Where the cool kids are

David Brooks today on a new book by Alan Jacobs:

.... A lot of our thinking is for bonding, not truth-seeking, so most of us are quite willing to think or say anything that will help us be liked by our group. We’re quite willing to disparage anyone when, as Marilynne Robinson once put it, “the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.” And when we don’t really know a subject well enough, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts,” and go with whatever idea makes us feel popular.

This is where Alan Jacobs’s absolutely splendid forthcoming book How to Think comes in. ...Jacobs’s emphasis on the relational nature of thinking is essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now.

Jacobs makes good use of C.S. Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting — a school, a company or a society — there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.

There are always going to be people who desperately want to get into the Inner Ring and will cut all sorts of intellectual corners to be accepted. As Lewis put it, “The passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.” ....

C.S. Lewis: "The Inner Ring"

The Art of Thinking Well - The New York Times

Oliver Wiswell

Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957) wrote historical fiction and was very good at it. Wikipedia notes that "Roberts' historical fiction often focused on rehabilitating unpopular persons and causes in American history," among which was Benedict Arnold. I long ago read Roberts' Northwest Passage (1937), set during the French and Indian War, and his Oliver Wiswell (1940), a book that tells the story of the War for Independence from a Loyalist point of view. From a Kirkus review of Oliver Wiswell when it was first published:

...[H]ere is the first, so far as I know, full-bodied story of the American Revolution from the side of the Loyalists. .... [H]ere we see the story of a Civil War, when we have accustomed ourselves to think of the Colonies as putting up virtually a united front to England. We see in many parts of the country, a majority of the people, and everywhere a majority of the upper classes and the intelligentsia of their day, determined on finding a way out without bloodshed, and paying the price in being made victims of lawless mobs, incendiaries, pillagers, sadists of the worst type, thrust from their homes, tarred and feathered, tortured and often killed — all because they demanded their right to independence of belief in the face of a new kind of tyranny. Oliver Wiswell was a Yale undergraduate, who came home on the eve of his father's victimization — and who tells his story. .... This is no paean of praise for either side. He is extraordinarily objective, standing firm for an ideal, for a right, seeing the abysmal stupidity of both sides, but holding fast, fighting when need arose, for what the Loyalists believed in. .... Roberts has told great stories.... This is his best book.

It is a book I really liked when I first read it and it almost made me sympathetic to the Loyalist cause. The book does what a work of historical fiction is supposed to do. And it certainly makes clear the cost of revolution.

I took the image above from the web. My copy lost its dust cover before I owned it.

OLIVER WISWELL by Kenneth Roberts | Kirkus Reviews

Emmylou

From Angel Band.

"His boring existence and his pointlessness"

Ever since the murders in Las Vegas I have been waiting for an explanation. Why did that guy do that? What was the motive? I want it to make some kind of sense. Stephen McAlpine, referring to a David Aaronovitch column in The Times, thinks "The Pointlessness of Vegas is Its Point":

.... Paddock’s actions are the perfect Nietzschean response are they not? Long before 58 people died in a hail of automatic gunfire, the idea of God was dead to Paddock. And with the idea of God long dead, Paddock has gotten away with it. ....

But as Aaronovitch observes the need to find a motive, a reason for it beyond the sheer pointlessness of it all, is a necessity in our times, but ultimately a refusal to face the appalling alternative, that there was no point. As he says:

There could yet be a true Paddock out there, full of motive, but the motiveless one feels right to me. And the picture it creates shows, in many ways, something worse even than political violence or grudge killing.

Here we are living in a world which scorns the religious dogma and calls out for us to be brave and go into the world alone and out of the world again alone, yet when someone does exactly that, and takes their actions to the logical conclusion of that position, everyone scurries to their comfort blanket of motives. ....

Aaronovitch continues:

The Paddock described so far emerges not from cause but from causelessness, not from a sense of location but of anomie or absence of normal social standards. He existed, and would continue to exist, in a vast, exurban, empty landscape, with no one much to love, if he ever loved. Day after day after day with only himself to please. Stephen Paddock with his boring existence and his pointlessness is what is really terrifying.

