"Without being downcast or defeated..."

I've been a frequent visitor to a website called Mere Orthodoxy for some time. Mere Orthodoxy is also a magazine. I subscribed recently and received my first copy today. I am already pleased with my decision.

From "About Mere Orthodoxy":

We are a small group of Christians who since 2005 have been defending word count and nuance on the Internet while working out what our faith looks like in public.

Whether it is arts, movies, literature, politics, sexuality, or any other crevice of the human experience, we believe that the Gospel has something to say about it and that "something" really can be good news.

We take our cues from C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, two of the most thoughtful, perceptive Christians of the twentieth century. One of them wrote Mere Christianity and the other wrote Orthodoxy, and we like those books so much we stapled their names together and took it as our own.

Their thoughtfulness wasn't abstract: it was rooted in the challenges and struggles that England was facing in their time, and their mission was to demonstrate how a classically minded, creedally centered orthodox Christianity was an attractive and persuasive alternative to the ideologies of their day.

And they did their work with words, with essays, poems, and stories.

Here's what we hope you will discover in our writing:

We are scripturally rooted and creedally informed. We know that it's not enough to simply say the Apostle's Creed and that the further we get from it, the more we'll disagree on the particulars of how Christianity should play out in public. But we also think that getting to the Apostle's Creed is a pretty good start for most Christians in our era, so that's where we'll put our baseline. ....

On the first page inside the front cover T.S. Eliot is quoted:

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

The first article immediately caught my attention: "We Are All George Smiley Now."

Mere Orthodoxy magazine.

J. Leland Skaggs

 Dad was born in Shiloh, New Jersey, on February 27, 1912.

Alec Guinness’s George Smiley

Alec Guinness is one of my favorite actors. Not the Alec Guinness of Star Wars, particularly, but the Guinness of the Ealing comedies, or the films he made with David Lean, and especially his role as George Smiley in the television series based on the le Carré books. I revisit those at least once a year. I like the BBC version far better than the 2011 film with Gary Oldman. From someone who, apparently, hadn't seen the 1979 version before:

The thing about spy shows is you can’t do anything else while you’re watching; to miss a micro-expression is to miss the plot. Such is the case with 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries based on the le Carré book of the same name, which I recently watched in full. As in the case in real-life espionage, the series features very little in the way of action. Only one episode features gunfire; occasionally, a man jogs. It was, sincerely, riveting. ....

...Alec Guinness’s George Smiley, a dour, droll cuckold and high-ranking intelligence officer whose devotion to England is only superseded by his commitment to social propriety. Smiley, recently and unjustly fired from his position as second in command of the Circus—the nickname for the cadre of top officers within the UK’s intelligence services—is tasked with ferreting out a mole leaking British secrets to the Soviets. It’s believed that the mole is one of the remaining members of the Circus, so Smiley and his few allies can’t let anyone know what they’re up to. (Rather, being professional spies, they can’t let anyone know even more than usual.) For his part, Smiley has to pretend to still be in forced retirement. Not the easiest way to go about an extremely high-stakes mission set at the height of the Cold War.

Even bearing these constraints in mind, Smiley sets about his mission with extreme delicacy. You could be forgiven for mistaking the setting of Tinker Tailor as an alternate-reality London where any act of rudeness sets off the offender’s exploding ankle monitor and blasts their component atoms into the mesosphere. Most of Smiley’s conversations with his various sources and suspects are comprised of intimation, allusion, and tactical civility. ....

Throughout this process Guinness’s Smiley never raises his voice; not once does he rise from his seat. By weaponizing formality, he’s obviated the need for blunter instruments. Why steal secrets when you can ask politely? (more)

 Calvin Kasulke, "Tinker Tailor Soldier... Shifgrethor," CrimeReads, Feb 24, 2025.

"As in a dream"

Jake Meador, in an email to subscribers of Mere Orthodoxy:

.... It is not a question of knowing what is right. It is a question, rather, of one’s commitment to the right.

