Tiananmen, June 4, 1989

Eisegesis or exegesis?

Tom Gilson asks, in the context of one issue but applicable to many, "Are We Making the Harold Camping Error?" "Camping’s prediction wasn’t his first foolishness, and maybe not even his greatest, though obviously it was the most damaging. He went wrong long before that, when he cut himself off from the fellowship and correction of other believers." Gilson:

Once I met a man in Yorktown, Virginia, who had his own novel interpretation of the Bible. He explained to me that there were five, maybe six other people scattered around the world who had it right along with him. I asked him, “Paul, would you tell me how likely it is that God would have allowed everyone in all of church history to have gotten it all wrong until the half-dozen of you came along?” He responded with a look of obvious discomfort. That was it, though. As far as I know he never changed his view.

Yes, it’s possible that the whole church has completely misinterpreted a basic teaching in the Bible for thousands of years. How likely is it, though? To “discover” a new moral teaching in the Bible requires that (a) the teaching wasn’t there before, but it is now, or (b) the teaching was there in plain sight and everyone missed it, or (c) the teaching was there but hidden until something in the passage of time brought it to light.

For anyone who accepts the authority of Scripture and the work of God through the church, (a) is impossible, (b) is exceedingly unlikely, and while (c) is possible, there’s a strong burden of hermeneutical proof on the shoulders of one who wants to make a case for it. ....

When a novel interpretation arises just in time to make some new cultural practice comfortable, that’s at least a yellow flag, a caution notice, an indicator that it might be a self-serving, ad hoc misuse of Scripture. It bears the marks of having been read into the Bible, rather than being read out of it. To use the technical terms, it looks more like eisegesis than exegesis. .... [more]

Certain Yet Wrong: Are We Making the Harold Camping Error? - Thinking Christian

Independence or slavery?

There are those, even today, who argue that the War of the Rebellion wasn't about slavery but, rather, about Southern rights, about the rights of states versus centralization. Included in Mackubin Thomas Owens's account of "The Campaign for Atlanta" is this, adding evidence, if any more were needed, that that was not the case:

.... Patrick Cleburne, the “Stonewall of the West,” [was] arguably the best Confederate general outside Virginia. An Irish immigrant to the South who had served in the British Army, Cleburne had performed magnificently in all the actions in which he was engaged. Most notably, it was Cleburne and his division that repulsed the main attack by Sherman at Chattanooga. It was said that Yankees dreaded seeing the blue flag of his division across the battlefield. ....

By late 1863, it had become obvious to Cleburne that the Confederacy was losing the war because of limitations of manpower and resources. Also by this time, the Union was enlisting black soldiers. So in 1864 he addressed the leadership of the Army of Tennessee, calling for emancipating slaves and enlisting them in the Confederate Army to secure Southern independence. The question, he said, was essentially this: Which does the South desire more — independence or slavery?

His proposal was met with stunned silence. Those present agreed that it would go no further, but word leaked out. Members of the government were made aware of the letter he wrote outlining the proposal:

Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late. ...It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision. ...It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.

General Howell Cobb of Georgia provided the official position of the Confederacy: “The day you make soldiers of [slaves] is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Cleburne’s proposal effectively killed his prospects for further promotion. .... [more]

The Campaign for Atlanta | National Review Online

"Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue"

In his review of a new biography of Jonathan Swift, James Bowman describes the frequent difficulty of imagining ourselves into the worldview of another time and place. Did Swift really intend that government officials should be expected to be hypocrites about their religious beliefs?

One of the problems with reimagining Swift as “our contemporary”...is that it makes him much harder to read. We are constantly having to abandon our delight in what he wrote in order to get our minds around what he really must have meant by it, especially when he is at his most misanthropic or moralistic. One example comes in Damrosch’s discussion of Swift’s pseudonymous A Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners (1709). In it he proposes rigid enforcement of morality on the part of those in government offices, even though he recognizes that this will produce hypocrisy, which at least “wears the livery of religion...acknowledgeth her authority, and is cautious of giving scandal.” Most shockingly, Swift wrote: “I believe it is with religion as it is with love, which by much dissembling at last grows real.” ....

