey — particularly his Disappointment With God. Decision Making and the Will of God, by Garry Friesen came to my attention at an important moment.

I was reminded of another important book by a reference to Ben Patterson in something I posted recently. One of his books is Waiting: Finding Hope When God Seems Silent. It is one of the books of which I own multiple copies because I give it away. The title accurately describes the subject, and the problem is one that every believer confronts — and always has. Mother Teresa's experience seemed to surprise, shock, or even gratify many of those who reviewed or read the new book of her letters, but most Christians understood it. If, by some chance, someone doesn't, Patterson's book would help.

The experiences of Job and Abraham are central in the book. They had to wait for God's promises to be fulfilled -— and wait and wait — without much evidence that the fulfillment would ever come apart from their faith—trust—in God. When things are very difficult, Patterson argues that the required attitudes are not so much patience and perseverance, as humility and hope.

The epilog sums it up superbly:

More basic than patience or perseverance are humility and hope. These two are the attitudes, the visions of life, that make patience possible. Patience is a rare and lovely flower that grows only in the soil of humility and hope.

Humility makes patience possible because it shows us our proper place in the universe. God is God, we are his creatures; he is the King, we are his subjects; he is master, we are his servants. We have no demands to make, no rights to assert. I can be impatient only if I think that whatever it is I want is being withheld or delayed unfairly. As Chuck Swindoll put it, "God is not in your appointment book; you're in his." His superiority is not only in power and authority, it is in love and wisdom as well. He has the right to do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it, but he also has the love to desire what is best for all his creatures and the wisdom to know what is best. He is superior to us in every conceivable way—in power and love and wisdom. To know that is to be patient.

Hope makes patience possible because it gives us the confidence that our wait is not in vain. Hope believes that this God of love, power, and wisdom is on our side. It exults in the knowledge that, in the delays of life, he knows exactly what he is doing. If he moves quickly, it is for our good; if he moves slowly, it is for our good. No matter how things look to us, God is the complete master of the situation. There is an old theological word for this—providence. The venerable Heidelberg Catechism defines God's providence as:

The Almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were, by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea all things come not by chance, but by his fatherly hand.

There are no accidents, no glitches with God. He does all things well. Everything that comes to us comes by his hand and through his heart. He provides for our needs and fulfills our deepest desires in the fullness of time, not a moment too late, nor a second too soon. Hope assures us that in all things, even in the delays of life, God is working for our good. To know that is to be patient.

One of the surprise "goods" that God is working for us as we wait is the forging of our character. What we become as we wait is at least as important as the thing we wait for. To wait in hope is not just to pass the time until the wait is over. It is to see the time passing as part of the process God is using to make us into the people he created us to be. Job emerges from his wait dazzled and transformed. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah.

Hope invites us to look at our waitings from the grand perspective of God's eternal purposes. In fact to be a believer is, by definition, to be one who waits. When Jesus won his victory over sin and death, he ascended into heaven, promising one day to return. We Christians wait for that return, poised between the times, in the "already, but not yet." ....

Ben Patterson, Waiting, 1990.

Up to no good

The Wall Street Journal celebrates "Alfred Hitchcock at 125: Still a Cinematic Titan" by posting links to reviews about some of his films and related materials. Hitchcock ranks very high among my favorite directors. From an essay about Shadow of a Doubt (1943):

...Hitchcock always claimed to hold in special regard his 1943 drama of small-town life threatened by the presence of a killer, Shadow of a Doubt. Joseph Cotten starred as Uncle Charlie, a murderer whose preferred victims are affluent widows but who, like so many Hitchcock villains, manages to charmingly conceal his villainy—especially to his worshipful family.

“Shadow of a Doubt was a most satisfying picture for me—one of my favorite films—because for once there was time to get characters into it,” Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview.