This is something Peter Jackson never understood about Tolkien, incidentally, and is perhaps the single biggest problem with the Lord of the Rings movies, much as I do love those films. Jackson seems to only understand one sort of moral dilemma: Will I choose the good or the bad? Tolkien understood that one, of course; it’s central to how he treats Boromir and Denethor.

But the question that really seems to have most preoccupied Tolkien was something more like “can a person persist in the good, past the point of all hope and even unto death?” That is the problem Aragorn, Faramir, and Theoden all confront in different ways and, of course, is also near the heart of Frodo and Sam’s journey. ....

[Meador is reminded] of the opening sentence in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a text that Lewis knew well and praised in his scholarly work. Hooker, writing at a time when the fate of the Church of England was unclear and when it was far from certain that his particular flavor of Anglicanism would endure, opened his great masterwork with this line:

Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream, there shall be for men's information extant thus much concerning the present state of the Church of God established amongst us, and their careful endeavor which would have upheld the same.

In other words, Hooker wrote, if for no other reason than simply for this: That those who came after him would know that he and his colleagues had not allowed what they believed to be true and right to pass away “as in a dream.” ....

What Lewis and Tolkien both force their readers to do, in different ways, is ask themselves “if you are called to a cause that is both just and hopeless, what will you do?” Neither of them want us to desire hopelessness, obviously. That can be an easy thing to do for people of a certain turn of mind. It is a vice I am sometimes prone to myself.

The point is, rather, that one should have an answer to that question because once you’ve answered it something has been decided. Obviously the good can and often do triumph. Tolkien and Lewis both wrote many morally admirable characters who win great victories. But I suspect both would also say that the ability of a character to remain good amidst their glory is a consequence of their resolve to hold to the good even in defeat. If you persist in what is right in the face of defeat, then you love the good more than you love temporal success, which is precisely the thing that allows you to handle success with maturity and wisdom when it comes.

Jake Meador in a Mere Orthodoxy email.

As if fresh

From a review of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves:

Fridges are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is ‘anxiety in its purest form’. The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten lettuce into the compost, because we outsourced our worries about preserving food to that chilly box in the corner of the kitchen.

Not all countries are entirely reliant on refrigeration. In the stalls of the souks in Marrakech, fridges seem to be used only for Coca-Cola and water, while everything from haunches of meat to giant pyramids of olives is sold at room temperature. There is a sense of urgency about the selling of food. ....

In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavourless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the ‘genetic capacity’ to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for ‘the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration’. The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home. ....

There is nothing new about trying to delay the rotting of food: salting and smoking, drying and fermenting are among the oldest food preparation techniques. There is evidence of dried meat (jerky avant la lettre) from as long ago as 12,000 BCE in the Middle East; salted fish goes back to the Sumerians; fruit was preserved in honey by the Greeks. But modern refrigeration aims to preserve food not in a transformed state – like a plum compared with a prune or milk with cheese – but as if harvest-fresh. ....

...[F]ridges both prevent food waste and contribute to it. Before the cold chain existed, it was normal to lose at least a third of all fruits and vegetables because they perished en route from the field to the eater. Now, a similar percentage of fresh food is wasted, but by eaters in our own homes. .... (more)

Bee Wilson, "Artificial Cryosphere," London Review of Books, Feb. 20, 2025.

George Washington and a Providential God

Today is generally known as "Presidents' Day" but legally it is Washington's birthday, moved from the actual anniversary of his birth to a Monday in order to give federal employees one more three day weekend.