Rather than scratch around for conspiracy theories, wasting time coming up with motives, do yourself a favour and pick up Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. That cuts to the chase. That exposes the mind of a man who has no reason to kill anyone other than the idea that he can and it won’t matter. ....

We can’t face the awful fact that Paddock got away with it. Plenty of money, no real problems, no real concerns, nothing in his past to haunt him, nothing in his future to worry him except for the oblivion of death. And if that didn’t worry him, and without a God to judge your actions why would it, then Paddock got away with it. ....

Except...

The Pointlessness of Vegas is Its Point – Stephen McAlpine

Grant

From a review in The American Scholar of Ron Chernow's Grant

.... His overall priority as president was to support vigorously the policy of Reconstruction. When many white southerners tried to deny freed slaves their rights, he unhesitatingly sent in federal troops to enforce the law. When the newly organized Ku Klux Klan launched what Chernow calls “the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American history,” Grant suspended habeas corpus, declared martial law and fought for legislation aimed at the Klan. He was “sure-footed,” Chernow writes, “when it came to protecting freed people. … He knew that the Klan threatened to unravel everything he and Lincoln and Union soldiers had accomplished at great cost in blood and treasure.” ....

The end of Grant’s presidency found him without a home, money, or plans. He and Julia took a two-year trip around the world, during which he was feted as a hero in capitals from Europe to Asia. Settling in New York, he was snared by a Wall Street scam that left him financially bereft. Having nothing to leave Julia, he agreed to write several articles and eventually a memoir of his wartime service. His friend Mark Twain, a former Confederate soldier, realized what a hit his work would be and arranged a highly remunerative book deal that assured Julia’s security. Grant devoted himself to the project, correcting the public record where necessary and otherwise telling the story through his own experiences. By now, he was dying of a painful cancer in his throat, but he persisted, showing the same courage he had displayed in the war; he finished his manuscript only days before his death. The memoir sold 300,000 copies, a huge number for the time. It also came to be seen as a great literary achievement, perhaps the greatest memoir of any American president.

The American Scholar: Triumph of the Underdog - Richard Moe

"It ain't my goal to gain the whole world, but give up my soul."

From a Hollywood Reporter review:

Diving headlong into one of the most controversial moments in Bob Dylan's storied career and paying no heed to unbelievers, Jennifer Lebeau's Trouble No More unearths rare concert footage from the singer's "Christian period," when he toured small venues playing nothing but songs about his new faith. The singer's refusal to perform his hits angered fans at the time, and many critics were unkind to the new compositions. A chance for reappraisal comes next month, when Columbia/Legacy's latest Bootleg Series installment will collect many hours of live recordings from this period. Lebeau's film will be part of that set's "Deluxe Edition," and will be catnip for fans of the albums Slow Train Coming and Saved. But seen on the big screen at the New York Film Festival, it proved something of a come-to-Jesus moment for unconverted viewers as well, loaded with fine performances of songs that fit comfortably in the songwriter's canon. ....

On "Saved," Dylan puts the message across as fervently as a tent-revivalist, his band chugging along like a train on straight tracks. On the rarity "Ain't Going to Hell for Anybody," he acknowledges his sinful ways and puts them behind him.

Though he has six African-American backup singers, this show doesn't evoke the sounds of the church the way, for example, Lyle Lovett does with his Large Band. Rather, it weaves them into the kind of rock music Dylan was already making at this time. Tim Drummond's bass (which cuts loose on songs like "Solid Rock") and Jim Keltner's drumming keep Spooner Oldham's organ from ever sounding churchy. ....

I don't believe I have ever heard ""Ain't Going to Hell for Anybody" so I explored YouTube and found this performance:

I found it difficult to understand the words to the verses — the chorus is pretty clear — and commentary on the song indicates that in typical Dylan fashion they frequently change from performance to performance. Bob Dylan Lyrics: "Ain't Gonna Go To Hell (For Anybody)"

'Trouble No More' Review | Hollywood Reporter

One day out of seven

I've posted these before. They're pretty good.

