The second day of July

John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail the day after the eventful decisions of July 2, 1776:

Yesterday, the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, and as such they have, and of right ought to have, full power to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which other States may rightfully do.” You will see in a few days a Declaration setting forth the causes which have impelled us to this mighty revolution, and the reasons which will justify it in the sight of God and man. ....

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore.

You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph in that day’s transaction, even although we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not. [more]

To Abigail Adams | Teaching American History

A putrid pact

A review of The Devils' Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 provides an important historical reminder:

Seventy-five years ago this summer, a deal was struck that took the world's breath away. Even in the dirty-dealing climate of the time, the Nazi-Soviet pact was a shocker. Hitler and Stalin, who had spent years reviling each other, were now apparently the best of friends. ....

When Vladimir Putin stands alongside world leaders at next year's 70th-anniversary VE Day celebrations, few will reflect that he is representing a nation that spent nearly a third of the war allied to the Nazis. ....

The pact was ostensibly an understanding that each would not attack the other nor ally with its enemies with a trade deal attached. It was the green light Hitler needed to start his war and eight days later the Panzers were in Poland. Seventeen days after that, the Red Army invaded from the East, in accordance with a secret protocol of the pact that divided territories in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Romania into Nazi and Soviet spheres of influence. ....

Beneath the surface differences there was much shared ideological DNA. This was indeed a pact between two devilish creeds. Both Nazism and Communism had rejected a notion that until then had sustained civilisation, that of the universality of mankind. Both sides thus set about murdering and enslaving with the same merciless efficiency. For the Germans the racial enemy was the primary target; for the Russians, the class enemy, a category that, as well as Trotskyists and conservatives, included Esperantists, philatelists and those with "white hands" that had never done manual labour. ....

As the ultimate victors, the Russians never had to undergo the national self-examination and acts of contrition forced on the Germans for their wartime behaviour. There is no sign of them doing so now. Instead in all likelihood they will use next year's anniversary to reinforce the message that it was their sacrifices that ultimately defeated Hitler. .... (more)

A Putrid Pact between Devils | Standpoint

Arrested development

Charles Moore in "The sad business of trying to disprove God" reviews Atheists: The Origin of the Species:

You often meet them for the first time at secondary school. The typical teenage atheist is more likely a boy than a girl, stronger on science than the arts, and at the high-ish end of the academic spectrum. He tells you that he has studied the nature of matter, the universe etc, and can prove that God does not exist.

Already, you are plunged into the thick of the problem, which is one of category. The teenage thinker treats the existence of God as a scientific matter, but it isn’t. Science can certainly disprove some claims that believers make about their God – or, to be more exact, it can prove that these claims are incompatible with science – but it can have nothing to say about something that lies outside its realm.

In the current era of Richard Dawkins and the New Atheism, many atheists call themselves the “Brights”, pleased to make the rest of us out as dullards. ....

Some atheists – Dawkins, Sigmund Freud, AJ Ayer – resemble, in essence, that clever young schoolboy. They believe they have brilliantly proved religion to be a load of hogwash. In their minds, it seems an advantage that their creed does not appeal as much to women or the poor and ignorant. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche saw more deeply how European society’s moral order would collapse with the destruction of faith – but welcomed it. Christianity was a “slave morality”, he said, celebrating weakness and preserving “too much of what should have perished”. People such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler took up such thoughts with deadly enthusiasm.

But precisely because religion, though theologically grounded, is much deeper than an intellectual theory, it tends to regenerate when attacked. The author quotes one Soviet persecutor of Christianity: “Religion is like a nail, the harder you hit, the deeper it goes in.” ....

This leads to the question: “Is atheism parasitic on religion?” There is something unsatisfactory about building your thought around an anti-faith. .... Hamlet says: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Any imaginative atheist must sometimes be troubled by this thought, and worry that his ideas are so dependent on the very thing he opposes.

