"We must not sink into a pagan materialism"

On the 150th anniversary of Independence Day, in 1926, President Calvin Coolidge spoke in Philadelphia. Coolidge had a reputation for being laconic, and, primarily because of Mencken's ridicule, rather stupid. But in an era when Presidents still composed their own remarks, his thoughts are conveyed clearly and are obviously the product of serious thought. From his "Speech on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence":

It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed. ....

Having recounted the ideas promulgated in the sermons of colonial pastors and theologians, the President continued:

No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.

Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause. ....

No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped. [more]

Thanks to Melinda at Stand to Reason for the reference.

Speech on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by Calvin Coolidge

How Screwtape survived

Dan Hamilton posts at the C.S. Lewis Blog providing an account of a friendship and of how the only existing manuscript of one of C.S. Lewis' books was preserved.

.... In 1941, Lewis entrusted to Sister Penelope the original manuscript of The Screwtape Letters, because he had some apprehension that the only other manuscript copy might come to harm in the German bombings. “I enclose the MS. of Screwtape. If it is not a trouble I shd. like you to keep it safe until the book is printed (in case the one the publisher has got blitzed) – after that it can be made into spills or used to stuff dolls or anything.”

(This was consistent with his disregard for his own manuscripts after they had served their purpose. Lewis would often turn his original and fair-copy pages into scratch paper or “spills” to light the gas fire. ....)....

Sister Penelope still had the Screwtape manuscript in the 1950s, and inquired what Lewis wanted her to do with it. Lewis cared little for it, and indicated that he would simply dispose of it straightaway if she returned it to him – most of his scribbles ended up in the w.p.b. (waste paper basket) anyway.

Lewis finally told her, “If you can persuade any ‘sucker’ (as the Americans say) to buy the ms. of Screwtape, pray do, and use the money for any pious or charitable object you like.”

She eventually – though reluctantly arranged for its sale to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, and so preserved the only surviving full-length original Lewis book manuscript. The funds from the sale went to refurbish St. Michael’s chapel at the convent. .... (more)

C. S. Lewis Blog: Why Read Old Books: History and Its Relevance

Praise Him, Praise Him...

One of the pleasures I anticipate each year in worship at our annual General Conference is great congregational singing — hundreds of voices raised in praise, singing out loudly in tune and in harmony. It is an experience I seldom have any other time in the year because my local congregation is so small and elsewhere there seems to be an aversion to hymns, or perhaps a growing inability to actually sing.

At least some of the hymns will be from the English hymn tradition of the last three centuries. Some years ago I started collecting CDs of hymns and anthems — some of which I discover on Amazon have become scarce and consequently rather valuable. Here are three that I very much like that are still available and reasonably priced:

"A Vaughan Williams Hymnal" is a collection of hymns to music by my favorite twentieth century composer. Among them the most familiar may be  "He Who Would Valiant Be" with words taken from John Bunyan and "For All the Saints" to Williams' tune Sine Nomine. Less familiar, at least to me, is this by John Henry Newman:

Firmly I believe and truly
God is Three and God is One;
And I next acknowledge duly
Manhood taken by the Son.

And I trust and hope most fully
In that Manhood crucified;
And each thought and deed unruly
Do to death, as he has died.

Simply to his grace and wholly
Light and life and strength belong,
And I love supremely, solely,
Him the Holy, Him the Strong.

Adoration ay be given,
With and through the angelic host,
To the God of earth and heaven,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Another collection of twentieth century hymns is the first in a series by the Choir of Wells Cathedral, "Christ Triumphant: Great Hymn Tunes of the 20th Century". It has words from many periods but the music is by modern composers, including several by Vaughan Williams. There is here another with words by Newman, "Lead, Kindly Light":

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling goom;
Lead Thou me on.
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead Thou me on.
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene — one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou
Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path but now
Lead Thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and spite of fears
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long Thy power hast blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er craig and torrent, till
The night is gone.
And with the morn those angel faces smile,
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

Parish Anthems, by the Clare College Chapel Choir was intended to encourage churches without much choral firepower. It includes very good anthems that can be sung by small choirs. I particularly like Richard Farrant's setting of "Lord for Thy Tender Mercy's Sake":

Lord for Thy tender mercy's sake
Lay not our sins to our charge;
But forgive that is past,
And give us grace to amend our sinful lives;
To decline from sin, and incline to virtue,
That we may walk in an upright heart,
Before Thee this day and evermore.