"The valiant Toad"

Michael Dirda reviews The River Bank, a new sequel to The Wind in the Willows, set soon after the victory of Toad Hall, and declares it "an absolutely delightful book." He quotes this passage from the new book:

Over the mantel, the Toad had caused to be mounted a tasteful arrangement of crossed swords and pistols, clustered appetizingly on either side of a large painting in a gilded rococo frame, of a mighty Toad brandishing pistols in each hand, vanquishing quite a crowd of Weasels, Stoats, and Foxes, as a rather smaller Badger, Mole and Water Rat looked on admiringly from the corners of the picture. There was some sort of thunderstorm going on in the background, and a bit of sunlight breaking through managed to illuminate the Toad while leaving everything else in gloom. A small brass plate affixed to the frame read, The Valiant Toad, Amidst the Fray.

Ordered.

Michael Dirda reviews 'The River Bank' - The Washington Post

"New Light"

A few days ago on Facebook I linked to this book review, "The Great Awakening and the Collapse of New England Congregationalism," by John Turner. About the first "Great Awakening" Turner writes

...George Whitefield and a host of imitators set about convincing New England’s Congregationalists that their prior religious experiences were worthless and built upon a “sandy” foundation. Instead, “the only experience that counted was the new birth,” no longer a decades-long process but now “a momentous event that could be dated with accuracy and narrated with confidence.” ....

Most ministers welcomed the earliest awakenings. After all, they resulted in scores of new church members. Many soon changed their minds. The emotionality, the physical manifestations, the boldness of converts, were all too much. Those who soured on the revivals found themselves denounced as unconverted by itinerants and the revived in their own parishes. Very few ministers managed to hold their churches together. At best, churches divided into New Light and Old Light factions, if not into separate churches. At worst, the tumult of the awakenings spawned a host of fractious dissenting movements. Within towns and even within families, New Englanders could reach no consensus on questions such as, “what did it mean to be a professor, a new convert, a visible saint, or an experienced Christian?” ....

I wondered how this might have affected Seventh Day Baptist churches since the earliest in North America were also in New England. Janet Thorngate, who recently edited Baptists in Early North America: Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists, responded:

.... Initially Baptists ignored or were opposed to what has become known as America's First Great Awakening, a time of spiritual revival led by George Whitfield of England & others. According to C.C. Goen, Baptists opposed it because of their suspicion of those espousing infant baptism, their "isolationist outlook," and their aversion to strong Calvinism (some SDBs were Calvinist, some Arminian, but at this time they didn't deem the difference particularly important). Yet, ultimately Baptists profited greatly from the Awakening because many leaving the Congregational churches joined Baptist churches or formed new Baptist churches. I do deal briefly with the effects on the Newport and [First] Hopkinton churches in my book ....  There is quite a bit of reference (mostly negative) to New Lights in the [First] Hopkinton records, but estimates of how many left the church during that time were exaggerated since many left for other reasons (e.g., those moving west with the church's blessings, to form the new church in Shrewsbury, NJ, etc.) SDBs, like other Baptists, were later poised to reap significant benefits from the 2^nd Great Awakening following the Revolutionary War.

"Reading aloud is really important"

The Five Books site asks Cressida Cowell, herself an author of children's books, to nominate "The Best Magic Books for Children." On her first choice, The Ogre Downstairs, she says:

I...read it to all my little siblings and cousins. So I not only enjoyed it myself but I passed it on to them. That power of reading aloud to younger children, making them laugh and seeing them as excited as I was, I think it’s possibly part of why I’m doing what I’m doing now.

I think reading aloud is really important isn’t it? Sharing a story as a family.

Yes, I write all of my books to be read aloud and that’s why they’re all a bit of a performance. I write my books specifically to be read aloud, to be enjoyed by the adults as well. But also as a performance.... It’s all done to make it a performance, so that it is fun to read aloud. ....