...Swift often wrote in favor of an outward conformity to established practices, especially those of the established church of which he was a clergy-man, in spite of inward doubts and even contrary convictions. As the king of Brobdingnag says to Gulliver:

He knew no reason why those, who entertain [religious or political] opinions prejudicial to the public, should be obliged to change, or should not be obliged to conceal them. And as it was tyranny in any government to require the first, so it was weakness not to enforce the second: for a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, but not to vend them about for cordials. .... [more]

Dean of Contradictions | The Weekly Standard

Paul du Vair, retiring at 76

I started teaching in Madison in the fall of 1970 at West Junior High School. The teaching staff there was extraordinary as were the students — classes were full of the children of UW profs from the surrounding neighborhoods. At least three of the faculty were past or future presidents of MTI — the local affiliate of WEAC and the NEA, i.e. the teachers' union. Paul du Vair was one of them. As President of MTI, and later of WEAC, he solicited my advice on parliamentary matters and was always supportive.  Paul spent most of his career in the classroom where he was, already in the '70s, a "legendary" biology teacher. He is retiring this spring after over fifty years in the classroom. Today, the Wisconsin State Journal recognized him. From the article:

Du Vair stuck with high school freshmen throughout his career, racking up dozens of local and national awards for his teaching, including his favorite: “Best Teacher in the World,” given by his students in 1982.

He has taught all levels of freshman biology and created the popular, award-winning summer aquatic biology course. It will cease when du Vair retires. ....

Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores, a network administrator, said she and her sisters enrolled in du Vair’s classes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Each pursued careers in science. One sister is a cancer researcher at the University of Chicago; the other is an engineer for Boeing. ....

“I think part of what makes him so amazing and so different from most teachers is the really high standards that he sets,” she said. “He has really high expectations, but he also is extremely clear about those expectations. He gives students a very good sense of self-confidence.”

He left teaching to serve as president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state teachers’ union, in the late 1970s, but later returned to the classroom. Morris Andrews, former WEAC executive director, said a president’s return to teaching is unique, but fitting for du Vair.

Du Vair is one of the founders of WEAC. He said teachers needed a voice in the workplace and job security, and the way to achieve that was to endorse political candidates that supported “the rights of teachers and the needs of children,” he said.

In his last speech as president of WEAC, he urged the union to endorse any candidate that fit those needs — regardless of party.

“I said, ‘Don’t get stuck in one political party,’ and we did,” he said. “And what happened? The other side said, ‘Now we’re going to get you.’ And they did. They got us.” .... [more]

'Legendary' teacher retires after more than 50 years in the classroom : Wsj

For what ought to be

G.K. Chesterton:

WE often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.

And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

~G.K. Chesterton: What's Wrong with the World

The Bookworm

Owned by the Milwaukee Public Library: "The Bookworm," 1851, by Carl Spitzweg, one of three versions he painted of the same subject:

"A happy omen for religious liberty"

Gerard V. Bradley, who is a professor of law at the Notre Dame Law School, writes that the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Greece v. Galloway "...is the Court’s best piece of Establishment Clause work in decades—and a happy omen for religious liberty in our country." From "The Supreme Court on Prayer":

The surprise—and it is a big one—is that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion did not stick to the reasoning of the more limited 1983 case (Marsh v. Chambers). He did not equivocate or dither. Instead, Kennedy authored a bold and almost uniformly lucid opinion that secured a wide constitutional berth for robustly “sectarian” prayers. ....

click on the image to enlarge

...[A]ll of the justices in Greece v. Galloway agreed that they resolved a constitutional dispute concerning sincere invocations of divine blessings and assistance, heartfelt expressions of gratitude for previous blessings bestowed, and recognition of God’s continuing action in the world and everyone’s dependence upon it. All of them agreed that this was a case about prayer.

One might well ask: what is the alternative? Well, the Court has, on other occasions, labeled sacred verbiage “ceremonial deism.” The Pledge’s “Under God” and the Court’s own “God Save this Honorable Court” are examples of language that time and familiarity have—according to the Court—stripped of literal meaning and thus blanched of religious content. These expressions linger usefully because, in the Greece Court’s phrases, they “lend gravity to the occasion” and “reflect values long part of the Nation’s heritage.” ....

The great bulk of Greece’s descriptions of the town’s opening acts, however, leaves no doubt that the Court acted upon them as real prayers, “invo[cations of] divine guidance in town affairs.”