There is in the musical heritage of the Christian faith a lot of very good stuff that we could use in worship to the praise of God.

My Cry Ascends

I found the description of this CD so attractive that I immediately ordered it. It seemed to exemplify the argument of the last post. The video below is a description by the composer of his intentions. From the information found at  Justin Taylor's "Between Two Worlds":

My Cry Ascends is a graceful collection of new Psalms and hymns for the church composed by Greg Wilbur. The music is recorded in a folk tradition with elements of Celtic style and southern harmony. Listeners will enjoy the hardy musical instrumentation: piano, viola, flutes, tin whistle, acoustic guitar, mandolin, bagpipe, hammer dulcimer and percussion. Rich biblical texts and expressive tunes feature the singing of Michael Card, Steve Green, Wes King, Katy Snow, Nathan Clark George and Bruce Carroll. The songs were written with congregational singing in mind, and it is our hope that this CD will bring these wonderful pieces into wider familiarity as an appropriate offering to the Most High God as He calls His people into worship.

Here are the tracks:

1. Now Unto Jehovah—Psalm 29 (2:39)
2. Come Ye Souls (3:06)
3. Savior and Friend (3:34)
4. Mighty Lord, Extend Your Kingdom (3:26)
5. Call Jehovah Your Salvation—Psalm 91 (3:14)
6. O God To Thine Anointed King—Psalm 72 (3:12)
7. O Bless the Lord My Soul—Psalm 103 (2:30)
8. Come Ye Disconsolate (3:18)
9. Lord, Hear My Prayer—Psalm 102 (4:00)
10. Alas and Did My Savior Bleed (3:31)
11. How Blest the Man—Psalm 41 (4:36)
12. Let God Arise—Psalm 68 (3:28)
13. Lord Jesus Think on Me (2:51)
14. From Depths of Woe—Psalm 130 (3:59)
15. Blest Is the Man—Psalm 32 (2:56)

You can listen to samples here, and download the first song for free here.

My Cry Ascends | Greg Wilbur from Compass Cinema on Vimeo.

My Cry Ascends: New Parish Psalms – Justin Taylor

"The Lord is at the center"

The theme running through just about everything I've ever posted here about worship is "It's not about you" [or me, for that matter], it's about Almighty God. Two things happen [or ought to] in a typical Christian "worship service": worship and teaching. Teaching is what the pastor does in the sermon. Worship is at least as important and shouldn't be treated as the preliminary to the sermon. Worship is what believers do when we recognize that we are in the presence of God.

The Gospel Coalition gives us a review by Chris Castaldo of God's Lyrics: Rediscovering Worship Through Old Testament Songs, by Douglas Sean O'Donnell. O'Donnell's attention to what the Scriptures teach us about worship in song also guides us toward principles relevant to every part of worship:

.... With attention consistently focused upon the splendor of God, O’Donnell sets the stage in his introduction, explaining that “many contemporary and some classic lyrics have blurred our perception of God and his work. By showing characteristics of these ‘sacred songs’ (1 Chron. 16:42) within the sacred writings—such as their God-centered yet personal nature, their emphasis on the works of God in salvation history, and especially their joy in judgment—we will offer both a corrective and a call: a corrective to sing lyrics that will not only make us ‘wise for salvation,’ but will also be profitable for ‘training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:14-16), as well as a call to return to the Word of God (the very words of God!) in our worship of him.” ....

From his investigation, O’Donnell elucidates four characteristics that recur in biblical song. In the book’s foreword, T. David Gordon summarizes these points (ix):

• The Lord is at the center; that is, our God is addressed, adored, and “enlarged.”
• His mighty acts in salvation history (not merely or primarily our personal experience of redemption) are recounted.
• His acts of judgments are rejoiced in.
• His ways of living (practical wisdom) are encouraged.

...O’Donnell uses the four above-mentioned characteristics of biblical song to evaluate classical hymns and contemporary worship music. As O’Donnell waxes eloquent about the kingdom directed nature of praise, one quickly recognizes a disconnection between a biblically principled approach and the self-centered emphasis of many churches today. This may be the most provocative part of the book. Thankfully however, where many such critiques tend to sound crotchety and irritable, O’Donnell is refreshingly constructive. ....