It is as if someone were to devote his energies to telling people that they did not really love one another. He might be right, of course, but it would be a sad business. .... [more]

The sad business of trying to disprove God - Telegraph

A gift, not an obligation

Continuing with the series of posts at Christianity Today, Michelle Van Loon contributes "The Jewish Roots of Christian Sabbath,":

Where I come from, Shabbat begins at dusk on Friday nights, and ends when the first three stars become visible on Saturday evening. The twenty-five or so hours from Friday evening through Saturday evening are meant to be a time of restorative rest and reconnection with God, family and faith community, I grew up in a fairly secular Jewish home in a predominately Jewish neighborhood, and understood that the Sabbath was a core part of our Jewish identity, even if few in our neighborhood observed it with any consistency. ....

When my family moved from the predominately Jewish enclave to a majority-Gentile community before I entered 8th grade, I discovered that Christians called Sunday the Sabbath, which was extremely confusing to me. How could there be two Sabbaths in a single week? I came to faith in Jesus during my high school years through the patient witness of a born-again friend. My parents forbade me from attending church as long as I lived under their roof, but as I began attending church after I left home, I heard a variety of explanations for Sabbath-on-Sunday: "It's the day our Lord was resurrected", "That whole Friday-Saturday thing is so Old Testament", "The Jewish Sabbath is a 7th-Day thing, and we Christians are 8th Day, resurrection people.", or, with a shrug, "In Christ, we're free from the Law, so we don't need to worry about keeping the Sabbath."

Preachers pointed to the way Jesus challenged those who were too tightly bound to legalistic ways of observing Shabbat (like this and this). Any conversation about the day of rest somehow turned into a Sabbath-versus-Jesus throwdown that Jesus always won. ....

.... When I read the New Testament, I saw Jesus and his Jewish followers participated in the Jewish feasts and joined their kin in synagogue on Shabbat. Jesus wasn't abolishing the Sabbath – he was asking his followers to engage more deeply in the meaning of the Sabbath as a time to celebrate our Creator, and connect him with the hope the Jewish people had carried for a Messiah who would come to usher in the new creation. He told his followers that he'd come to fulfill the Law, that he was Lord of the Sabbath.

But did this mean he intended us to swap out one day for the other? Or view Sabbath-keeping as an unplugged relic of a bygone era? ....

After my first trip to Israel six years ago, I caught a glimpse – a small one – of the delight Sabbath was meant to be for us. .... While there is legalism aplenty in the Orthodox Jewish community about the way in which Sabbath should be observed, there was also a sense of expectancy among the entire community that there would be space each week to reconnect with God and others. It was the first time I'd ever had the sense that Shabbat was indeed a gift instead of an obligation – a gift God wanted to give me each week.

To be honest, it's a gift I'm not entirely sure how to unwrap. I do know this much. I can no longer return it to the Giver unopened as I have for so many years. .... [more]

The Jewish Roots of Christian Sabbath | Amy Julia Becker | A blog by Amy Julia Becker on Faith, Family, and Disability.

"Who is the Sabbath for?"

"Who is the Sabbath for? by Amy Julia Becker introduces a series of essays at Christianity Today. Yesterday's post, "A Day Meant for Our Great Good, excerpted portions from one of them. From Becker's "Who is the Sabbath for?":

...[I]n seminary, I had to write a paper comparing the two different places in Scripture where Moses receives the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5), and I was struck by the differences between the reasoning for observing the Sabbath. In both lists, keeping the Sabbath shows up as the fourth commandment, and scholars usually include the Sabbath as the last of the four commandments about our relationship with God: Don't worship other gods, Don't have idols, Don't misuse God's name and keep the Sabbath day holy. The next six commandments have to do with our relationships with other people and our community: Honor your parents, don't steal, don't commit adultery, don't lie, don't covet.

What struck me though, was how the lists were more or less identical in Exodus and Deuteronomy except when it came to the Sabbath. In Exodus, the Israelites are commanded to rest on the seventh day as an act of adoration, as a way to remember God as their creator. The Sabbath is linked to the other three commands about God. In Deuteronomy, the Israelites are commanded to rest on the seventh day as an act of both rememberance and of service to others. Here, the emphasis lies not upon God as creator but God as redeemer, as the one who brought the Israelites out of slavery. The Israelites must rest in order to allow their laborers to rest, in order to recognize the humanity—the God-given creatureliness—of their fellow human beings, whether or not those people share their faith.