A while back, on another "Presidents' Day," I published the following about what can be known about George Washington's religious faith:

Mark Tooley republishes his review, "George Washington's God," "in honor of Washington’s Birthday and of Michael Novak, who died Friday, February 17, 2017." Michael Novak and his daughter, Jana Novak, were authors of Washington’s God: Religion, Liberty, and the Father of Our Country, published in 2006; it was written at the request of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. From Tooley's review:

.... The assumption of the last century’s scholarship that Washington was irreligious is partly his fault. Reserved and emotionally reticent, he left no extant theological treatises on his personal religious beliefs. The clues must be extracted from Washington’s ecclesial habits, his family life, his character, and the numerous references to the Almighty in his public writings and personal letters. ....

Most of Washington’s family, friends, and associates assumed he had at least conventional if not necessarily expressive Christian faith. “He took these things [religion] as he found them existing, and was constant in his observance of worship according to the received forms of the Episcopal Church in which he was brought up,” James Madison matter-of-factly observed of his fellow Virginian. ....

Washington was indeed tight-lipped about the specifics of his theology. But he was surprisingly frequent in his references to the Deity. His God was not remote or impersonal. Washington’s God, as he described Him in his public declarations and personal letters, was quite active and quite personal. This deity saved the young Washington several times from French and Indian bullets, saved Washington’s army from near destruction by the far larger British army, and saved the young republic from chaos and division. ....

Washington’s few specific references to Jesus Christ and his lack of Trinitarian language helped fuel the assumption that he was a deist. The Novaks devote a whole chapter to deism, which they explain as a rationalization of Christianity. The deist God is a creator whose world is governed by natural laws and who desires moral living by humanity, whose conduct will be judged in the afterlife.

Much of early Protestantism initially rejected Catholicism’s use of human reason, choosing instead to focus on faith alone. Deism, the Novaks suggest, allowed Protestants to incorporate the language of reason during the Enlightenment. Some deists remained Christians, while others would follow the European model of strict rationalism. Washington, as he related the many interventions of his God, clearly believed in a continuously active deity who was more than the detached “clockmaker” of strict deism. ....

The Washingtons usually attended Pohick Church near Mount Vernon and sometimes Christ Church in Alexandria. Either trip by carriage involved a couple hours of travel round trip. Washington financially supported both churches and gave considerable personal time over the decades to his work on the church vestry. Throughout his presidency he regularly attended churches in New York and Philadelphia. ....

Washington’s spiritual life within his family appears to have been conventionally orthodox. He prayed before meals, read sermons out loud to Martha, and bought devotional material for his stepchildren. When stepdaughter Patsy was dying, he prayed audibly while on his knees at her bedside. ....

.... Washington’s public utterances about God were unifying rather than divisive and were admired by Anglicans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and even Jews. He carefully wrote to their congregations, visited their places of worship, and received their delegations, commending their faith and urging their loyalty to the new republic and its promise of religious liberty to all. .... (more)

From 10 George Washington Quotes Pointing to God's Providence":

“Whereas it becomes us humbly to approach the throne of Almighty God, with gratitude and praise for the wonders which his goodness has wrought in conducting our fore-fathers to this western world…and above all, that he hath diffused the glorious light of the gospel, whereby, through the merits of our gracious Redeemer, we may become the heirs of his eternal glory.” — Washington’s General Orders, November 27, 1779

 George Washington's God - Juicy Ecumenism, 10 George Washington Quotes Pointing to God's Providence - Juicy Ecumenism

A noble lie?

Ross Douthat, author of just published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, on those who would promote belief for the wrong reason:

There is, however, a different kind of relationship to religion that does deserve critique. This is the category of person who likes religious ideas when other people believe in them, who wants religion to exist for its civilization-shaping qualities without personally accepting any of its impositions, who draws pleasure from what the late Richard John Neuhaus called “regretful unbelief,” who only really believes in belief.

