Confessing our sinfuness is not enough

C.S. Lewis died in 1963. Not long before he gave an interview to Decision magazine, the magazine of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. From that interview as re-published at Mere C.S. Lewis:

Sherwood Wirt: A light touch has been characteristic of your writings, even when you are dealing with heavy theological themes. Would you say there is a key to the cultivation of such an attitude?

C.S. Lewis: I believe this is a matter of temperament. However, I was helped in achieving this attitude by my studies of the literary men of the Middle Ages. and by the writings of G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, for example, was not afraid to combine serious Christian themes with buffoonery. In the same way. the miracle plays of the Middle Ages would deal with a sacred subject such as the nativity of Christ, yet would combine it with a farce….

Wirt: What Christian writers have helped you?

Lewis: The contemporary book that has helped me the most is Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man. ....

Wirt: I believe it was Chesterton who was asked why he became a member of the church, and he replied, ‘To get rid of my sins.’ [At this point I was surprised by the suddenness of Professor Lewis’ reply.]

Lewis: it is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins. We also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins. Not only do we need to recognize that we are sinners; we need to believe in a Saviour who takes away sin. Matthew Arnold once wrote, ‘Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.’ Because we are sinners, it does not follow that we are saved. [more]

Mere C.S. Lewis: The last interview (Part 2)

"Trust me anyway"

Via Elizabeth Scalia, Benedict XVI:

The sum of human life does not strike a balance if we omit God; in that case, only contradictions remain. It is not enough, then, to believe somehow theoretically that there is a God; we must regard him as the most important element in our life. he must be everywhere. And our fundamental relationship to him must be love.

That can often be very difficult. It can happen, for instance, that one individual has many illnesses ...poverty makes life difficult for another. Yet a third loses the persons on whose love his whole life depends. ...And there is a great danger that the individual will become embittered and will say: God can certainly not be good; if he were, he would not treat me this way.

Such a revolt against god is very understandable; often it seems almost impossible to accept God’s will. But one who yields to this rebellion poisons his whole life. The poison of saying No, of being angry with God and with the world, corrodes the individual from within.

But what God asks of us is, as it were, an advance of confidence. He says to us: "I know, you don’t understand me yet. But trust me anyway, believe that I am good, and dare to live by this trust." There are many instances of saints and great individuals who dared to trust and, in consequence, found for themselves and for others true happiness amid the greatest darkness. – from Auf Christus schauen pp 109-110

The problem of evil

At a site I visit frequently one of the members questions the effectiveness of prayer: "I don't pray because of Pascal's wager, for I do believe. I pray because I want God to listen, even if He won't alter predestination or random negative events. Knowing God could alter them but won't is a tough way to rationalize our earthly intelligence with that of a supreme being." He refers to a group to which he belongs studying C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain and also to a couple he knows who are experiencing great physical and emotional hardship. There are a lot of responses to his enquiry including one that led me to the lecture below by Peter Kreeft, who begins by quoting from the preface of that book by Lewis:

...[T]he only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to consider myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

That is also what Kreeft attempts here acknowledging that answering the intellectual problem may not help those in the midst of emotional crisis. I have always found Kreeft helpful as an apologist and this is pretty good. It takes about an hour and a quarter.

Why do the wicked prosper?

The second season of House of Cards became available on Netflix yesterday. It is certainly one of the best television dramas (The British original, also available on Netflix, was good, too). Netflix makes the entire season of an original series available all at once — I am already up to episode eight out of thirteen. Frank Underwood (F.U.) continues his rise to greater political power completely unrestrained by any moral consideration. If you prefer drama that is morally uplifting this isn't it—although it does make vice repellant. I liked what Jordan Ballor had to say about the series in House of Cards: One Righteous Man:

.... The prophet Jeremiah lamented the apparent flourishing of evildoers, asking of God, “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” (Jer 12:1). Underwood’s career in the first season has been one of prospering, at least in terms of political fortunes and influence, even if it hasn’t been the most restful of sessions for the veteran congressman. Indeed, Underwood is like the wicked of the psalmist’s complaint, who “day and night prowl about” on the walls of the city without rest (Ps. 55:10), one of “those who are bloodthirsty, in whose hands are wicked schemes, whose right hands are full of bribes” (Ps. 26:10). ....