So I began to wonder if this fourth commandment was a hinge command, a command that both linked to the first three commandments in our relationship to God and a command that linked to the following six commandments in our relationship with others. It made me wonder whether the Sabbath was somehow integral to loving God and loving neighbor, somehow integral to my life as a Christian. ....

In the midst of my own reflections, our pastor preached about the discipline of rest. She had recently been diagnosed with a serious concussion that left her in bed in a dark room for weeks on end. She talked about a whole new understanding of rest. And she made the point that on the Sabbath we aren't simply invited to rest from all our labor. We are invited to rest with Jesus. "Come unto me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.," Jesus said (Matthew 11:28). The Sabbath is an invitation, yes, but an invitation not to solitude or self-indulgence. It's an invitation to rest with God. .... [more]

Who is the Sabbath for? | Amy Julia Becker | A blog by Amy Julia Becker on Faith, Family, and Disability.

"They sang a new song..."

Via Challies Dot Com, J.I. Packer:

"A day meant for our great good"

She believes Sunday is the Sabbath but everything else she writes is right. It would be nice to be able to debate the correct day rather than continuing to ignore the blessing altogether:

.... Sabbath...could be seen like this—all restriction and rules. It could be counted as just one more obliging way to pay the cantankerous piper. And maybe that was my fear: that in the practice of rest (and the dutiful effort to please God), I'd only find more anxiety in the piles of the undone.

But the Scripture never portrays the Sabbath as a dreary obligation. The Pharisees, of course, had wrung the joy out of it with their legalistic impulse. They were the first to criticize Jesus' disciples when they plucked heads of grain on the Sabbath to eat. "Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?" (Mark 2:24) Jesus rebukes them, reminding them that by their accounting, King David would have been a law-breaker. He was a man who entered the house of God and, because he was hungry, ate the holy bread of the Presence. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," instructed Jesus (v. 27). Jesus insists that the Sabbath command hasn't been given for God's good—but for ours.

Ten years ago, I took a risk on this: that God meant something for my great good in his invitation to mute, if only temporarily, the noise of my to-dos. So now I don't fold laundry on Sabbath. I don't plow through email on Sabbath. I don't tackle long overdue household or work projects. These restrictions aren't rules to which I oblige myself. Rather, they are invitations.

Sabbath is a day meant for our great good, "the day in which we pause our striving and start abiding," write John Pattison and C. Christopher Smith in their fine book, Slow Church. Sunday is the day we risk on the strange notion (the gospel) that we can be loved and cherished by God for doing absolutely nothing.

As Pattison and Smith write, "Sabbath is an exercise in radical grace: in the midst of our sin and brokenness, God loves us. Our creator God looks down at us with absolute love; we set aside the Sabbath to meet that gaze." .... [more]

Paul Manuel on "Is the Sabbath a Universal Requirement?"

The Delicious Invitation to Rest | Amy Julia Becker | A blog by Amy Julia Becker on Faith, Family, and Disability.

Civilisation

One of the most interesting series I remember ever watching was Civilisation, developed and narrated by Kenneth Clark. I knew a lot about the history of Western civilization but wasn't particularly well-tutored about its art. The series, developed for the BBC, was an instance of what they did best, but, as the writer of "Kenneth Clark - Looking for Civilisation" argues, probably couldn't be done today. Amazon has the DVDs (I don't) and also the book that accompanied the series, Civilisation: A Personal View,  which is magnificently illustrated (I do have that). The book appears to be available only second-hand. From the New Criterion essay about a current exhibition in London at the Tate:

Clark is perhaps best known for his television series Civilisation, a Personal View (1969), a democratic exercise that introduced more people in Britain to the arts than any previous broadcast or, indeed, publication. The programs traced European culture from the end of the Roman Empire to contemporary times. They were serious, scholarly, and immensely popular programs and made Clark famous not just in Britain but in the sixty other countries in which they were shown. ....