This is a special temptation for the intellectual. Think of the sociologist who has a thousand data points proving the advantages of joining and belonging and practicing a faith tradition, and an indifferent attitude to the tradition’s truth. The psychologist who stands ready with a thousand fascinating mythic readings of the Old or New Testament but dances away whenever he’s challenged about whether the events in question actually took place. The self-proclaimed “cultural Christian,” whether of the Elon Musk or the Richard Dawkins school, who loves some aspect of the Western inheritance and fears some dark post-Western future—but not enough to actually embrace the West’s metaphysical foundations. The political philosopher with many religious friends and allies in front of whom he would never explicitly use the term “noble lie,” even though you know he’s thinking it.

This tendency is especially suited to eras like our own, when the pendulum has swung away from militant atheism and toward some recognition that religion might be useful for society after all, though it takes somewhat different forms on the right and on the left.

The right-wing believer-in-belief will often defend the most traditionalist and fundamentalist forms of faith—though he would never be caught dead sharing their literalist or supernaturalist premises—because he likes how those forms shape culture and politics. ....

We (the religious) like being liked, we appreciate being appreciated, and belief-in-belief provides a useful language to translate between the strangeness of some of our convictions and the world of secular priorities and routines. To talk about faith’s benefits rather than its truth claims. To promise therapeutic advantages when talk of heaven seems embarrassing. To remain in the natural and material and psychological because that way you don’t lose anyone by mentioning the Devil. ....

...[M]y new book is a deliberate attempt to leave this kind of halfway argument behind, and to persuade readers to accept religious ideas on their own terms—to transcend the merely sociological and talk directly about why there’s probably a real God with actual demands and expectations, a real supernatural realm that plays some role in human life and history, and yes, a real heaven and a risk of hell. .... (more)

2/17 I've changed the title of this post to more accurately suggest its subject. 

Ross Douthat, "Everyone Should Believe in God," The Free Press, Feb. 16, 2025.

T.E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was one of those films—spectacular, but (more or less) based on history—that enthralled teenage me (another was A Man for All Seasons). I did learn more of the actual history as time passed. The movie was directed by David Lean who also directed my favorite films of Dickens' novels, Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, as well as the film of Doctor Zhivago, another wide-screen spectacle. The Telegraph reports today about a re-creation of one of Lawrence's most heroic WWI feats:

It was a journey immortalised by Peter O’Toole in the epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia – and now four military veterans have become the first people to recreate T.E. Lawrence’s 700-mile (1,126km) trek across the sands of the Middle East.

Howard Leedham, James Calder, Craig Ross and Martin Thompson spent 25 days on camelback crossing the Nafud desert in Saudi Arabia to mark 90 years since Lawrence’s death.

The four men, who served in the British special forces, endured 37C (98F) heat, sandstorms and sheer cliffs on the trek from Al Wajh in Saudi Arabia to the Aqaba in Jordan.

They collected sand from four significant areas on the journey to spread on Lawrence’s grave in Moreton, Dorset.

Lawrence was a First World War hero who led the Arab Revolt against German-supporting Turkey. In 1916 he swept across the desert to Jordan and rewrote the map of the Middle East.

His remarkable feat was described in his autobiographical account Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the classic film Lawrence of Arabia. ...

On the penultimate day, the group, with 40 locals, re-enacted Lawrence’s attack on an Ottoman train that was transporting friends and family who had travelled to celebrate the end of their journey. The staff on the train were aware of the attack, but the tourists were “somewhat startled”. ....

Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident near his home at Bovington, Dorset in 1935. He is buried in the graveyard of St Nicholas Church in Moreton. (more)

Telegraph Reporters, "Veterans retrace Lawrence of Arabia’s epic 700-mile trek across Middle East," The Telegraph, Feb. 13, 2025.

Lincoln, on the anniversary of his birth

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. These words from the conclusion of Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1861) have an obvious relevance to our times:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Lincoln Addresses the Nation - NYTimes.com

Is Pascal's Wager a good bet?

Ross Douthat is a New York Times opinion columnist. He is also a Christian, author of the soon-to-be published Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. A recent column was titled "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God." From that:

...I think that the most compelling case for being religious — for a default view, before you get to the specifics of creeds and doctrines, that the universe was made for a reason and we’re part of that reason — is found at the convergence of multiple different lines of argument, the analysis of multiple different aspects of the existence in which we find ourselves.