In House of Cards, we have yet to see a character whom Underwood cannot find some way to cajole, coerce, or otherwise corrupt into serving his purposes. Frank can seemingly always find some way to extort or deceive. Everyone can be manipulated; everyone has weaknesses that can be exploited.

Frank Underwood has bought in to a fatal conceit: that seeking power to dominate and control others fulfills us and makes us strong. But as Augustine puts it, this is a basic “falsehood,” that “we commit sin so that things may go well with us, and, instead, they go ill with us. Or we sin so that we may fare better, and, instead, we fare worse.” Frank will ultimately be left with what Augustine observed about the fallen world, that “every disordered soul is its own punishment.”

The iniquity of the city of man on full display in House of Cards leaves us wondering whether there is even one righteous man for whom the city might be spared. .... [more]

‘House of Cards’: One Righteous Man | The American Culture

Inerrancy and the age of the earth

C Michael Patton lists "Six Factors that Do Not Affect Inerrancy." His post attracted my attention because of a discussion several of my friends have been having on Facebook (provoked by another of my postings). Patton's second point:

2. Speaking According to Cultural Convenience

Sometimes the Bible speaks in accordance with cultural understanding without any attempt to correct that understanding. For example, in Mark 4:31, Christ claims that the mustard seed is the smallest seed in all the earth. This does not necessarily mean that if agricultural science ever found a seed that was smaller (and they have), Christ was wrong. Christ could have just been making a statement that was in concert with the cultural understanding of the day without making a objective universal claim about this seed. The mustard seed was the smallest seed that these Palestinian farmers knew of.

While I don’t have any strong convictions about the age of the earth or how literal[ly] we should take the early chapters of Genesis, it is quite possible that much of what is being said is one of cultural convenience. This does not affect inerrancy, but is a matter of one’s hermeneutics (rules of interpretation). .... [more]

Six Factors that Do Not Affect Inerrancy | Parchment and Pen

Lincoln's birthday

From last Feb 12:

"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Once upon a time we celebrated the birthdays of our greatest Presidents on the anniversary of the actual day upon which each was born. Today is the birth day of Abraham Lincoln. And, appropriately, today I received the March issue of First Things with an article by Andrew Ferguson, "Lincoln and the Will of God," which they have made available online. Ferguson, of course, is the author of Land of Lincoln, a book about the meaning of Lincoln to Americans as much as about Lincoln himself. From the article:

.... For generations, Americans have liked to say they wanted their children to be like Lincoln: principled, resolute, patient, kind. But what we’ve really wanted is for Lincoln to be like us, whoever we are.

Nowhere has the appropriation been as relentless as in the matters of religion and Lincoln’s spiritual life. Mary Baker Eddy claimed the martyred president as an early proponent of Christian Science, though her discovery of Divine Healing came a year after his death. In the early 1900s, the California guru Paramahansa Yogananda announced that Lincoln had once been a yogi in the Himalayas.

Closer to earth, the evangelizing atheist Robert Ingersoll tagged him as a model of the freethinking skeptic, and the founders of the Ethical Culture Society agreed. In the 1920s, Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago asserted that Lincoln—who was reared by Baptists, married by an Episcopalian, and subjected in his adulthood to endless hours sitting in straight-backed pews being preached at by Presbyterians—was nevertheless a man of closeted Catholic faith, who delighted in laying out an altar for Mass whenever his Catholic aunt came to visit.

Not every attempt to enlist Lincoln is far-fetched, of course, and a good deal of energy has been expended in simply trying to figure out what religious convictions Lincoln held, if any. [....]