Kenneth Clark saw John Constable as Britain’s greatest painter—indeed, as the only one who could be said to match the best of the Continental European artists. He shared Constable’s love of nature and respected his attempts to capture the ever-changing patterns of sky, clouds, and light, which Clark saw as a distinctly English speciality, one brought about by the turmoil of the local weather, in which the sky changes even as it is being looked at. It was Clark who purchased Constable’s great romantic painting Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames—Morning after a Stormy Night (1829) for the National Gallery. ....

It is fitting that there should be an exhibition celebrating Clark’s life and major achievements, for since his death he has had his detractors, many of them enemies of civilization, and of Western civilization in particular. A majority of them are equality-mongers, offended by Clark’s explicit view that the arts are “incurably aristocratic” and that aesthetic decisions cannot be made by a committee but require the connoiseur. If there were a remake of his celebrated television series, the politically correct mandarins of broadcasting in today’s United Kingdom would not employ an urbane presenter with a posh accent and expensive bespoke suits. .... [more]

Kenneth Clark - Looking for Civilisation by Christie Davies - The New Criterion

Not a cause, a pretext

As the 100^th anniversary of the Great War approaches much is being written about lessons that should be drawn from the events leading to that war. From the very beginning of my teaching career at least one of my course responsibilities each year would include the First World War and so, in preparation, I would read more and more about it. After the war the victors decided to attribute most of the "war guilt" to Germany — guilt for starting the war. A consequence was the requirement that Germany pay reparations to the Allies, and that, and many other grievances arising from the Treaty of Versailles,  contributed to the rise of Hitler. Was Germany in fact guilty? Later many historians argued that responsibility was far more widespread and even that the war was inevitable. For what it is worth I think David Adesnik, in "War and Responsibility," has it right:

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, as they rode through the streets of Sarajevo. Journalists and pundits have relied on a few select metaphors to describe the consequences of the assassination. It “triggered” the First World War. It was the “spark” that “ignited” or “set off” the “kindling” or “powder keg” of latent European antagonisms.

These descriptions are deeply misleading, however. They fail to convey that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife were not a cause of war, but a pretext. The Germans and Austro-Hungarians deliberately chose to prevent a diplomatic resolution of the assassination crisis because they wanted to crush Balkan nationalism with violence. After decades of ferocious debate over responsibility for the First World War, an increasing number of historians now accept that one side undermined potential diplomatic solutions despite the obvious risks of a broader conflict. ....

...[T]he true lesson of Sarajevo is that great wars happen because dangerous men want them to. Those men do not have to be monsters like Hitler or Stalin. They may be narrow-minded, reckless, or aggressive like Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khamenei, Kim Jong-Un, or certain leaders in Beijing. Looking back at the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Franz Ferdinand one hundred years ago, it is clear that the preservation of peace ultimately depends on maintaining the strength and determination necessary to deter or defeat such adversaries. ....

...[A]ssassinations were a “familiar technique” for radicals in turn of the century Europe. Why, then, did the assassination of Franz Ferdinand lead to war, whereas “no previous assassination within living memory had provoked a major international crisis?”

The answer is that Austria-Hungary, with the full support of its German ally, chose to exploit the crisis. .... [more]

Adesnik goes on to give a good summary of the decisions leading from the assassinations in June, 1914, to the outbreak of war that August.

War and Responsibility | Washington Free Beacon

Mr. Slope's doctine

A recent GetReligion item quotes from Anthony Trollope's description of a sermon delivered by Obadiah Slope, chaplain to Bishop Proudie of Barchester:

Having thus, according to his own opinion, explained how a clergyman should show himself approved unto God, as a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, [Obadiah Slope] went on to explain how the word of truth should be divided; and here he took a rather narrow view of the question; and fetched arguments from afar. His object was to express his abomination of all ceremonious modes of utterance, to cry down any religious feeling which might be excited, not by the sense, but by the sound of words, and in fact to insult the cathedral practices. Had St Paul spoken of rightly pronouncing instead of rightly dividing the word of truth, this part of his sermon would have been more to the purpose; but the preacher’s immediate object was to preach Mr Slope’s doctrine, and not St Paul’s, and he contrived to give the necessary twist to the text with some skill.