Consider three big examples: the evidence for cosmic design in the fundamental laws and structure of the universe; the unusual place of human consciousness within the larger whole; and the persistence and plausibility of religious and supernatural experience even under supposedly disenchanted conditions.

Each of these realities alone offers good reasons to take religious arguments seriously. Indeed, I think each on its own should be enough to impel someone toward at least a version of Pascal’s Wager. ....

[An] underrated argument I’d be inclined to emphasize is what you might call the argument from intelligibility, which sits at the intersection of two lines described above — the line of evidence from the fine-tuning of the universe and the line of evidence from the strange capacities of human consciousness.

The fine-tuning argument, to oversimplify, rests on the startling fact that parameters of the cosmos have been apparently set, tuned very finely, if you will, in an extremely narrow range — with odds on the order of one in a bazillion (that’s a technical number, don’t question it), not one in a hundred — that allows for the emergence of basic order and eventually stars, planets and complex life. To quote Bentham’s Bulldog, this would seem like a pretty strong prima facie case for some originating intelligence: “If there is no God, then the constants, laws and initial conditions could be anything, so it’s absurdly unlikely that they’d fall in the ridiculously narrow range needed to sustain life.” ....

.... We aren’t just in a universe that we can observe; we’re in a universe that’s deeply intelligible to us, a cosmos whose rules and systems we can penetrate, whose invisible architecture we can map and plumb, whose biological codes we can decipher and rewrite and whose fundamental physical building blocks we can isolate and, with Promethean power, break apart.

This capacity of human reason is mysterious, on one level, in the same way that consciousness itself is mysterious: As the philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it in his critique of materialism, “Mind and Cosmos,” it is “not merely the subjectivity of thought but its capacity to transcend subjectivity and discover what is objectively the case” that presents a problem for a hard materialism, since under materialist premises our thoughts are ultimately determined by physical causation, raising questions about how they could possibly achieve objectivity at all. ....

“Is it credible,” Nagel asks, “that selection for fitness in the prehistoric past should have fixed capacities that are effective in theoretical pursuits that were unimaginable at the time?” Evolution’s pressures on our capacities are for prehistoric survival, not discovering calculus or E=mc². So why should capacities that evolved because we needed to hunt gazelles and light fires also turn out, mirabile dictu, to be capacities that enable us to understand the deepest laws of physics and of chemistry, to achieve manned spaceflight, to condense all of human knowledge onto a tiny piece of silicon? ....

As the previous line suggests, the intelligibility of the cosmos is perhaps not exclusively an argument for the existence of God. Rather it’s more of an argument for a position that some people who concede divine possibilities are still inclined to doubt — not only that God exists in some distant, unfathomable form, but also that his infinite mind and our finite minds have some important connection, that we actually matter in the scheme of things and that in fact our own godlike powers are proof of something that was claimed by the old religions at the start: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.”

Douthat's column is behind a subscription wall. I read it by getting a free, limited, subscription.

Ross Douthat, "My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God," New York Times, Feb. 7, 2025.

Rooting for justice

Alan Jacobs is writing a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers. Today he considers a distinction she makes between stories of crime and stories of detection:

Dorothy L. Sayers, once she had established herself as a writer of detection, was asked to edit an anthology of, roughly, her kind of fiction. In the end she edited several such volumes, but the first, largest, and best of them was published in 1928 as Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror. (The following year it was published in the U.S. with the much less accurate title The Omnibus of Crime.)

In her highly illuminating introduction to the anthology, Sayers argues that in one form or another tales of detection and tales of horror are quite ancient. ....