The Court preserved these prayers from practically all constitutional attacks, save when the public prayer organizers act in bad faith. “So long as the town maintains a policy of nondiscrimination, the Constitution does not require it to search beyond its borders for non-Christian prayer givers in an effort to achieve religious balancing.” “The content of the prayers is no concern,” according to the majority opinion, so long as there is no indication that “the prayer opportunity has been exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.” An isolated “disparagement” will not suffice: “Absent a pattern of prayers that over time denigrate, proselytize, or betray an impermissible government purpose, a challenge based solely on the content of a prayer will not likely establish a constitutional violation” (emphases added).

What counts as “proselytizing” or “disparaging”? We know one thing that does not count...the lower appellate court went so far as to warn Greece prayer-givers to “resist [the] temptation” to “convey their view of religious truth, and thereby run the risk of making others feel like outsiders.”

The alarming suggestion is that the only way to display respect and tolerance for others’ beliefs is for the prayer-giver to keep his real beliefs to himself or to offer them as one opinion among many others. But every religious tradition consists of a set of claims defining a particular view of reality, that is, of truth. Inviting religious believers into the public square, asking them to “pray,” and then telling them to avoid suggesting that they are speaking the truth from their hearts as they understand that truth to be, only promotes an artificial dialogue, a phony pluralism, and a platitudinous civil religion.

Greece v. Galloway could not have more resoundingly rejected this whole notion of self-censorship. The majority declared, “Once it invites prayer into the public sphere, government must permit a prayer giver to address his or her own God or gods as conscience dictates, unfettered by what an administrator or judge considers to be nonsectarian.” The purpose of the Establishment Clause is not to protect some empty civic ritual or politico-theological civil religion. Prayer-givers may speak from the heart (“conscience”) in sectarian terms. They may speak what they believe to be true. ....

The most important part of the Greece decision is that it upheld legislative prayer while rejecting civil religion. The prayers it upheld originated outside the government; they were citizen prayers for lawmakers and they were recited in the vernacular. Indeed, Greece v. Galloway could not have rejected more resoundingly the whole notion of government control of the praying citizenry. The purpose of the Establishment Clause is not to protect some empty civic ritual or politico-theological civil religion. Prayer-givers may speak from the heart in sectarian terms. They may speak what they believe to be true. (more)

The Supreme Court on Prayer | Public Discourse

Thou hast turned my mourning into dancing

Jason Helopoulos on "a good theology of Christian death," for we must both grieve and rejoice:

Is a Christian funeral service a celebration or time for mourning? A right understanding of how to consider a Christian’s death will stymie the two extremes of merely rejoicing or merely grieving. ....

As Romans tells us, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). It is not a good thing that our Christian friend or family member has passed away. No matter the benefits after death, death itself is an abomination. Death is an unwelcomed guest. It had no place in creation. Rather, it stormed onto the scene as the thief of life upon the entrance of sin into this world. Therefore, death itself is not to be celebrated. We cannot merely rejoice when a Christian dies somehow forgetting that death is an enemy.

For God formed man from the dust of the earth. Creation is turned on its head as man is returned to the dust in his death. There has been loss and loss that was not meant to be in this world. There has been death, which had no place in the good creation. ....

Martha, Mary, and their friends have good reason to weep at the loss of Lazarus (John 11:33). The Scriptures never ask Christians to deny the feeling of grief–it is a right and holy sadness. ....

However, we should not merely grieve. When a Christian dies we should also be filled with rejoicing. Truly, for the Christian, “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). As a believer in Christ departs from this life they are immediately in a far better place (Philippians 1:23). They are with Christ! They have finished the race and kept the faith (2 Timothy 4:7); and that faith has become sight (2 Corinthians 5:7). They no longer see in a mirror dimly, but see Him face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). The object of their love, affection, and joy is before and with them forevermore.

What glories await the Christian at death. One moment, a feeble sinner experiencing the miseries of this life, and the next moment, one who is adorned with the crown of righteousness (2 Timothy 4:8) in the presence of the King of Glory. There the Christian shall be–surrounded by His glory. A glory which banishes all our enemies. In that place there shall no longer be the experience of loss, grief, pain, discomfort, or regret. Rather, the saint shall dwell in sheer joy and bliss as they revel in the beauty and glory of their Savior and God forever. Therefore, we should rejoice at the death of a Christian, for as the Apostle Paul says, they are “in a far better place” (Philippians 1:23). .... [more]

Christian Death: Mourn or Celebrate? | TGC

"Fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners"

From Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton:

That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light, let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners. .... [Orthodoxy]

Only if...