An incisive quote from New Testament scholar Gordon Fee at the start of part three drives home O’Donnell’s point, “Show me a church’s songs and I’ll show you their theology.”  .... [more]

God’s Lyrics - TGC Reviews

For a more diverse campus

Even the Los Angeles Times better understands how genuine diversity is achieved than the majority on the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with the UC Hastings College of Law in San Francisco against a Christian group that argued — persuasively, in our view — that it had been denied recognition because it refused to accept members who wouldn't abide by its religious principles. Now that Hastings has won its case, it should take a fresh look at whether student organizations should be required to accept members who don't share their views. ....

Even if it passes constitutional muster, the "all comers" policy could lead to bizarre results, such as a Jewish group having to admit Christians or a pro-life group being required to let abortion-rights activists seek leadership positions. The best argument against the policy is that it actually undermines diversity by making every student group potentially interchangeable in its membership. A better way to promote diversity of viewpoints is to allow groups on campus to define their beliefs — including religious beliefs — and compete for the allegiance of students. Hastings should give it a try.

A poor Supreme Court ruling on Hastings - latimes.com

Witnessing

Tom Krattenmaker in USA TODAY writes about "How to sell Christianity? Ask an atheist." No one likes to feel manipulated or subjected to emotional blackmail, and yet atheists report that much of the "evangelism" they experience does feel like that.

Jim Henderson is a recovering evangelist. Back in his soul-chasing, church-starting days, he began hearing a grating dissonance between his faith in Jesus and the way he went about winning new converts. Henderson realized he was doing unto others what he would never want done unto him. He was manipulating conversations to set up a pitch. Viewing people as potential notches on his evangelism belt rather than fellow sojourners and prospective friends. Listening only to the extent it could reveal an argumentative opening. He realized he hated the whole enterprise. ....

Conventional evangelism is often accused, and rightly so, of "bait and switch" tactics; think attractive social gathering or sports outing that, unbeknownst to invitees, is really designed to segue into a Gospel pitch. Henderson has a fascinating alternative to propose: all bait, no switch.

Call it promotion by non-promotion, evangelism by attraction, goodwill mongering, or letting one's life speak for itself, but this is what will best represent the faith among the many Americans who do not share the evangelical faith. Henderson and his fellow travelers are right in urging would-be evangelists simply to get to know people, become their friends and let the spiritual chips fall where they may.

This re-imagined form of witness trumpets good news all around — for Christians who, as Henderson puts it, want to be "normal," for the public credibility of Christianity, and for all of the not-yet and never-will-be converts who don't want to be pitied or demonized for (supposedly) living in the dark. .... [more]

Thanks to Mike Pohlman for leading me to the column, which he summarizes: "So, how does one sell Christianity? You don’t."

The occasions when I know that anything I did was used by God I was unconscious of any effort to evangelize.

How to sell Christianity? Ask an atheist. - USATODAY.com

"A new bigotry with moral pretensions"

Universities and colleges are already among the most intolerant of places, although that intolerance is justified as being in the interest of tolerance — college students being such delicate flowers that they require protection from views that might cause them discomfort. Yesterday the Supreme Court — in the interest of preventing discrimination — has decided that public universities may discriminate against religious groups with unpopular convictions unless those groups permit membership for, and leadership by, "all comers," including those who disagree with the group's organizing purpose. Hadley Arkes predicted the likely consequence of the decision before it was rendered:

.... If the Christian Legal Society loses, the lesson drawn from the case is likely to be the one that proved to be decisive even though it was never fully argued: that it was indeed legitimate to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation and that it is legitimate for law schools and colleges and universities to make a moral insistence on that rule even if it means virtually pushing off the campus, and stamping as illegitimate, any groups that proclaim openly the orthodox teaching of Christianity and Judaism that has been woven into the life of this country from its beginning.

That prospect is at once staggering and yet quite real, and it is not to be dismissed out of hand. We have already seen the inclination to deny standing and legitimacy to Christian groups at Tufts University and other places. No one with any familiarity with elite schools in the East can doubt that this rejection of the seriously religious is already in the air. At my own college, Amherst, the new students often are counseled to free themselves from any inhibitions on plunging into a sexual life happily free of commitments. And they usually are instructed with a moral severity to recede from any objections to the homosexual life.