“I don’t know anything about Lincoln’s religion,” a longtime friend, David Davis, remarked after Lincoln’s death, “and I don’t believe anybody knows anything about it.” Though Davis’ skepticism should give pause to more historians than it has, he overstated the case. We will never know for sure whether Lincoln held orthodox Christian beliefs, whether he believed in the Trinity, the divinity of Christ or his resurrection, the life everlasting, the forgiveness of sins, the inerrant word of God as revealed in the Old Testament or the New.

But perhaps the country has benefited from not knowing. The uncertainty has made Lincoln our common property, whoever we are, from Robert Ingersoll to Cardinal Mundelein to Nettie Maynard. It may be indeed that Lincoln’s is the only kind of religious expression that will travel in a free country like ours. His religion has lasted a century and a half and has appealed to believers of all kinds, and to skeptics too, exactly because of its generality. Yet it still means something definable and concrete: The country, Lincoln believed, is the carrier of a precious cargo, a proposition that is the timeless human truth, and the survival of this principle will always be of providential importance. We assent to Lincoln’s creed, wide open as it is, when we think of ourselves as Americans. [more]

FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life

"A brain like a peahen"

Kevin DeYoung has been reading Wodehouse again:

P.G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit [1954] – A sheer delight. To wit: “All this nonsense you have been talking, trying to reconcile me and D’Arcy. Not that I don’t admire you for it. I think it’s rather wonderful of you. But then everybody says that, though you have a brain like a peahen, you’re the soul of kindness and generosity.” To which Bertie muses: “Well, I was handicapped here by the fact that, never having met a peahen, I was unable to estimate the quality of these fowls’ intelligence, but she had spoken as if they were a bit short of the grey matter, and I was about to ask her who the hell she meant by ‘everybody’, when she resumed.”

Book Briefs – Kevin DeYoung

Is atheism irrational?

Alvin Plantinga, in an interview printed in the New York Times, argues that atheism is irrational. The entire interview is interesting. A few excerpts from Plantinga's responses:

...[L]ack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence. ....

.... I don’t think arguments are needed for rational belief in God. In this regard belief in God is like belief in other minds, or belief in the past. Belief in God is grounded in experience, or in the sensus divinitatis, John Calvin’s term for an inborn inclination to form beliefs about God in a wide variety of circumstances.

Nevertheless, I think there are a large number — maybe a couple of dozen — of pretty good theistic arguments. None is conclusive, but each, or at any rate the whole bunch taken together, is about as strong as philosophical arguments ordinarily get. ....

Some atheists seem to think that a sufficient reason for atheism is the fact (as they say) that we no longer need God to explain natural phenomena — lightning and thunder for example. We now have science.

As a justification of atheism, this is pretty lame. We no longer need the moon to explain or account for lunacy; it hardly follows that belief in the nonexistence of the moon (a-moonism?) is justified. A-moonism on this ground would be sensible only if the sole ground for belief in the existence of the moon was its explanatory power with respect to lunacy. (And even so, the justified attitude would be agnosticism with respect to the moon, not a-moonism.) The same thing goes with belief in God: Atheism on this sort of basis would be justified only if the explanatory power of theism were the only reason for belief in God. And even then, agnosticism would be the justified attitude, not atheism. ....[more]

(Added on 2/12) David Berlinski, mathematician, philosopher, and agnostic:

.... Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?

Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?

Dead on. .... [more]

Is Atheism Irrational? - NYTimes.com, Some Questions from David Berlinksi about Scientism

"That Hideous Strength"

Suzannah thinks That Hideous Strength is one of the best of C.S. Lewis's books and one that she might recommend first:

...[I]f there's one CS Lewis book I highly recommend everyone to read, it would be this one (perhaps even above Till We Have Faces). That Hideous Strength is, admittedly, an odd book. But it may be Lewis's most relevant. It's a book about statism, revolution, perversion, bureaucracy, modern education, scientific materialism, and transhumanism pitted against what one hapless character comes to call "the Straight": Christianity, beauty, freedom, morality, law.