The BBC adapted two of Trollope's Barchester books, The Warden and Barchester Towers, into a seven part, thoroughly enjoyable, series with a remarkable cast. That is how I came to the story although all of Trollope is in the public domain and available as free e-books. Amazon sells the DVDs as The Barchester Chronicles. The Amazon description, which also notes the remarkable cast:

The first two episodes of this BBC miniseries only hint at the delights to come. A lawsuit aimed at church reform in the town of Barchester forces a decent middle-aged clergyman (the august Donald Pleasence, best known in the U.S. for the Halloween movies) into a moral crisis and a conflict with his son-in-law, a pompous archdeacon (Nigel Hawthorne, The Madness of King George). The gracefully written and acted narrative shows glimpses of dry wit—but in episode 3, the arrival of a new bishop (Clive Swift, Keeping Up Appearances), his imperious wife (Geraldine McEwan, The Magdalene Sisters), and his devious chaplain (Alan Rickman, Truly Madly Deeply, the Harry Potter movies) launches The Barchester Chronicles into a satirical power struggle all the more mesmerizing because of the smallness of the territory. The scheming of the citizens and clergy of this British town is both Byzantine and wonderfully comic as the tempestuous personalities claw and dig at each other.

Rickman, in one of his first film or television roles, turns in a tour de force of oily ambition. McEwan's ferocious machinations are downright terrifying, while the sputtering Hawthorne (The Madness of King George) seems constantly in danger of bursting a vein. At the center of it all is Pleasence. Making goodness compelling has always been difficult, since wickedness is always more dramatic; but Pleasence brings a deep and stirring passion to his role that proves as engaging as all the back-biting that surrounds him. And these are just the more familiar faces; a host of lesser-known actors give equally superb performances. The final episode (of seven) will have you on pins and needles. The Barchester Chronicles, adapted from two novels by Anthony Trollope, is one of those marvels of British television, a skillful production that proves intelligent fare can be hugely entertaining.

It is very good entertainment.

Who is an evangelical? Who isn’t? Who says so?

Paul Manuel

Something else I found while looking at old posts. There is a lot more material at Paul W. Manuel now than there was when this was originally posted going on two years ago and Paul has sent me much more that will appear as I have time to format it.

Paul Manuel is a good friend and someone from whom I have learned much. For about ten years he, and wife Linda, attended the Madison Seventh Day Baptist Church while Paul was in graduate school [Hebrew and Semitic Studies] at the University of Wisconsin. During much of that time he taught our adult Sabbath School class. He made me think. He persuaded me on many subjects, and when he didn't, he forced me to re-think my reasons. In other words, he is a very good teacher. And he teaches with authority on biblical subjects because he is a careful bible scholar with the academic tools appropriate to the task.

Over the years Paul has developed many studies and lessons and he has agreed to let me create a blog which, I hope, will eventually contain a lot of his work. Nothing of mine will appear on the site. It can be found here, at http://paulwmanuel.blogspot.com/. Several posts are already up and there will be more.

Paul W Manuel

"Studying about that good old way..."

Doing a search on this blog I came across something I had posted here last January. Alison Krauss singing about baptism:

Politicized indignation

From Adam Bellow's "Let Your Right Brain Run Free" in the current National Review, the primary thesis of which is the importance of a conservative presence in popular culture. On the way there, accurately I think, he describes something of the nature of current political discourse:

.... The Left has always demonized conservatives, and many of my authors have been subject to that kind of ugly treatment. Those who cannot win an argument often fall back on ad hominem attacks. In the past we could ignore such attacks — indeed, they often worked in our favor. But lately they have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Those who dissent from the prevailing liberal dogma are quickly branded as extremists and declared to be bad people. Do you support the traditional view of marriage? You’re a homophobe who wants to deny equal rights to gay Americans. Do you question the economic benefits of raising the minimum wage? You are a selfish Scrooge who hates the working class. Do you want America to establish control over its borders? You hate hard-working immigrants who just want to enjoy the American dream. Do you believe a human fetus has legal and natural rights? You are a misogynist who wants to control women’s bodies. Do you support the death penalty in certain cases? You’re a heartless savage no better than the killers themselves, according to Charles Blow of the New York Times. Do you oppose any aspect whatsoever of Barack Obama’s transformative agenda for America? You’re a racist. Racist, racist, racist!