I haven't read all five. I know nothing about The Ogre Downstairs (1974) and although I have read Edith Nesbit I haven't read this one: The Five Children and It (1902). Her third choice is The Hobbit (1937):

The Hobbit is such a richly imagined fantasy that, especially as a child, you can live in it. It is so completely immersive. The Hobbit also contains one of my favourite scenes in children’s literature – the riddling match with Gollum.

Her other choices are The Sword in the Stone (1938) by T.H. White and The Wizard of Earthsea (1968) by Ursula K. Le Guin. I thought it notable that none were published after 1974 (over forty years ago) and the earliest barely within the beginning of the 20^th century.

The Best Magic Books for Children — A Five Books Interview

Baptist

The Center for Baptist Renewal continues a series on an "Evangelical Baptist Catholicity Manifesto" with Article IV, "Baptist Distinctives," from which:

We have deliberately moved in the Manifesto from what we hold most in common with other Christians (the Trinity, the good news of Christ’s life & work) to what we hold in common with other Protestants, to, now, what makes us distinctly Baptist. .... While the canon of “Baptist distinctives” is debated, there are at least five that are readily identifiable and agreed upon by most Baptists throughout space and time: the necessity of personal conversion, a regenerate church, believers’ baptism, congregational governance, and religious liberty. ....

...[W]e should note that while none of these distinctives have theological priority in Baptist life, they do have a sort of logical priority or ordering. An emphasis on personal conversion gives rise to an affirmation of believers-only baptism, which in turn necessarily prompts affirmation of regenerate church membership, a corollary of which is congregational governance. The last distinctive, religious liberty (referred to by some as “soul freedom” on an individual level and “separation of church and state” on a governmental level), arises from the previous four and also provides the cultural and theological context in which they can be exercised to the fullest. ....

We believe that these Baptist beliefs have much to commend them both biblically and theologically. So we do not wish to keep them to ourselves, as it were, but instead to press them home to all willing partners in cross-denominational dialogue. As we have stated previously, we believe that the Baptist tradition is a renewal movement within the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. Thus, we commend our distinctives for consideration by the whole church of the Lord Jesus Christ. .... Each tradition has its own unique gifts to offer the whole church. .... (much more)

Evangelical Baptist Catholicity Manifesto: Article IV — Center For Baptist Renewal

In the sure and certain hope

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
And if I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection. (G.K. Chesterton, The Meaning of Dreams)

From an essay about the phrase "our daily bread" in the Lord's Prayer by Philip Lawton in the current Sabbath Recorder:

Humans are interesting creatures. We fight and beg and steal for control of our lives, but then every night we lay down that control. We trust that we will wake the next morning. But the truth is we have no control over whether that will happen. Every night when you go to bed you have faith that you will wake the next morning. When we are sleeping we are at our most vulnerable. And yet even the strongest control freak will go to bed each night. The irony of that is staggering.

What I realized this summer is that every day I wake is a blessing from God. There are a million things that could happen to me while I sleep and I have no control over any of them. I am quite literally putting my life in the hands of someone else. If the power goes out, I could die. If lightning strikes and shorts out my CPAP, I could die. If aliens come and abduct me in my sleep…. well maybe not that. But the point is that I have no control over what happens to me while I sleep. And that is exactly the way that God wants it. ....

"No more a stranger, nor a guest..."

A friend's post today reminded me of this post here from 2012:

My favorite hymn paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm: Isaac Watts' "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need."

My shepherd will supply my need:

Jehovah is His name;

In pastures fresh He makes me feed,

Beside the living stream.

He brings my wandering spirit back

When I forsake His ways,

He leads me, for His mercy’s sake,

In paths of truth and grace.

When I walk through the shades of death

Thy presence is my stay;

One word of Thy supporting breath

Drives all my fears away.

Thy hand, in sight of all my foes,

Doth still my table spread;

My cup with blessings overflows,

Thine oil anoints my head.

The sure provisions of my God

Attend me all my days;

O may Thy house be my abode,

And all my work be praise.

There would I find a settled rest,

While others go and come;

No more a stranger, nor a guest,

But like a child at home.