Concerning the tale of detection proper, Sayers muses on a curious fact: Why, if there are such ancient examples of such tales, did the genre not really take root and grow expansively until the second half of the nineteenth century? Drawing on the work of what she rightly calls “a brilliant little study” by a scholar rejoicing in the name of E.M. Wrong, she makes a fascinating suggestion: that while stories about crime always have flourished and always will flourish, stories of detection depend on the reader’s confidence in the basic integrity of the forces of law and order. That is, detective stories depend on the reader’s essential sympathy with the Law rather than the criminal — the reader must want the criminal to be caught.

This does not mean that the reader is expected to have any real confidence in the competence of the police — unless, of course, the protagonist is himself or herself a police officer, in which case we typically see an honest and skillful investigator thwarted or at least impeded by corruption or incompetence in the higher ranks. (This is a problem often faced by Maigret and Morse, and sometimes Dalgleish.) When the detective-protagonist is not a police officer, most famously in the case of Sherlock Holmes, we expect that the police will be none too intelligent and, whether they realize it or not, in desperate need of Holmes’s help. But we never for a moment imagine that Lestrade or Athelney Jones is corrupt. ....

So if the detective story depended on the readers’ confidence in the integrity of the System, what happens when that confidence evaporates? Obviously a return to crime fiction: from the uprightness of Poirot and Lord Peter and even Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, we move to the morally sloppy, thoroughly compromised, just barely more-slimed-than-sliming porotagonists of Elmore Leonard’s novels; or Danny Ocean and his crew. Perhaps that’s why the most popular detective stories are those of the Golden Age, which provide an opportunity for us to enter a more innocent time than ours, more innocent in multiple respects, one in which we’re not openly rooting for thieves and murderers. (more)

I enjoy recent authors like Elmore Leonard, but my favorite authors, Dorothy L. Sayers among them,  wrote in the Golden Age.

The book cover above results from an image search and is the second in the series Sayers edited. I own a copy of the first, the one to which Jacobs refers, but I don't know where it is. The dust cover on my copy is very tattered.

Alan Jacobs, "The Integrity of the System," The Homebound Symphony, Feb. 10, 2025.

"Witness" is forty years old!

Before Master and Commander Peter Weir directed Witness, forty years ago. It's an old film by now, I suppose, but it doesn't seem so to me. Like Master and Commander it isn't just a story, it immerses the viewer in an unfamiliar (to most of us) culture:

Before we see a gun, a bullet or a drop of blood, we see tall grass swaying in the breeze. Amid the grass there is a mass of men, women and children walking peaceably but confidently. We soon discern, from their unmistakably austere manner of dress, that they belong to the Amish community; we quickly realize that they have gathered for a funeral.

These images constitute the stirring, surprising opening of Peter Weir’s peerless thriller Witness. The film, which was released by Paramount Pictures 40 years ago this month, will eventually develop into a police procedural of rare drama and intensity, but not before Mr. Weir lays the firm foundation for the setting with which it begins and to which it returns: an Amish community in Pennsylvania in 1984. ....

In the film’s early stretch, Mr. Weir exercises great patience in establishing the principal Amish characters: Rachel (Kelly McGillis), a widow whose late husband was being mourned in the opening scene, and her little boy, Samuel (Lukas Haas). By the time Rachel and Samuel have made their way to a Philadelphia train station, Mr. Weir has engendered such audience identification with them that, although they are outsiders in this environment, we no longer perceive them as such. Instead, Mr. Weir makes alien and unsympathetic the other travelers, some of whom cannot suppress their stares.

Mr. Weir’s approach of acclimating us to the Amish worldview pays dividends in a pivotal scene. After entering the train station men’s room, Samuel observes, through a slightly ajar stall door, a murder.... (more, with spoilers)

Peter Tonguette, "Peter Weir’s Witness: Crime and Community," The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2025.