This is a bare-knuckled attempt to enforce an ideological orthodoxy by policing the boundaries of acceptable speech. The methods used — anonymous accusers, public shaming, forced apologies, reeducation programs — come straight out of the Stalinist playbook, and they are not only shockingly illiberal. They are shockingly effective.

By harnessing the passions of offended minorities to the power of social media, the Left has created a hurricane of politicized indignation that can be directed wherever it likes and levels everything it touches. Meanwhile the general response is...embarrassed silence and the fear of being targeted yourself. This is a key point, for just as bad as outright censorship (which cannot be imposed to the extent the Left would like) is the censorship people impose on themselves in order to avoid being punished with the loss of their reputation and livelihood. .... [more]

There are plenty of examples of this approach on the Right, too, the difference being that conservatives have less access to creating entertainment, most forms of media and, especially, to academia.

Let Your Right Brain Run Free | National Review Online

Joy springs from sorrow

Shortlist.com provides a collection of quotations: "Wisdom From J.R.R. Tolkien's Works." "Proverbs and guiding words are scattered throughout The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and much of his academic writings — drawing on his faith and the vast mythology of the world of Middle-earth."

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” (The Hobbit)

"It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish." (The Fellowship of the Ring)

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” (The Hobbit)

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” (The Fellowship of the Ring)

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and 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 us." (The Fellowship of the Ring)

“Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.” (The Hobbit)

“The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.” (The Fellowship of the Ring)

“For if joyful is the fountain that rises in the sun, its springs are in the wells of sorrow unfathomable at the foundations of the Earth.” (The Silmarillion) [more]

Wisdom From J.R.R. Tolkien's Works - Books - ShortList Magazine

Indian Summer

Not the right time of year, but all the discussion about "Redskins" made me think of this. Beginning in 1907 and continuing at least into my youth, at some point in the Fall the Sunday Chicago Tribune would publish these on the front page. The cartoonist was a nationally famous Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon.

The story, from 1907 — if this is difficult to read (it will enlarge if clicked upon), it is also here

Unilateral disarmament

I probably won't read Terry Eagleton's Culture and the Death of God but I probably should. Jonathan Sacks' review, "Nostalgia for the Numinous," is in itself worth reading:

.... We are meaning-seeking animals. And if we can no longer believe in God we will find other things to worship. Eagleton’s book is a brisk, intelligent, and provocative tour of Western intellectual history since the Enlightenment, understood as a series of chapters in the search for a God-substitute. The Enlightenment found it in reason, the Idealists in the human spirit, the Romantics in nature and culture, the Marxists in revolution, and Nietzsche in the Übermensch. Others chose the nation, the state, art, the sublime, humanity, society, science, the life force, and personal relationships. None of these had entirely happy outcomes, and none was self-sustaining.

The end result was postmodernism, a systematic subversion of meaning altogether. Postmodernism is Nietzsche without the anguish, tragedy, or will to power—all the things that made Nietzsche worth reading. Now, in place of the revaluation of values, we have their devaluation. We are surrounded by choices with no reason to choose this rather than that. Postmodern consciousness, in Perry Anderson’s phrase, is “subjectivism without a subject.” Eagleton calls it “depthless, anti-tragic, non-linear, anti-numinous, non-foundational and anti-universalist, suspicious of absolutes and averse to interiority.”

The result is that we are witnesses to the advent of the first genuinely atheist culture in history. The apparent secularism of the 18^th to 20^th centuries was nothing of the kind. God—absent, hiding, yet underwriting the search for meaning—was in the background all along. In postmodernism, that sense of an absence, or what Eagleton calls “nostalgia for the numinous,” is no longer there. Not only is there no redemption, there is nothing to be redeemed. ....