My Shepherd Will Supply My Need

Another "Golden Age"

If the 1920s and '30s were the "Golden Age" for the detective novel, then the 1950s and 60's may have been the Golden Age of spy fiction:

Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, appeared in 1953, and Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed — about a Nazi plot to kidnap Churchill — came out in 1975. In the two decades between these two famous books, the British thriller dominated English-language adventure fiction. It was, as those of a certain age know, a particularly blissful time to be a youthful reader....

Their heroes regularly confronted Nazis, ex-Nazis and proto-Nazis, the secret police of any and all communist countries and a variety of “super-rich and power-mad villains, traitors, dictators, rogue generals, mad scientists, secret societies” and “ruthless businessmen.” They were seldom books that asked “Whodunit?” but rather “How will the hero ever manage to survive?” ....

Michael Dirda is here reviewing Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a new book about those books, many of which I read growing up in those years. In the review Dirda mentions many of the authors and titles.

Review Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang by Mike Ripley - The Washington Post

The end?

Someone, a numerologist, has predicted that tomorrow will be the end of history. Russell Moore responds:

.... None of this has anything to do with biblical Christianity. Jesus, and then his apostles, told us to expect a day of final judgment, to look for the return of Christ to our present reality of space and time.

But the key to all of this is the unexpected nature of it. Jesus said that life would go on, just as it always does, until, suddenly — like a thief in the night — the eastern skies explode into light. The Bible verses the prophecy-mavens use to fix their dates — wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and so on — are spoken of by Jesus as the exact opposite. When you see these things, Jesus said, “see that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet” (Matt. 24:6). Upheavals of this nature will happen in every generation, as “but the beginning of the birth pains” (Matt. 24:8). ....

History could, of course, come to consummation on Sept. 23, or on Sept. 24 or 1 million years from now, on Feb. 29. I don’t know. Neither do you. And we’re in good company. Jesus said that he himself, in his human nature, did not know the timing of his return, but only the Father (Mark 13:32).

One thing is for sure. When that day does arrive, we will not need numerology to figure out if it’s here. Jesus will be visible and indisputable. ....

Will the world end tomorrow? Here's what we know. - The Washington Post

The cost of ignorance

Mark Bauerlein on "Camille Paglia's Teaching":

.... The very first question asked her about comparisons between President Trump and Adolf Hitler, to which she replied: “‘Presentism’ is a major affliction—an over-absorption in the present or near past, which produces a distortion of perspective and a sky-is-falling Chicken Little hysteria.” ....

Paglia believes there is a causal connection between young Americans’ ignorance of history and their dim view of present conditions. At a conference in Oxford, Paglia stated again, in response to a student who criticized her and others for telling youths not to be so sensitive and snowflaky, “There is much too much focus on the present.” Thanks to the (presumed) sensitivity of modern youth, Paglia says, students have not had a “realistic introduction to the barbarities of human history.... Ancient history must be taught.... I believe in introducing young people to the disasters of history.” Without that background, she implies, our only standard of appraising current circumstances is current circumstances plus a few utopian dreams. We have so much material prosperity, they think, so why don’t we have more perfect people to enjoy it? ....

Camille Paglia's Teaching | Mark Bauerlein | First Things

"I began to suspect that life itself has a plot.”

In "The Mainliner Who Made Me More Evangelical" (behind a subscription wall) Russell Moore is reflecting on the importance of  Frederick Buechner as two new books by that author are published. I begin quoting with something Wendell Berry said to Moore:

.... “Isn’t it something, how we get what we need at just the right time?” he said. “The right book comes along at just the right time. The right friend comes along at just the right time. The right conversation comes along at just the right time. It’s grace.”

His words left me bursting with gratitude, but not only—or even primarily—for Berry. As I left his farm, I couldn’t help thinking of two authors who came along right when I needed them: C.S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner. ....

...[W]hy would I—a conservative evangelical of the Reformed stripe, a Southern Baptist of all things—keep coming back to the writings of this mainline Protestant from Vermont? One reason is that Buechner probably kept me from becoming a liberal Protestant.