The highest decorated British soldier in the First World War, Private Henry Tandey, might have prevented the Second World War when he had in his sights Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler. An account of a really big "what if?"

.... Tandey was mentioned five times in dispatches and certainly earned his VC during the capture of the French village and crossing at Marcoing, his regiment held down by heavy machine gun fire Tandey crawled forward, located the machine gun nest, and took it out.

Arriving at the crossing he braved heavy fire to place wooden planks over a gaping hole enabling troops to roll across and take the battle to the Germans. The day still not over he successfully led a bayonet charge against outnumbering enemy troops which helped bring hostilities to an end.

As the ferocious battle wound down and enemy troops surrendered or retreated a wounded German soldier limped out of the maelstrom and into Private Tandey's line of fire. The battle weary man never raised his rifle and just stared at Tandey resigned to the inevitable. "I took aim but couldn't shoot a wounded man," said Tandey, "so I let him go."

Tandey put that encounter out of his mind and rejoined his regiment, discovering soon after he had won the Victoria Cross. ....

In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940), Conservative PM from 1937-40, made his gloomy trip to Munich to meet Chancellor Hitler in a last ditch effort to avoid war which resulted in the ill-fated 'Munich Agreement'. During that fateful trip Hitler invited him to his newly completed retreat in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, a birthday present from Martin Bormann and the Nazi Party.

.... While there the Prime Minister explored the hill top lair of the Fuehrer and found a reproduction of Matania's famous Marcoing painting depicting allied troops. Puzzled by the choice of art, Hitler explained "that man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again, providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us". ....

Hitler seized the moment to have his best wishes and gratitude conveyed to Tandey by the Prime Minister, who promised to phone him on his return to London. It wasn't until that time Tandey knew the man he had in his gun sight 20 years earlier was Adolf Hitler and it came as a great shock. Given tensions at the time it wasn't something he felt proud about.

The story first broke in 1940 but no one gave it much thought at the time.... [more]

I've made a few formatting changes and added the Matania painting from an image on the web.

First World War.com - Feature Articles - How a Right Can Make a Wrong

Therapy culture

What are the lessons of the Santa Barbara murders? I'm not sure there are any apart from the need for better police work and, perhaps, rethinking involuntary commitment. Whether it has any direct relationship to that event or not — and it may — I liked the central argument of this essay a lot:

...[O]ne of the main, and most terrifying, achievements of the modern cult of therapy has been to churn out a generation of people completely focused on the self and in constant need of validation from others; a generation that thinks nothing of spending hours examining and talking about their inner lives and who regard their own self-esteem as sacrosanct, something which it is unacceptable for anyone ever to dent or disrespect.

Many thinkers have attacked the therapy industry's creation of a new and ravenous narcissism which demands constant flatter-feeding. In his classic 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism, the great Christopher Lasch said "the contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious." He said therapy culture, the post-'60s obsession with self-reflection, had created a new "narcissistic personality"; it had given rise to individuals who "depend on others to validate [their] self-esteem" and who "cannot live without an admiring audience." ....

In her powerful essay "The Overpraised American," Christine Rosen said the "overarching goal" of most therapeutic tomes is to teach people "how to love oneself." She quotes one self-help book which advises people to "Have a love affair with yourself!" Rosen writes: "Today's commercialised therapy purveyors all begin with the same premise: Think first of yourself."

The end result is a new generation invited to focus more on their navels, on their apparently fantastically interesting inner selves, rather than on the world around them; a generation encouraged to see any kind of challenge to their self-esteem, whether it's a tough exam, a presumed slight or a difficult, controversial idea, as an intolerable assault on their inner god. As the late American philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain said, the era of therapy has created a "quivering sentimental self that gets uncomfortable very quickly, because this self has to feel good about itself all the time."

Therapy culture has created a new army of little gods made fearsomely angry by any perceived insult against their self-esteem. .... The cult of therapy convinces individuals they are gods and that their self-esteem is a gospel that must not be blasphemed against. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks once said of a therapeutic self-help guide to life, death, and life after death, "In this heaven, God and his glory are not the center of attention. It's all about you." .... [more]

Could Therapy Culture Help Explain Elliot Rodger's Rampage? - Reason.com

These honored graves

Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, "Take Time to Remember" in The Weekly Standard:

.... Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day, is a post-Civil War holiday. It was first instituted by the Grand Army of the Republic on May 30, 1868, “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.” If the Fourth of July renews the memory of the birth of the nation, Decoration Day renewed the memory of those who gave their lives “that that nation might live,” or again in Lincoln’s words, that this nation would have a new birth of freedom.