Hitchcock efficiently establishes the character of Uncle Charlie, whose natural habitat is presented in the film’s opening: Under a false name, he occupies a run-down rented room in an ugly, uninviting urban environment. Charlie is first seen lying in bed, a cigar in his hand and cash by his side while brooding over his next move. After learning that two men are on his tail, he makes a hasty exit and seeks refuge in the bosom of his adoring relations in Santa Rosa, Calif. We do not yet know the specifics of Charlie’s criminality, but we know he is up to no good. ....

This psychological drama is set against the richest sociological portrait Hitchcock ever attempted. Hitchcock uses the splendid setting of Santa Rosa—its tranquil neighborhoods, gracious front porches, patient policeman monitoring a street crossing—not just as atmosphere but to render Uncle Charlie a stranger in a strange land. He not only hails from a place geographically distant from Santa Rosa, but proves to be far slicker and more sardonic than his homespun kith and kin. Intuitively, Young Charlie says at one point that her uncle conceals an enigmatic inner self....

The picture is preoccupied with ideas of normality and ordinariness, and Hitchcock, making the film amid World War II, makes clear that he sees such all-American qualities as worth defending. In a series of speeches, Uncle Charlie offers a cynical view of life—“The world’s a hell,” he says. “What does it matter what happens in it?”—with which he justifies his actions. ....

Peter Tonguette, "‘Shadow of a Doubt’: Hitchcock’s Tale of Small-Town Evil," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 24, 2023.

"Dust to dust"

Re-posted because it is so right:

Jonathan Aigner ponders "How To Choose Music For A Funeral." I agree with much (not all) that he writes but very much agree with the following and have made my preference clear to my pastor, relatives, and friends:

One of the things the baby boomer generation has introduced into the liturgical sphere is the “celebration of life” service. That’s quite unfortunate.

A “celebration of life” points to a dead person. A funeral points to the cross.

A “celebration of life” sidesteps grief. A funeral confronts grief head-on.

A “celebration of life” ignores resurrection. A funeral depends on resurrection.

Funerals aren’t celebrations of human life. Funerals are proclamations of another life, a life that ended in a death that ended in a life.

That is the life worth celebrating. The music you choose must point to Jesus, not to the casket. ....

Death sucks. It just sucks. And when we lose someone we love, we remember how badly it sucks. And we helplessly face the fact that we can’t do a damn thing about it.

It’s not supposed to be that way.

But Jesus lives, and so shall we.

And that makes all the difference.

How To Choose Music For A Funeral

“I enjoy monotony”

I'm tempted, but it seems rather expensive. From a review, "Of mice and men and Magdalen: C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin":

The life of a dedicated Oxford don and literary figure is bound to contain few opportunities for drama, glamour, or adventure. “I enjoy monotony,” C.S. Lewis once admitted to a questioner, and that was surely a fortunate trait, given that he spent 30 years teaching at Oxford, mainly in undergraduate tutorials, before he finally moved to a non-teaching post at Cambridge.

Yet such is the fascination that many have with the author of the Screwtape Letters (1942), the Narnia Chronicles (1949-54), and the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), that many readers will relish the details of his Oxford life revealed in this sympathetic and atmospheric biography.

Simon Horobin records that Lewis typically taught 24 hours of tutorials a week, a huge burden over the three Oxford terms, which then as now consisted of eight intense weeks (the standard stint of a teaching fellow in Classics today, which tutors find taxing enough, is eight hours a week). When he was finally appointed to a chair at Cambridge in 1954, Lewis commented in a letter: “29 years of pupils’ essays is enough, bless ’em” and some years later wrote delightedly to his lifelong friend Arthur Greeves, “I’ve never been so under-worked since I first went to school.” ....

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.” Lewis was eventually persuaded by his old friend J.R.R. Tolkien that he would still be able to live at The Kilns if he took the chair. By the time he arrived in Cambridge he was already a literary celebrity (his relationship with other literary stars such as Tolkien, T.S. Eliot and particularly John Betjeman was not entirely happy).