As a teenager, I grappled with a call to ministry, but I was reluctant to enter the Bible-Belt ministry of the time, suspicious as it was of the intellect and imagination. ....

Then, meandering through a local library’s used book sale, I found Buechner. The book was his collection of essays, A Room Called Remember. This was someone who didn’t seek to manipulate my emotions or enlist me in a cause. He just told the truth as he saw it. And he clearly loved Jesus. So I voraciously consumed everything he ever wrote—and in the 30 or so years since, I’ve read much of it over and over again. J. Gresham Machen and Carl F.H. Henry taught me that I needn’t put my mind in a blind trust in order to follow Jesus. Buechner taught me the same about my imagination. ....

Buechner’s appeal to story is an apologetic—one as clear and compelling as Lewis’s treatment of the universal moral sense in Mere Christianity. “Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots,” he says.... “After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot.” ....

...Buechner suggests that having a Christian vision of reality means paying attention to the seemingly humdrum, even boring, plotlines of grace in our lives. One’s life is not “just incident following incident without any particular direction or purpose, but things are happening in order to take you somewhere.” Looking back on his own life, Buechner sees “that very often things that seemed at the time to have had very little significance were key points in the plot of my life.” ....

...[T]he main thing Buechner has taught me and re-taught me...is to be a steward of tears. I found my eyes welling up several times over these pages, especially in Buechner’s stories of grappling with guilt, fear, and grief. “Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention,” Buechner writes in Beyond Words.... “They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”

But ultimately, Buechner wants us to see through our tears to the joy lying beyond. Again, as the writer of plots, he knows that joy is best glimpsed against a backdrop of conflict. He teaches us to feel what it is to suffer with Christ, but then to be held by him—to know he is there to hold us. “Joy is knowing that this is true from your stomach,” he concludes, referencing Deuteronomy 33:26–27. “Knowing that even though we see only through a glass darkly, even though lots of things happen—wars and peacemaking, hunger and homelessness—joy is knowing, even for a moment, that underneath everything are the everlasting arms.” A few minutes after reading this, I caught myself humming the tune to the old gospel song, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Once again, Buechner drove me further into my evangelical identity, not away from it. ....

The Mainliner Who Made Me More Evangelical | Christianity Today

Outrage on the hunt

In "The Joy of Destruction" Joseph Bottum writes about some of the reasons our politics have become so intolerant:

.... The glory of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. And the horror of the Internet is that it allows like-minded people to find one another. Coin collectors, baseball-card enthusiasts, and used-book readers have all benefited from the opportunities offered by online connection. So have neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and Communist agitators. Where they were once connected only by the sickly sweet smell of the ink from the mimeograph machine clumping away on the kitchen table, the forces of anger now have instantaneous links.

And that instantaneity allows a radicalizing more rapid than the world has ever seen. Back in a 1999 study called “The Law of Group Polarization,” legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein suggested that discussion among people with similar views causes a hardening of opinion. “In a striking empirical regularity,” he wrote, “deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.” It hardly matters whether the groups are pro-gun, pro-abortion, or pro-anarchy. With sufficient group discussion on one side of an issue, everyone involved takes a step toward the extreme: The mildly supportive become strongly supportive, the strongly supportive become wildly supportive, and the wildly supportive become fanatical psychopaths.

In such books as Violence and the Sacred (1972) and The Scapegoat (1982), the French-American theorist René Girard offered an explanation for this kind of thing, developing his ideas about scapegoating and what he called “mimetic rivalry.” Against Freud, Girard argued that human desires do not always come packaged in predetermined forms. We create many of them in imitation of others. We learn to want by watching what others want, and we catch desire the way we catch a disease.

More recent years have seen some attention paid to the concept of “competitive victimhood.” A fascinating 2017 trio of surveys by Laura De Guissmé and Laurent Licata, for example, pointed out that a group’s empathy for the victimhood of others is significantly decreased whenever the group expands its own sense of victimhood. But Girard was there first, warning that the idea of victimhood, stripped of its Christianity, would itself become a device of cultural violence, with people competing for the status of victim even as they trample those who oppose them or merely fail to support them sufficiently.