Mark and Jane Studdock have been married six months when Mark, a sociologist at a small university, finds himself (almost by mistake, but driven by an insatiable desire to join the In Crowd) recruited by the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or NICE for short, a kind of nationalised scientific research body--or so they claim. .... [more]

I haven't read that book for decades. Perhaps it is time to re-read.

Vintage Novels: The Cosmic Trilogy 3: That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis

Hollow men

From a critical review at The University Bookman of what looks to be an interesting book: The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief by George Marsden:

Randall Jarrell once observed that “The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” The same could be said of intellectuals in the United States in the 1950s. Liberal intellectuals in that era criticized the American people for their bovine conformity, gross materialism (all the tail-fins and chrome on those wastefully big cars!), and lack of appetite for thoroughgoing social transformation. ....

...[A]lthough Marsden credits the intellectual elites of the ’50s for their perceptiveness in realizing that American culture was in crisis, he rebukes them for lacking any adequate remedies for the coming upheaval, and indeed for having done much to bring it on.

More particularly, Marsden declares that the characteristic outlook of 1950s moderate-to-liberal intellectuals can be understood as “latter-day efforts to sustain the ends of the American enlightenment, but without that enlightenment’s intellectual means.” ....

The 1950s intellectuals shared the founders’ reverence for science and the individual, but not their belief in natural laws, established by a Creator, that constituted self-evident principles apprehensible through reason. The liberal culture of the 1950s therefore had no adequate criteria for determining “the good,” and so in Marsden’s view its efforts to sustain a humane, progressive public consensus were bound to fail. ....

Marsden perceptively observes that Martin Luther King Jr., unlike most liberal proponents of civil rights, did believe in a God-given order and moral laws that could be comprehended by all men and women. .... [more]

The University Bookman: Hollow Men and the Search for a Workable Pluralism

Raffles

E.W. Hornung was Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law. He also ventured into fiction involving crime and detection but, unlike Sherlock Holmes, his protagonist, A.J. Raffles, was a criminal. Wikipedia describes Raffles:

Raffles and Bunny are men-about-town who also commit burglaries. Raffles is a famous gentleman cricketer, a marvellous spin bowler who is often invited to social events that would be out of his reach otherwise. "I was asked about for my cricket", he comments after this period is over. It ends when they are caught and exposed on an ocean voyage while attempting another theft; Raffles dives overboard and is presumed drowned. These stories were collected in The Amateur Cracksman. Other stories set in this period, written after Raffles had been "killed off" were collected in A Thief in the Night.

The second phase begins some time later when Bunny – having served a prison sentence – is summoned to the house of a rich invalid. This turns out to be Raffles himself, back in England in disguise. Then begins their "professional" period, exiled from Society, in which they are straightforward thieves trying to earn a living while keeping Raffles's identity a secret. ....

Both books are available, free, for Kindle or other electronic formats at ManyBooks: The Amateur Cracksman and A Thief in the Night. In 1930 Ronald Colman played the character in a film that was remade in 1939 starring David Niven.

"These things I remember, as I pour out my soul..."

Jared Wilson:

It strikes me as I read through Psalm 42 — as I frequently do — how crucial memory is to the process of faith in the midst of difficulty or depression. “These things I remember…” the psalmist says in verse 4. When God allows affliction, it is important to remember his historic faithfulness.

There is a reason the Israelites filled the ark of the covenant with mementos of God’s faithfulness, and it’s not because they were magic talismans.

When you are stuck, deep, despondent, or in despair, think back to what God has delivered you from in difficult times past. Remember how he has never really failed you. Remember your way all the way back to Mount Calvary and the empty tomb. Remembering God’s historic faithfulness is the first step in enjoying his present faithfulness to you, even if you don’t feel it. ....

Remembering is the First Change – Gospel Driven Church

Good books

Suzannah Rountree of "In Which I Read Vintage Novels" has created an index of all her reviews and essays organized alphabetically by the author reviewed. She writes good, informative, reviews of books—usually books she likes—often books that have fallen out of fashion—responding to them from within a Christian perspective. Most of them are from the 19^th and early to mid 20^th centuries. I invariably like what she has to say about authors I know, like Lewis, Tolkien, Buchan, Chesterton, Wodehouse, etc., and consequently have confidence in her judgement when she writes about those less familiar to me. Her "Review Index" is here.