On Decoration Day, May 30, 1871, at Arlington National Cemetery, it was an ex-slave named Frederick Douglass who delivered the memorial address near the monument to the “Unknown Loyal Dead,” before a gathering that included President Grant, his cabinet, and many other distinguished people. “Dark and sad,” Douglass began, “will be the hour to this nation when it forgets to pay grateful homage to its greatest benefactors.” Giving eloquent expression to that homage, he concluded: “If today we have a country not boiling in the agony of blood, like France, if now we have a united country, no longer cursed by the hell-black system of human bondage...if the star-spangled banner floats only over free American citizens in every quarter of the land, and our country has before it a long and glorious career of justice, liberty, and civilization, we are indebted to the unselfish devotion of the noble army who rest in these honored graves all around us.”

On this occasion and for the rest of his life, Douglass was at pains to keep alive through speech the memory and meaning of the deeds of that noble army of men who gave their lives to preserve the Union. ....

After World War I, Decoration Day was expanded to commemorate the lives of all those who have died in service to our country. Later, the name of the holiday was changed to Memorial Day; later still, it lost its fixed date in the calendar, celebrated instead on the last Monday in May. ....

Take Time to Remember | The Weekly Standard, May 29, 2011

War and memory

Re-posted from 2011:

From James D. Hornfischer's reflections on interviewing veterans of World War II:

.... About 1.8 million World War II veterans remain alive today. That's less than half the number of 2003. When these voices go silent, those of us who write about the war will lose the benefit of living engagement. We will work as our Civil War colleagues do: from documents and recordings and nothing else. What will be gone when these are the sole primary sources is not the facts themselves but the spark that can bring them to life. Diaries and oral history transcripts can let us know a man's thoughts and deeds. But truth is also revealed through tone, emotion and context—and it can be plumbed responsively in real time to discover what was most important.

For those of us who have never served in uniform, it's easy to see World War II as a grand, sweeping drama, featuring actors large and small driven by a sense of overriding mission, all sins and failings vindicated by victory. Yet for the veterans I meet, the war is often about something else entirely. Any talk of it brings them back to a single, pervasive memory sequence: a moment of impossible decision or helplessness when, through their action or inaction, they believe, a comrade paid the eternal price. They can't talk about the war without reliving their powerlessness to influence its predations, without revealing how it changed them. ....

Those veterans who stand away from the crowd or shun the opportunity to speak are of special interest to me. The distance in their eyes shows that they're still in the grip of what they've seen. While talking to them can be like trying to squeeze water from a stone, if you stay with it you can tap something deeply revealing. "The thing that comes out of it is, if you survive, there's a purpose," Bud Comet told me. "You see why you survived. I feel like maybe God had other purposes for me." There was nothing trite in the manner of his expression. This was the considered conclusion of years, the product of the horror of survival at sea. .... [more]

Today I started to re-read the first volume of Bruce Catton's The Army of the Potomac. In the 1962 preface he remembered Civil War veterans he encountered in his boyhood:

...[O]nce, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they were young; everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for death, which did not frighten them much—they had seen it inflicted in the worst possible way on boys who had not bargained for it, and they had enough of the old-fashioned religion to believe without any question that when they passed over they would simply be rejoining men and ways of living which they had known long ago.

.... A generation grew up in the shadow of a war which, because of its distance, somehow had lost all resemblance to everyday reality. To a generation which knew the war only by hearsay, it seemed that these aged veterans had been privileged to know the greatest experience a man could have. We saw the Civil War, in other words, through the distorting haze of endless Decoration Day reminiscences; to us it was a romantic business because all we ever got a look at was the legend built up through fifty years of peace.

We do learn as we grow older, and eventually I realized that this picture was somewhat out of focus. War, obviously, is the least romantic of all of man's activities, and it contains elements which the veterans do not describe to children.  ....

Yet, in an odd way, the old veterans did leave one correct impression: the notion that as young men they had been caught up by something ever so much larger than themselves and that the war in which they fought did settle something for us—or, incredibly, started something which we ourselves have got to finish. It was not only the biggest experience in their own lives; it was in a way the biggest experience in our life as a nation, and it deserves all of the study it is getting. ....