"May I but safely reach my home"

Re-posted

From Conjubilant With Song: Safely Reach My Home:

.... A simple, four stanza text by Isaac Watts, first published in 1707, which appeared under the epigraph The hope of heaven our support under trials on earth.... It could be set to many different tunes in Common Meter (8.6.8.6.) such as ST. ANNE or WINCHESTER OLD, tunes which were known in Watts's time. However, it has become more familiar in this country with a folk tune from Scotland which was arranged in an early American tune collection titled Kentucky Harmony (1817).

When I can read my title clear To mansions in the skies, I'll bid farewell to every fear, And wipe my weeping eyes. And wipe my weeping eyes, And wipe my weeping eyes I'll bid farewell to every fear, And wipe my weeping eyes.	Let cares, like a wild deluge come, And storms of sorrow fall! May I but safely reach my home, My God, my heav’n, my all. My God, my heav'n, my all, My God, my heav'n, my all, May I but safely reach my home, Ay God, my heav'n, my all.
Should earth against my soul engage, And fiery darts be hurled, Then I can smile at Satan’s rage, And face a frowning world. And face a frowning world, And face a frowning world, Then I can smile at Satan’s rage, And face a frowning world.	There shall I bathe my weary soul In seas of heav’nly rest, And not a wave of trouble roll, Across my peaceful breast. Across my peaceful breast, Across my peaceful breast, And not a wave of trouble roll, Across my peaceful breast.

Isaac Watts, 1707
Tune: PISGAH (8.6.8.6.6.6.8.6.)
Scottish tune, arr. Joseph C. Lowry, 1817
Conjubilant With Song: Safely Reach My Home

Marple

Last night I watched two of the Joan Hickson Miss Marple mysteries. I think Hickson is by far the best Marple on screen. I've owned the DVDs of that series for some time but last night, I watched streaming on Britbox and was glad I did — the episodes have been restored and are beautiful. I saw "The Moving Finger" and "A Pocket Full of Rye," neither of which I had watched recently and much longer since read. Speaking of the books, today I came across one reader's ranking of the twelve Agatha Christie's in which Miss Marple appears:

• 
  A Murder is Announced (1950)
• The Moving Finger (1942)
• The Body in the Library (1942)
• A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)
• The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
• Sleeping Murder (1976)
• The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
• A Caribbean Mystery (1964)
• 4.50 from Paddington (1957)
• They Do It with Mirrors (1952)
• Nemesis (1971)
• At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)

Not bad, although I would rank The 4:50 from Paddington a bit higher.

Jose Ignacio Escribano, "My Ranking of the Twelve Miss Marple Novels," A Crime is Afoot, Feb. 4, 2025.

Virtucrats

Joseph Epstein is a favorite essayist I always read whenever and wherever I find him. From "Virtucrats on Parade":

To win an argument you need reason, and, when it comes to politics, you cannot, as Jonathan Swift had it, reason someone out of something into which he or she has not been reasoned.

Consider how one came to one’s own politics. Many among us have adopted the politics of our parents. Others have come by their politics in direct opposition to their parents’ politics. Some take up the politics reigning among their social milieu; still others, seeking to distinguish themselves, choose a politics of nonconformity. For some people, politics is of trifling interest; for others, politics dominates their lives. Still others, bored blue by the subject, scarcely have any politics at all. ....

Michael Oakeshott thought politics “an inferior form of human activity” that was about nothing more than the struggle for power, and as such “an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” Oakeshott viewed “politics [as] the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life but of organizing a common life.” He contemned those who in the political realm thought they had all the answers, which many strongly politicized people do.

Michael Oakeshott’s were the politics of conservatism, but of a kind that entailed “the propensity to use and enjoy what is present rather than to wish to look for something else.” For him, to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” ....

In our time, politics have more and more become about dueling virtues: with those on the left claiming themselves superior because of their struggle for justice, those on the right claiming the wisdom of their perception of the limits of the possible. And each side is intent on crushing the other. The more politics dominate a time, as Oakeshott noted, the worse that time. ....