The message to the religious is, in short: You had best be silent, or be careful about mouthing your objections. For you must understand, at the outset, that your moral outlook is not respected here. One of my students posted on his door a sign that ran a bar through the words “same-sex marriage.” He was warned, by his resident adviser, that he was coming near the edge of an actionable offense. His offense was to express in public a view held by most of the American people on a matter of controversy in our current politics.

The Supreme Court may produce, in the case of the Christian Legal Society, a decision suitably qualified, narrowed, muffled. But if it comes down in favor of the law school against the students, we can expect that decision to be trumpeted and amplified. We can expect that the “best” schools will lead all others in claiming a high moral stance as they purge Christian fellowships from the recognized life of colleges and universities. And we can expect that this lesson, taught from the most prestigious schools, will ripple outward, spreading widely in the land: a new bigotry with moral pretensions—an animus to religion driven by a religious passion but serenely detached, now, from both revelation and reason. [more]

Vast Dangers in a Small Place | First Things

"We hear about those as just went on..."

Perhaps my favorite passage from The Lord of the Rings is the exchange in the Mines of Moria when Frodo says to Gandalf “I wish none of this had happened,” and Gandalf responds, “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” This is one of Tolkien's themes. The most important heroes in LOTR are ordinary people who, when placed in extraordinary circumstances, do what is necessary. Yesterday Ray Ortlund provided another quotation from those books: Samwise on "the tales that really mattered":

"....The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually — their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on — and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same — like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?’”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Boston, 1994), page 696.

The tales that really mattered – Ray Ortlund

Cloud cuckoo land

Walter Russell Mead reminds us that the times we live in are not protected from tragedy and that every bad thing that happens isn't a problem that has a solution:

.... Brought up in a soft and candy colored consumer paradise, most Americans today aren’t psychologically prepared for a world that, in critical respects, doesn’t live up to our standards. This is only a sign of how out of touch we have allowed ourselves to become: we have constructed a bubble of affluence and optimism for ourselves and told ourselves that the bad old days of existential threats, tragic trade offs and agonizing choices were over for good. Like credulous investors plunging into a fizzy and exuberant stock market at the peak, we console ourselves with the mantra that “This time is different.”

Previous generations would laugh us to scorn. Our ancestors lived in a world of mysterious terrors, subject to forces that they did not understand and could not control; so do we. The difference between us is that our ancestors saw this more clearly; in our days, blinded by the extraordinary scientific and technological progress of the last two hundred years, many of us start with the assumption that ‘progress’ has cured history of tragedy and tamed Mother Nature. But that is just where we are wrong: the western enlightenment did not produce a stable world order in which the forces of science and good government could protect us from every ill. It has produced a wild new world filled with unprecedented dangers and extraordinary challenge. The scientific revolution eliminated smallpox and cured polio — and gave us the nuclear bomb.

...[T]he alternative to living in a world of danger and challenge isn’t the idyllic existence we sometimes imagine. While people sometimes reject and fear change, risk and uncertainty — rude forces that disrupt our routines, challenge our assumptions, and threaten our cherished plans — those are exactly the conditions required to make us grow and to become our fullest selves. We would be dull people, and this would be a dull world, without adventure and change. To venture out on the great seas is in our nature; without this kind of challenge and risk, we become small and petty people.

Neither religion nor the living God Himself is about protecting and sheltering us from danger, disruption and disturbance. God wants us out there on the open seas; faith is the quality that gives us the courage to confront the great storms of life. As Cowper put it, “He plants His footsteps on the seas and rides upon the storm.” That is where we must be, too and in those storms we will need the kind of faith that enables people to feed on tumult, to grow on storms — rather than being overwhelmed and submerged by the tempests and tumult of the wild and woolly times into which we are called. [more]

One of his commenters quotes Kipling:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Faith Matters: For Those In Peril On The Sea - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest

"Write with the ear"

Responding to a request from an American schoolgirl, C.S. Lewis offered these eight rules for good writing:

1. Turn off the radio.
2. Read good books and avoid most magazines.
3. Write with the ear, not the eye. Make every sentence sound good.
4. Write only about things that interest you. If you have no interests, you won’t ever be a writer.
5. Be clear. Remember that readers can’t know your mind. Don’t forget to tell them exactly what they need to know to understand you.
6. Save odds and ends of writing attempts, because you may be able to use them later.
7. You need a well-trained sense of word-rhythm, and the noise of a typewriter will interfere.
8. Know the meaning of every word you use.