If that sounds like the current protesters—if that sounds like too much of our current political agitation on both left and right—it should. Trying to understand antifa, the Washington Post recently described the amorphous group as a collection of “predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists who reject turning to the police or the state” to achieve radical ends, preferring to pursue their radical ends through violent confrontation on the streets. The disorganized organization could not have existed before the Internet—or, at least, it could never have found so quickly people...to march alongside it, before such leaderless collectives were made possible by computerized communication.

The group polarization of online discussions, the mimetic rivalry to show oneself more pure than others, the Twitterized brutality toward those who fail to show enough purity, the outrage on the hunt for something to be outraged about: The Internet sometimes seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of proving the social-contagion theories of René Girard. ....

The Joy of Destruction | The Weekly Standard

On Constitution Day

Thomas Kidd explains "Why Ben Franklin Called for Prayer at the Constitutional Convention":

.... Several weeks into the proceedings, the octogenarian Benjamin Franklin proposed that the meetings open with prayer. "How has it happened," he pondered, according to a copy of the speech in Franklin's papers, "that we have not, hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our Understandings?"

This was a poignant but peculiar suggestion coming from Franklin, the great printer, scientist and diplomat. He described himself in his autobiography as a "thorough deist" who as a teenager had rejected the Puritan faith of his parents. Why would Franklin ask the Philadelphia delegates to begin their daily deliberations with prayer?

Even stranger, few convention attendees supported the proposal. A couple of devout delegates seconded his motion, but it fizzled among the other participants. Franklin scribbled a note at the bottom of his prayer speech lamenting, "The Convention except three or four Persons, thought Prayers unnecessary!"

If Franklin truly was a deist, he wasn't a very good one. Doctrinaire deists believed in a distant Creator, one who did not intervene in human history, and certainly not one who would respond to prayers. Yes, Franklin questioned basic points of Christianity, including Jesus' divine nature. Yet his childhood immersion in the Puritan faith, and his relationships with traditional Christians through his adult life, kept him tethered to his parents' religion. If he was not a Christian, he often sounded and acted like one.

The King James Bible, for example, had a significant influence on Franklin. From his first writings as "Silence Dogood"—the pseudonym he adopted when writing essays for his brother's newspaper, the New-England Courant—to his speeches at the Constitutional Convention, Franklin was constantly referencing the Bible. He knew it backward and forward, recalling even the most obscure sections of it from memory. ....

As a young man Ben did indulge some strident views and scurrilous behavior, especially on an extended trip to London. But he was certain that personal responsibility and industry were the keys to worldly success. He wrote of deism in his autobiography: "I began to suspect that this doctrine, tho' it might be true, was not very useful." So he devoted himself to a personal "plan of conduct," through which he tracked his practice of godly virtues. ....

Then came the Revolutionary War. Its weight, along with the shock of victory and independence, made Franklin think that God, in some mysterious way, must be moving in American history. "The longer I live," he told the delegates in Philadelphia, "the more convincing Proofs I see of this Truth, That God governs in the affairs of men."

He repeatedly cited verses from the Bible to make his case, quoting Psalm 127: "Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Without God's aid, Franklin contended, the Founding Fathers would "succeed in this political building no better, than the Builders of Babel." At the Revolutionary War's outset, as he reminded delegates, they had prayed daily, often in that same Philadelphia hall, for divine protection. "And have we now forgotten that powerful friend?" ....

Why Ben Franklin Called for Prayer at the Constitutional Convention | TGC

Faith and works

Also from "Answers to Questions on Christianity," in God in the Dock:

The controversy about faith and works is one that has gone on for a very long time, and it is a highly technical matter. I personally rely on the paradoxical text: 'Work out your own salvation...for it is God that worketh in you.' It looks as if in one sense we do nothing, and in another case we do a damned lot. 'Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,' but you must have it in you before you can work it out.

C.S. Lewis,  God in the Dock (1970)

Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. Philippians 2:12-13 (KJV)