A Memorial Day Look at the World War II Generation - WSJ.com, Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army, 1962.

Order and liberty

A high school debate partner introduced me to National Review. A short time later I discovered the back files of the magazine dating from its creation in the college library. Those early issues of the magazine differed from the magazine today in some of their emphases. There was comment on the political issues of the day as there has always been but also a lot of space devoted to defining what exactly was American conservatism. William F. Buckley, Jr., the editor, was attempting to bring together several strands of political and economic thought and the contributors to the magazine were fairly diverse. Their debates were interesting to me, and fun to read. There were traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk and Garry Wills (as he then was). There were libertarians like Murray Rothbard. And then there were those who argued for "Fusionism," for an approach that reconciled the contesting positions, the most prominent of which was Frank S. Meyer. That was the version I found most persuasive. Those tensions remain today. In "Fusionism As Foundation" Brandon James Smith argues that Fusionism remains the best solution to these tensions and quotes one of Meyer's summaries of the position:

Frank Meyer provided the basic elements of what he described as the American Conservative Position. These shared principles are:

1. Belief in objective moral order
2. Acknowledgment of the individual “as the necessary center of political and social thought”
3. Rejection of the use of the State to impose uniform ideology
4. Rejection of collectivism and central planning
5. Support for the Constitution, and by extension, the limitation of government power
6. Strong defense of Western civilization against Communism

Though these principles were often stated differently, Meyer accurately described these principles as a “consensus among divergence.” The divergences among those on the right are little more than differences in the emphasis placed on particular principles, according to Meyer. .... [more]

These debates in the pages of National Review were my introduction to political theory, led me to books providing a more in depth understanding, and finally to a subject that has occupied much of both my formal education and subsequent reading.

The book What Is Conservatism? edited by Frank S. Meyer, collecting some of the essays, was published in 1964. I bought it second-hand a few years later.

Fusionism As Foundation | Public Discourse

An Inklings parlor game

When the Inklings gathered the usual routine was for one of them to read from something on which he was working. Apparently, when none were prepared to present, Irene Iddesleigh would sometimes be brought out. The game was to see how much could be read without someone bursting out in laughter. David Bentley Hart introduced me to this work by Amanda McKittrick Ros in a First Things essay a couple of years ago and I immediately downloaded the book for my Kindle. I have now also found it at ManyBooks where it is a free download and is described as "The story of a marriage doomed from the first moment by unrequited love."

From a review at ManyBooks:

I can cheerfully say that this is the worst novel ever written. I thoroughly recommend it to everyone who likes a laugh. I re-read several passages in astonishment at their awfulness. She [Ros] has heard about adjectives and alliteration and uses the two devices endlessly. ....

Hart quotes several passages from that book and others, from among which:

When on the eve of glory, whilst brooding over the prospects of a bright and happy future, whilst meditating upon the risky right of justice, there we remain, wanderers on the cloudy surface of mental woe, disappointment and danger, inhabitants of the grim sphere of anticipated imagery, partakers of the poisonous dregs of concocted injustice. Yet such is life.

“Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”

Hart also notes Ros's poetry:

...[S]he printed a few broadsheets for the troops during the Great War, one of which featured her poem “A Little Belgian Orphan,” a tale of German atrocities that begins with the extraordinary line “Daddy was a Belgian and so was Mammy too,” and that includes such plangent couplets as “Just then they raised the little lad and threw him on the fire, / And wreathed in smiles they watched him burn until he did expire.” [more]

I found these poetic efforts, the first being the final verse of "A Little Belgian Orphan":

Go! Meet the foe undaunted, they're rotten cowards all,
Present to them the bayonet, they totter and they fall,
We know you'll do your duty and come to little harm
And if you meet the Kaiser, cut off his other arm.

And after visiting Westminster Abbey, where a lot of people are in fact interred:

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here,
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust;
Royal flesh so tinged with 'blue'
Undergoes the same as you.

So if conversation lags open Irene Iddesleigh, read it aloud, and see whether you can retain your composure better than Lewis or Tolkien .

Irene Iddesleigh

Brilliantly Bad Books by David Bentley Hart | Articles | First Things

"That invisible man, Kemp, must now establish a Reign of Terror."