Thanks to Kevin Butler at SDB Exec for the reference.

8 Writing Tips from C.S. Lewis- ChristianWritingToday.com

The cult of the Providential State

Walter Lippmann was there early in the history of American Progressivism but by the middle of the New Deal he had come to have serious doubts. The logic of an older liberalism seems to have reasserted itself. Lippmann, quoted by Paul Rahe: "Walter Lippmann on Progressivism," from An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society [1937]:

Although the partisans who are now fighting for the mastery of the modern world wear shirts of different colors, their weapons are drawn from the same armory, their doctrines are variations of the same theme, and they go forth to battle singing the same tune with slightly different words. Their weapons are the coercive direction of the life and labor of mankind. Their doctrine is that disorder and misery can be overcome only by more and more compulsory organization. Their promise is that through the power of the state men can be made happy.

Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves communists, socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come. They believe in what Mr. Stuart Chase accurately describes as “the overhead planning and control of economic activity.” This is the dogma which all the prevailing dogmas presuppose. This is the mold in which are cast the thought and action of the epoch. No other approach to the regulation of human affairs is seriously considered, or is even conceived as possible. The recently enfranchised masses and the leaders of thought who supply their ideas are almost completely under the spell of this dogma. Only a handful here and there, groups without influence, isolated and disregarded thinkers, continue to challenge it. For the premises of authoritarian collectivism have become the working beliefs, the self-evident assumptions, the unquestioned axioms, not only of all the revolutionary regimes, but of nearly every effort which lays claim to being enlightened, humane, and progressive.

So universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. Though despotism is no novelty in human affairs, it is probably true that at no time in twenty-five hundred years has any western government claimed for itself a jurisdiction over men’s lives comparable with that which is officially attempted in totalitarian states.

But it is even more significant that in other lands where men shrink from the ruthless policy of these regimes, it is commonly assumed that the movement of events must be in the same direction. Nearly everywhere the mark of a progressive is that he relies at last upon the increased power of officials to improve the condition of men. Though the progressives prefer to move gradually and with consideration, by persuading majorities to consent, the only instrument of progress in which they have faith is the coercive agency of government. They can, it would seem, imagine no alternative, nor can they remember how much of what they cherish as progressive has come by emancipation from political dominion, by the limitation of power, by the release of personal energy from authority and collective coercion. For virtually all that now passes for progressivism in countries like England and the United States calls for increasing ascendancy of the state: always the cry is for more officials with more power over more and more of the activities of men.

Yet the assumptions of this whole movement are not so self-evident as they seem. They are, in fact, contrary to the assumptions bred in men by the whole long struggle to extricate conscience, intellect, labor, and personality from the bondage of prerogative, privilege, monopoly, authority. For more than two thousand years, since western men first began to think about the social order, the main preoccupation of political thinking has been to find a law which would be superior to arbitrary power. Men have sought it in custom, in the dictates of reason, in religious revelation, endeavoring always to set up some check upon the exercise of force. This is the meaning of the long debate about Natural Law. This is the meaning of a thousand years of struggle to bring the sovereign under a constitution, to establish for the individual and for voluntary associations of men rights which they can enforce against kings, barons, magnates, majorities, and mobs. This is the meaning of the struggle to separate the church from the state, to emancipate conscience, learning, the arts, education, and commerce from the inquisitor, the censor, the monopolist, the policeman, and the hangman.

Conceivably the lessons of this history no longer have a meaning for us. Conceivably there has come into the world during this generation some new element which makes it necessary for us to undo the work of emancipation, to retrace the steps men have taken to limit the power of rulers, which compels us to believe that the way of enlightenment in affairs is now to be found by intensifying authority and enlarging its scope. But the burden of proof is upon those who reject the oecumenical tradition of the western world. It is for them to show that their cult of the Providential State is in truth the new revelation they think it is, and that it is not, as a few still believe, the gigantic heresy of an apostate generation.