In 1985 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, I coined the word “virtucrat.” Elsewhere I’ve defined a virtucrat as “any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply righteous in the bargain.” A virtucrat apprehends the world’s injustice and feels obliged to set things right. He is confident that he sees through the lies and cons of the rich and powerful, which he feels must be exposed. His life becomes a mission, his view of himself that of a sensitive, serious, above all highly virtuous person. ....

The old adage has it that virtue is its own reward, yet in politics the pretense to virtue has all too often brought not reward but the severest punishment to those societies—Russian, German, Chinese—whose leaders promised that under their plans virtue would flourish as never before. (more)

Joseph Epstein, "Virtucrats on Parade: Beware angels in politics," Commentary, February, 2025.

Moral imagination

From a long, very interesting, essay by Katherine Rundell, herself an author of books for children, "Why children’s books?":

.... It was W.H. Auden who said: ‘there are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences, but there are no good books which are only for children.’ The great discipline of children’s fiction is that it has to be written for everyone: because if it is not for everyone then it’s not for anyone at all. It offers us the specific joy of finding our commonality: we can all meet on the pages of A.A. Milne in a way that we cannot on the pages of Jacques Derrida. ....

...[T]here are common threads that run through the children’s books that have endured and the new books that children currently devour. If, as a practitioner, I were to draw up a list it would include: autonomy, peril, justice, secrets, small jokes, large jokes, revelations, animals, multitudinous versions of love, inventions – and food.

Food gives both solid reality and delicious longing to children’s books. Brian Jacques, author of the Redwall series about monastic chivalric mice, was a milkman when he began volunteering to read at a school for the blind. He found himself horrified by the quality of the books he was reading, and decided to write his own – and, because the children were blind, he accentuated senses other than sight: smell, sound, temperature, texture and, most important of all to children, taste. The food in Redwall is the thing most of its readers remember....

Perhaps the best book ever written about postwar rationing is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Published in 1964, ten years after rationing ended in Britain, it has an entire nation’s hunger for fresh tastes and wild luxury encoded in its pages. And there is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, written in 1950, when sugar and fruit and treats were still scarce (in 1942, according to a survey, many children did not believe that bananas were real): Edmund’s Turkish Delight stands in for every lost and longed-for glory. What child forgets the seismically disappointing discovery that the English version tastes like jellied flowers dusted in soap powder? ....

What is​ fantasy for? You do not suddenly start needing philosophy on your eighteenth birthday: you have always needed it. Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death. As Tolkien said, in an interview in 1968, ‘human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death.’ ....

C.S. Lewis wrote that tales of the marvellous are their own, real thing: fictional, yes, but also solid pieces of knowledge. They are ‘actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.’ The greatest children’s fantasies were worth your time when you were twelve, and they are equally worth it now. They keep the imagination sharp, and big, and hungry. They remind us that the imagination is not an optional extra, which we can humour in our children but safely discard in adulthood. It is at the very heart of everything. It is deadly serious, the necessary condition of political change, of love. It is the sharpest tool of ethics. Edmund Burke popularised the term ‘moral imagination’ to describe the ability of ethical perception to step beyond the limits of the fleeting moment and beyond the limits of a single person’s experience. ....

There’s no doubt that reading for pleasure as a child can change your life. It is a key predictor of economic success later in life. But the main reason to help children seek out books is this: if you cut a person off from reading, you’re a thief. You cut them off from the song that humanity has been singing for thousands of years. ....

To write those books is to insist that though the world burns, and there is more fire to come, it will always be worth teaching children to rejoice. It will always be worth showing them how to build an internal blueprint for happiness. Nothing about being alive demands joy. But, over and over, the great children’s books insist on it: on joy as a way that humans both create and are given meaning. Joy is insisted on through talking spiders, and rats in rowing boats, and in the vast promise of an opening line: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ .... (much more)

Katherine Rundell, "Why children’s books?," London Review of Books, Feb./ 6, 2025.