Another great book available free as an eBook is The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells:

THE STRANGER came early in February one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking as it seemed from Bramblehurst railway station and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; the snow had piled itself against his shoulders and chest, and added a white crest to the burden he carried. He staggered into the Coach and Horses, more dead than alive as it seemed, and flung his portmanteau down. “A fire,” he cried, “in the name of human charity! A room and a fire!” He stamped and shook the snow from off himself in the bar, and followed Mrs. Hall into her guest parlour to strike his bargain. And with that much introduction, that and a ready acquiescence to terms and a couple of sovereigns flung upon the table, he took up his quarters in the inn. .... (more)

Download The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. The illustration, of course, is a poster for a movie version of the story.

"Lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees..."

One of the reasons I enjoy Kevin DeYoung so much is my sense that what he writes is both biblically informed and doctrinally balanced. He also seems to me a good example of one who hears what his critics mean and responds with clarity. For instance, "The Grace that Saves Is the Grace that Leads Us Home." Excerpts:

If we are faithful parents, faithful mentors, and faithful preachers, we will gladly teach with all our might that Christ made propitiation for the sins of his people (Heb. 2:17), that we can with confidence draw near to the throne of grace (Heb. 4:16), that Christ is the mediator of a new and better covenant (Heb. 9:15), that Christ offered up his body once to bear the sins of many (Heb. 9:28), and that we should not be sluggish (Heb. 6:12), that we must not go on sinning deliberately (Heb. 10:26), that we must run with endurance the race set before us (Heb. 12:1), and that we should strive for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12:14). ....

There is no plausible way to read the Bible and conclude that God working in us absolves us from working hard, no responsible way to think that exhortation and exertion are anything other than essential to a life of discipleship.

• 1 Corinthians 15:10 “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”
• Philippians 2:12-13 “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.”
• Colossians 1:29 “For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”
• 2 Peter 1:5 “For this reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge…” ....

If as a preacher I tell you that you can be justified by works of the law, I should be damned (Gal. 1:8,9; 2:16). And if I never tell you to flee from sin (1 Cor. 6:18), never warn you about persisting in sin (1 John 3:4-10), never implore you to no longer keep on sinning (Heb. 10:26), never plead with you to pluck out your eye (Mark 9:47), never let you know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9), never urge you to lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees (Heb. 12:12-17), then you may be damned. .... [more]

The Grace that Saves Is the Grace that Leads Us Home | TGC

Isaac Watts and Joseph Stennett

From The Poetic Wonder of Isaac Watts and of particular interest to Seventh Day Baptists:

London in Watts' day was a city of great preachers, and he and his friends were determined to hear as many of them, and as often, as they could manage. Watts wrote of John Howe, the awe-invoking former chaplain to Oliver Cromwell; of Thomas Gouge, who preached at the meetinghouse on Thames Street; and of Joseph Stennett, preacher at Pinner's Hall and author of the hymn "O Blessed Savior, Is Thy Love." His grandson Samuel Stennett would author the better-known hymn "Majestic Sweetness Sits Enthroned"; both grandfather and grandson wrote on themes that would occupy Watts' pen as a hymn writer. [links added]

More on Joseph Stennett here and both Joseph and Samuel.

"He poured out His fury..."

Drew Dyck at Christianity Today reminds us that God is not tame:

We evangelicals love talking about God's love. Just drop in on one of our church services and listen. You'll hear worship choruses dripping with lyrics that border on romantic. The sermon will gush with assurances of God's affection. While such affirmations are good—we need reminders of God's love—rarely do we speak of God's majesty, let alone whisper a word about his wrath. Among young Christians, this one-sided view of God is especially striking. Jesus is a homeboy or boyfriend. God is the big guy upstairs. Talk of divine holiness is dismissed as legalistic or judgmental.

The Bible, however, describes God in sobering terms. Among the myriad titles given, he is called "a consuming fire," "Judge of all the earth," and the "Lord of hosts"—a title that portrays God poised for battle, at the head of a heavenly army. In addition, the Bible stresses God's discontinuity with humankind. "God is not human that he should..." is almost a refrain in Scripture. .... God is radically different from us, in degree and kind. He is ontologically dissimilar, wholly other, dangerous, alien, holy, wild.

When God shows up in Scripture, people cower and tremble. They go mute. The ones who manage speech fall into despair. Fainters abound. Take the prophet Daniel. He could stare down lions, but when the heavens opened, he swooned. Ezekiel, too, was overwhelmed by his vision of God. .... [more]

How We Forgot the Holiness of God | Christianity Today