» Walter Lippmann on Progressivism - Big Government

Festing

I just returned from spending three days in Milwaukee with my brother. I've been going to Summerfest with him since sometime in the mid-seventies, not long after he moved to Milwaukee to work for Northwestern Mutual. He is now retired but we're still going to Summerfest — not in the evenings when the big acts appear, but from shortly after  it opens at noon until the crowds begin to impede movement. We sit, we listen, we eat and drink, but mostly we watch. Summerfest is one of the great people-watching opportunities of the year.

Posting now resumes.

"We certainly don’t want to offend anyone"

In the interest of inoffensiveness New Haven makes a minor change on its high school diplomas:

All it took was one complaint for the school district to make a small but significant change to diplomas that will be handed out at graduations this week.

For the first time in as long as anyone can remember, diplomas for New Haven high school students were printed without the phrase “in the year of our Lord.”

It’s a small change that could easily go unnoticed, but Superintendent of Schools Reginald Mayo feels it was a necessary one.

“It’s a religious thing,” he said Tuesday. Then, regarding the deleted language: “I’m surprised it took this long for someone to notice it. We certainly don’t want to offend anyone.”

This will be the first year without the language. For example, diplomas from last year state that the diploma was awarded “this twenty-fifth day of June in the year of our Lord, Two Thousand Nine.”

When will someone notice why the year is counted as 2010?

New Haven high school diplomas drop phrase ‘in the year of our Lord’- The New Haven Register - Serving New Haven, Connecticut

Knowledge without knowing

E.D. Hirsch is not a political conservative, but he has become an educational conservative. Terrence O. Moore explains why:

For 60 years or more public school teachers have avoided instruction in what they refer to dismissively as "mere facts," training students instead in supposedly more useful "skills." As a professor of education once told me, "It's not so important that children know things as that they know how to know things." Predictably, students graduate from public schools without either skills or knowledge since, as Hirsch has explained in dozens of ways, skills are dependent on knowledge. A person who is unfamiliar with the basic outline of Western history or the principal works of literature will, when reading a fairly complex text involving rich metaphors and subtle references, simply be unable to grasp the author's meaning. Any college professor who has let freshmen read a Federalist paper on their own knows that these high-school graduates might as well be reading Sanskrit.

Never content with merely exposing the dangerously low levels of Americans' reservoir of knowledge, Hirsch has worked tirelessly to get actual facts—whether stories, historical events, common metaphors, or rudiments of grammar—into young people's heads, beginning with his list of "What Literate Americans Know" (with entries from "1066" to "Zurich") at the back of Cultural Literacy. Since then, he has published dictionaries of cultural literacy, the popular What Your X-Grader Needs to Know series, and, through his non-profit Core Knowledge Foundation, created an exemplary curriculum for grades K-8, supplemented with excellent materials such as adaptations of the more difficult works of literature taught in the early grades. ....

Among the several other reforms presented in The Making of Americans, the most noteworthy is Hirsch's re-labeling "Progressive education" the "anti-curriculum movement." So-called Progressive educators have been united not so much by a common agenda as by their hostility to any form of traditional subject matter and learning method. If only the new name would stick! Hirsch also attempts to fend off the criticisms of the multicultural Left, which claims that traditional content oppresses or marginalizes minorities. Every hyphenated-American group is entitled to enjoy its own rich culture in private, writes Hirsch, but the common school should concentrate on those things Americans hold in common. What's more, he insists that education must remain anchored in tradition, a point that has not always been clear in his thought, since "cultural literacy" could be imagined to shift considerably over time. As he explains,

I am a political liberal, but once I recognized the relative inertness and stability of the shared background knowledge students need to master reading and writing, I was forced to become an educational conservative.... Logic compelled the conclusion that achieving the democratic goal of high universal literacy would require schools to practice a large measure of educational traditionalism.

.... For more than two decades this political liberal and educational conservative has been among the very few professors eloquently calling for a solid curriculum in order to rebuild public education. If one tenth of this nation's professors gave one tenth the attention to the issue that E.D. Hirsch has, the schools would be fixed by now. Until then, we continue to build higher education on a foundation of sand.