The real trouble—and here Eagleton is surely right—is that the West no longer has a set of beliefs that would justify its commitments to freedom and democracy. All it has left is “a mixture of pragmatism, culturalism, hedonism, relativism and anti-foundationalism,” inadequate defenses against an adversary that believes in “absolute truths, coherent identities and solid foundations.” The West has, intellectually speaking, “unilaterally disarmed at just the point where it has proved most perilous for it to do so.” Eagleton regards this as an irony, but it is not. It is precisely the West’s loss of faith that made it seem vulnerable to its opponents. It is mostly the failure of postmodernism to speak to the most fundamental aspects of the human condition that has driven those in search of meaning and consolation into the hands of the anti-modernists for whom freedom and democracy are not values at all. ....

Can the West recover its faith? Livy said about 1^st-century Rome that it had reached the stage where “we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.” Such is the degree of secularization among the West’s elites now that religious liberty itself is felt by many believers to be at risk. Having tried and failed to provide substitutes for religion, today’s public intellectuals have no new candidate to offer beyond the present mix of relativism, individualism, hedonism, and consumerism, which is neither elevating nor redemptive. .... [more]

Jewish Review of Books » Nostalgia for the Numinous

"Matilda, who told lies..."

A blog post at "The Imaginative Conservative" reminds me that G.K. Chesterton's friend, Hilaire Belloc, wrote several books for children.

.... In 1896, his first two books were published, Verses and Sonnets and The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts. The latter became an instant popular success prompting more of the same, including More Beasts (for Worse Children) in 1897 and Cautionary Tales for Children ten years later, in which the author’s indefatigable mirth is kindled by the kindergarten army of Matilda, who told such dreadful lies; Jim, who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion; and Algernon who played with a loaded gun, and, on missing his sister, was reprimanded by his father. .... (more)

I went looking for them online and found Cautionary Tales for Children downloadable for e-readers at both Gutenberg and ManyBooks.net. The tales are genuinely cautionary as this example illustrates:

MATILDA, Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death.

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies,
It made one Gasp and Stretch one's Eyes;
Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth,
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth,

Attempted to Believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her,
And would have done so, had not She
Discovered this Infirmity.

For once, towards the Close of Day,
Matilda, growing tired of play,
And finding she was left alone,
Went tiptoe to the Telephone

And summoned the Immediate Aid
Of London's Noble Fire-Brigade.
Within an hour the Gallant Band
Were pouring in on every hand,
From Putney, Hackney Downs and Bow,
With Courage high and Hearts a-glow
They galloped, roaring through the Town,

"Matilda's House is Burning Down!"
Inspired by British Cheers and Loud
Proceeding from the Frenzied Crowd,
They ran their ladders through a score
Of windows on the Ball Room Floor;
And took Peculiar Pains to Souse
The Pictures up and down the House,

Until Matilda's Aunt succeeded
In showing them they were not needed
And even then she had to pay
To get the Men to go away!

                    * * *

It happened that a few Weeks later
Her Aunt was off to the Theatre
To see that Interesting Play
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.

She had refused to take her Niece
To hear this Entertaining Piece:
A Deprivation Just and Wise
To Punish her for Telling Lies.

That Night a Fire did break out—
You should have heard Matilda Shout!
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call

To People passing in the Street—
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraging her to obtain
Their confidence)—but all in vain!
For every time She shouted "Fire!"

They only answered "Little Liar!"
And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

Amazon has an edition of Cautionary Tales for Children with illustrations by Edward Gorey, who is perfect for this book. The second illustration is his.

"If I should die..."

In August we will reach the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of World War I. "The Age of the Warrior Poet" is Paul Johnson's review of Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, a collection of poems by British soldiers composed during and just after that war. Among the 95 poems collected are selections from Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon including some that Johnson considers "among the best short poems in our language."