He correctly recognised that a large part of the success of the Narnia books was due to the marvelous illustrations by Pauline Baynes. When she wrote to congratulate him on the award of the Carnegie Medal for The Last Battle, Lewis generously responded saying that it was “our medal”: the pictures were bound to have been a factor. He was similarly generous in his letters to Dorothy Sayers, though the statement that “Lewis’s long friendship with Dorothy L. Sayers contradicts the suggestion that he sought out only members of his own sex” strikes an unduly defensive note. .... (more)

8/21/2024  I'm not very good at resisting temptation. My copy arrived today. 

Armand D’Angour, "Of mice and men and Magdalen," The Critic, July 2024.

“The age of the storytellers.”

Dirda again, this from a 2012 essay titled "Armchair Adventures":

Why is it that I so seldom want to read what everyone else wants to read? A season’s blockbuster will come out—whether Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall or Stephen King’s 11/22/63—and the world will hurry off to the bookstores. More often than not, though, I dawdle, maybe stop for a coffee on the way. Sometimes I never get round to the book at all. ....

...I taught a course at the University of Maryland entitled “The Classic Adventure Novel: 1885-1915,” covering 10 books. Given those dates, you can probably guess half the titles on the reading list: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines; Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped; H.G. Wells, The Time Machine; Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel; E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet; G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday; Rudyard Kipling, Kim; A. Conan Doyle, The Lost World; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; and John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

If one were to characterize all these disparate works, one might settle for the phrase “comfort books.” Other descriptive clichés come to mind: ripping yarns, action-packed swashbucklers, escapist fantasies, boys’ books. All accurate designations, but I will make the case that such stories are as important to our imaginations as the more canonical classics.

To my delight, the class proved immensely popular. Students said that it reminded them of why they had majored in English: not because they could hardly wait to read the latest in literary theory, but because they loved stories. ....

This spring...I’m back discussing “The Modern Adventure Novel: 1917-1973.” Our reading list picks up where the previous one left off and includes: Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars; Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood; Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades; Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest; H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness; Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios; Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination; Chester Himes, The Real Cool Killers; Charles Portis, True Grit; and William Goldman, The Princess Bride. ....

I could easily have doubled the number of books in both classes. And I still kick myself for forgetting about Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock. ....

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers. At a dramatic moment in Sabatini’s piratical masterpiece, the evil buccaneer Levasseur snarls: “You do not take her while I live!” To which Captain Blood coolly replies, as his blade flashes in the sunlight: “Then I’ll take her when you’re dead.” Writing—or reading, for that matter—doesn’t get any better than that.

Michael Dirda, "Armchair Adventures," The American Scholar," Feb 24, 2012.

Blind faith?

Greg Koukl argues that "It’s Time to Forget 'Faith'," not the thing, the word:

I have a suggestion. I want you to forget talking about faith—your faith, others’ faith, even the Christian faith. Here’s why you should take my advice.

Sometimes a word outlives its usefulness to communicate accurately. ....

It’s virtually impossible nowadays to use the word without people subconsciously adding “blind” or “leap of” as modifiers. Indeed, some find it impossible to understand faith in any other way since, in their minds, irrationality is central to any definition of religious faith. ....

That’s what they mean when they talk about religious faith. Is this what you mean when you use that word? I hope not, since that isn’t what the biblical authors meant. Pistis, the Greek word for faith, means active trust, and the biblical context reveals over and over again that this trust is based on evidence like reliable witnesses, rational reflection, and convincing proofs. ....

When talking about your own act of faith, use the word “trust.” When talking about the content of your beliefs, use the word “convictions”—e.g., you put your trust (not faith) in Christ based on your confidence in your Christian convictions (not faith).

Instead of saying that you believe in the resurrection (“belief” words have the same liability), say, rather, “I’m convinced Jesus rose from the dead,” or just, “Jesus rose from the dead.” These statements invite a request for reasons, which you can then give. ....

Greg Koukl, "It’s Time to Forget 'Faith'" Stand to Reason, August 1, 2024