The Claremont Institute - The Making of an Educational Conservative

Ruthlessness and conscience

When Christians are confronted with the question of war a few adopt a position of strict pacifism but most make judgments about the justice of the cause and how it is pursued using some variation of ancient just war theory. I used to include an explanation of Just War in a unit of the elective high school international relations class I taught. Students understood and appreciated that there could be just and unjust reasons for going to war but there were always severe doubts about the attempt to enforce rules about how a war should be fought. Paul Johnson reviewing Michael Burleigh's Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II—about a war during which all sides largely disregarded just war standards—discusses the history of efforts to limit the killing of the innocent, in the ancient world as well as more recently.

.... There may or may not be such a thing as a "just war". But we can be sure that war, which means the abandonment of reason, justice to individuals, and proportion, cannot be fought justly, as Burleigh demonstrates time and again. All that a morally self-respecting society can do is to try to ensure that obvious excesses are prevented. ....

People who try to wage war righteously are almost bound to be inconsistent. And recent post-war experience shows that attempts to limit bomb-loads and differentiate between target areas on a moral basis, as practised by both Anthony Eden in the 1956 Suez War and Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, do not work from any point of view and, in retrospect, are liable to seem ridiculous as well as hypocritical. Burleigh's book should be read, and reflected on, by anyone inclined to take a high moral line on Afghanistan and Iraq. And by those who have to take decisions on getting in, or getting out. It would be interesting to know what Tony Blair, for instance, thinks of it. But then he never reads books, poor fellow. [more]

Moral Fog of War | Standpoint

Finding freedom and joy in ministry

Via Internet Monk, Skye Jethani on what makes a truly successful ministry:

Good grief!

Adults can really screw up kids' lives. Why is it that the reaction to a perceived problem is so often at the idiotic extreme? A kid is sent home from school because he pointed a finger and said "bang!" Schools and cities try to make playgrounds so safe that all fun (part of which is risk) is eliminated. Teachers insist on games that no one can lose because losing makes the loser sad. And now, apparently because of fear that someone might feel left out, an undoubtedly futile — but inevitably damaging and hurtful in itself — effort to eliminate "best" friends. "The End of the Best Friend":

...[F]rom Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.

But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?

Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend. But the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.

“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”

“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”

That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago.... (more)

More, 6/23, Jonah Goldberg at NRO:

As a result of this thinking, best friends are broken up. Buddies are put on separate teams, assigned to different classes, etc. It’s not quite the sort of thing cult leaders and North Korean prison guards do, but in principle it’s not too far off either.

The response from across the ideological spectrum on the Web has mostly been outrage and disgust. Among the objections: Why ban successful, positive relationships in an effort to wean out negative ones? Why value the superficial over the meaningful? Why lie to kids that they can be friends with everyone? What about the damage to shy and introverted kids who particularly benefit from having a kindred spirit?

All good points, but it is a bizarre symptom of our hyper-rationalist age that people are forced to articulate why best friends are valuable to kids. For the record, I think removing best friends from childhood is a barbarous and inhumane act, akin to amputating a limb from an athlete. You can still have a childhood without a best friend, just as you can still be an athlete without a leg. But why would you voluntarily make someone’s life so much harder? Having someone with whom you can share the joys and discoveries of early life is a gateway into not just adulthood, but humanity.

The most offensive part of this whole enterprise is that it is aimed at making life easier for administrators, not better for kids. The social life of childhood is frustrating and unwieldy for educators, so they respond by making childhood less complicated.

The End of the Best Friend - NYTimes.com, The Latest Thievery: Best Friends - Jonah Goldberg - National Review Online

"The singing turned them into love"

The Christian Century has an ongoing series of essays in which theologians are asked to explain how they have changed their minds over the course of time. Mark Noll, who is best known as a historian of Christianity, particularly North American Christianity, responded with an essay, "Deep and wide: How my mind has changed," that especially focused on how Christian fellowship, hymns, and celebration of the Lord's Supper have deepened his faith. From the section about the influence on him of hymn-singing:

Hymns did not exactly take on new meaning; rather, I began to sense more clearly why the best had been so consistently moving since at least the early adult years of self-conscious faith. Regarded simply as texts, they could offer unusually evocative communications of strong theology. But the gripping force of the hymns lay in their affect and not simply in their words alone, in the more-than-rational conviction they communicated through the combination of careful writing and effective music. It could not have been a coincidence that in these years J. S. Bach became, as he has been for so many others, a kind of fifth evangelist. Sometime in this period I was also delighted to discover that Charles Hodge, the 19th-century lion of Princeton Seminary who has been so often criticized for writing theology as an exercise in scientific biblical rationalism, suggested on several occasions that hymns and devotional writings from the far reaches of the church could construct an entirely sufficient account of the Christian faith.