I would rate Brooke the best of the war poets, and "The Soldier" the finest of his productions. This is probably what most people would have said in 1918, and marks the point at which the wheel comes full circle. His reputation dominated the war years and remained high some time after. Brooke died from an insect bite on the way to the Dardanelles, and his end, like Byron's, was somehow rendered more poignant by his failure to find the scene of battle, and perish heroically. Brooke died on April 23, 1915, in time for Dean Inge of St Paul's to preach an Easter Sermon, in which he read "The Soldier" to an immense and hushed congregation. This was interrupted by a man standing up and protesting against the war, an incident which gave the occasion a heightened mood of drama and helped, as it were, to canonise the poet. Brooke had been buried, on Skyros, the night he died. An obituary appeared in The Times, which applauded his "incomparable war sonnets", his courage, and the nobility of his sacrifice. ....Within a month of Brookes's death, his battalion had lost 11 of its 15 officers, and of the five men who had piled stones on his grave at Skyros, only two were alive when the war ended. .... [more]

"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke, Christmas, 1914

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust conceal'd;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air.
Wash'd by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The Age of the Warrior Poet | Standpoint

“Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.”

Shortlist Magazine collects "18 Pieces Of Wisdom From Sherlock Holmes," from which:

• “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.” (His Last Bow)
• “Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.” (The Valley of Fear)
• “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes)
• “Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.” (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)
• “Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson.” (The Return of Sherlock Holmes)
• “Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst.” (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes)
• “It is a capital mistake to theorise before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.” (A Study in Scarlet)
• “Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.” (The Adventure of the Illustrious Client) [more]

And while on subjects Sherlockian, I came across this in a collection of "stylish book covers":

 18 Pieces Of Wisdom From Sherlock Holmes Novels - Books - ShortList Magazine

"Blessed are ye, when men...persecute you...for my sake."

The current Weekly Standard article, "The War on Christians," by Paul Marshall describes circumstances that need to be given much more attention:

For at least three reasons, the contemporary persecution of Christians demands attention: It is occurring on a massive scale, it is underreported, and in many parts of the world it is rapidly growing.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life finds that Christians are suffering persecution in more places today than any other religious group; between 2006 and 2012, Pew says, they were targeted for harassment in 151 countries—three-quarters of the world’s states. Similar findings are reported by the Vatican, Newsweek, the Economist, and the 60-year-old Christian support group Open Doors. Most people in the West are unaware of these facts, though that may be changing.

A few cases do get press coverage—the desperate plight of Meriam Ibrahim, for instance, who gave birth in a Sudanese prison just the other day. She was raised a Christian, but after officials learned that her long-absent father was a Muslim, she was sentenced to death for apostasy—for leaving Islam. And since in Sudan a Muslim woman may not be married to a Christian, her marriage to her American husband was declared void, and she was convicted of adultery and sentenced to 100 lashes to be administered before her execution. These punishments will be dropped if she renounces her Christian faith, which she steadfastly refuses to do.

Another case receiving attention is North Korea’s sentencing of a South Korean missionary, Kim Jong-uk, to life with hard labor. On May 30, he was convicted of espionage and trying to start a church. North Korea also still holds Kenneth Bae, an American sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor on charges of trying to use religion to overthrow the political system. ....

These events get media attention because they are particularly poignant, or dramatic, or involve foreigners, but our media miss countless other stories. Since the kidnappings, Boko Haram has killed—not kidnapped, killed—hundreds of people, many in the predominantly Christian Gwoza area of Borno State, destroyed 36 churches, and kidnapped at least 8 more girls. On June 1, it attacked a Christian area in neighboring Adamawa state, killing 48 people. In Sudan, a second woman, Faiza Abdalla, has been arrested on suspicion of converting to Christianity, and on April 8 a court terminated her marriage to a Catholic. Iran is imprisoning and torturing pastors from the rapidly growing house church movement, including an American citizen, Pastor Saeed Abedini. Vietnam has imprisoned over 60 Christian leaders. Eritrea holds more than 1,000 Christians in conditions so inhumane that prisoners die or are permanently crippled. In Somalia, in an ignored religious genocide, Al-Shabaab systematically hunts Christians and kills those it finds. .... [more, probably behind a subscription wall].

 The War on Christians