A significant bonus in thinking about why the best hymns worked so powerfully at cognitive, emotional and spiritual levels lay in recognizing where these particularly gripping hymns came from. As basically a Calvinist myself, I nonetheless saw immediately that the best hymns came from many points on the Christian compass. Some were ancient (for example, Ambrose of Milan: "O splendor of God's glory bright, from light eternal bringing light"), some were contemporary (Margaret Clarkson: "He, who in creation's dawning brooded on the lifeless deep, still across our nature's darkness moves to wake our souls from sleep"). Some were heavy (Johann Herrmann: "Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended . . . I it was denied thee: I crucified thee"), some were light (Fanny Crosby: "Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save"). They came from fellow Calvinists ("I greet thee who my sure Redeemer art"), but also from the winsome and zany Count von Zinzendorf ("Jesus, thy blood and righteousness"), from Mennonites, Disciples of Christ, Catholics, Pentecostals, independents, and especially from the implacably Arminian Charles Wesley ("Arise, my soul, arise, shake off thy guilty fears, the bleeding sacrifice in my behalf appears. . . . My name is written on his hands").

Such effective hymns went deep because they communicated the core dogmas of the Nicene Creed with unusual force. Concentration on those core dogmas made them singable by believers almost everywhere; the singing turned them into love.

A further broadening effect of the great hymns took me longer to comprehend. With the help especially of Andrew Walls's account of how the once-incarnate Christ has been, as it were, incarnated afresh wherever Christianity enters a new culture, I came to see something else. While the dogmas of these hymns were universal, the music that played such a powerful part in quickening the dogma was particular. Isaac Watts's "When I survey the wondrous cross" remained fairly inert words on the page without the tune "Rockingham," by Edward Miller, or "Hamburg," by Lowell Mason. I might find singing this hymn with a rock-and-roll melody or accompanied by a five-toned Thai xylophone an intellectual curiosity, but it would not be heartfelt worship.

Over time the obvious became clear: the hymns did their great work for me as they were sung with music originating from only about 200 years of Western musical history (1650-1850). With music not from the West and with later or earlier Western music, the affect simply was not the same. Extension was the next step: if I was experiencing the universal gospel through a particular cultural expression, it followed that the same gospel could be as powerfully communicated through other cultural expressions, even if those expressions were alien or foreign to me. The experience of those who could be moved by a rock-and-roll rendition of "When I survey the wondrous cross," or by a five-toned Thai version of a similar hymn, was, in principle, just as authentic as when I sang these words set to "Rockingham." Understood in this way, the hymns were making me at the same time both a cultural relativist and a stronger Christian dogmatist. .... [more]

The Christian Century: Mark A. Noll: Deep and wide: How my mind has changed

Political correctness and moral outrage

Shelby Steele is unimpressed with the response of "world opinion" to the Gaza flotilla incident, and especially the response of the West. He suggests one reason for Western demoralization in "Israel and the Surrender of the West."

.... Somehow "world opinion" has moved away from the old 20th century view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a complicated territorial dispute between two long-suffering peoples. Today the world puts its thumb on the scale for the Palestinians by demonizing the stronger and whiter Israel as essentially a colonial power committed to the "occupation" of a beleaguered Third World people.

This is now—figuratively in some quarters and literally in others—the moral template through which Israel is seen. It doesn't matter that much of the world may actually know better. This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas's recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns—or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel, not of Hamas.

...[T]he entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic; we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past—racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on. .... [more]

That last paragraph reminded me of this from Bernard Lewis: "Imperialism, sexism, and racism, are not European inventions, but European words, without which the evils they refer to would never have been challenged." The West has been guilty of much evil, but also has been the source of much good, and there are few other cultures or societies with the historical standing to condemn it. All moral authority seems to flow to those who can assume the role of victim — and their objectionable behavior is seldom subjected to the same moral standard as that of the putative "oppressor."

Israel and the Surrender of the West - WSJ.com