C.S. Lewis and politics

Micah Watson, in an essay about C.S. Lewis and politics, reminds us that he wasn't particularly obsessed with current political events and, indeed, thought there were far more important things on which to concentrate:

Lewis was known to avoid and indeed disdain newspapers. He turned down an honorary recognition from Winston Churchill so as to avoid encouraging those who would dismiss him as politically partisan. He did not keep up with the latest political news, and I suspect he would find our twenty-four-hour news cycle and social media conglomerate a particularly modern abomination. ....

In his sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis reminds us that human beings have an eternal destiny, whether of unimaginable joy or abject horror and misery. In contrast, the lives of governments, businesses, cultures and even taxes have the lifespan of gnats. Governments are temporary, people are eternal. ....

Nevertheless, in that essay "The Political and Apolitical C.S. Lewis," Watson identifies "four lessons that remain salient for contemporary Christian thinking about politics." I like what Watson did here and—as almost always with lessons derived from CSL—I agree. I have excerpted and added emphasis:

The first lesson is that politics is not everything, nor is it nothing. Lewis noted that the people who did the most for this world are those who had their minds most on the next. This world has a built-in purpose; history has a direction to it that leads to God and a coming reality that frames everything we do in this already-but-not-yet phase of life. .... Politics is one of these second things, as it is a practice necessary to protect and promote the good earthly gifts God has provided. ....

Men and women are made in God’s image, and destined to a future existence that dwarfs this earthly sojourn. At the same time, human beings are fallen. These bedrock truths about the human condition limit the scope of government.

Lewis supported democracy, he wrote in his essay “Equality,” because he believed in the Fall. ...Lewis wrote that human beings are so fallen that they cannot be trusted with untrammeled power, and democracy, for all its faults, better checks this dynamic than other systems. ....

Lewis believed that while God revealed political ends, or goals, in the Bible, He did not usually prescribe the specific means to achieve these ends. God tells us to feed the hungry but leaves it up to us to learn how to cook. ....

The best Christian political thought and action will be accomplished, then, not by clergy per se but by Christians engaged in the practice of politics...

In an essay titled “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” Lewis considers the dangers of conflating Christian involvement in politics with a formal Christian party.... The problem is that politics is, in part, about means to achieve ends, and Christians can and do disagree in good faith about the best means. ....

Lewis did not think retreating from the public square was an option. “The practical problem of Christian politics is not that of drawing up schemes for a Christian society...but that of living as innocently as we can with unbelieving fellow-subjects under unbelieving rulers who will never be perfectly wise and good and who will sometimes be very wicked and very foolish.” .... (more)

The Political and Apolitical C.S. Lewis | Canon and Culture

The sadness of a romantic

From Barton Gingerich's "An Alternative to the Celebrity Pastor,":

.... Some churches today assert that a pastor should be an enthusiastic, extroverted purveyor of hilarity, therapy, success, or optimistic activism. These pastors are supposed to be casual, invested with “big dreams” to do “big things for God,” handy at enabling a good time during congregational worship, “innovative” with outreach (i.e. the kids find the pastor sufficiently hip), and—perhaps most important of all—adept in the vocabulary of self-help and therapy. ....

Gingerich offers another—more authentic—approach, described by George Herbert (1593-1633) in The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life:

.... According to Herbert, parsons should expect to see and experience much misery because sin is real and people are in need. These are the two realities that cause sadness. Of course, this sort of knowledge regarding the congregation only comes by a certain level of pastoral intimacy—of presence in a parishioner’s life that sees beyond the image that people often project to the state of their soul. If a priest is sad, it should be the sadness of one who knows things should be right and are not. It is the sadness of a romantic. ....

.... Churches with a ringmaster for a pastor need to look at what they are grounded in—all too often, it is good times and pleasant sensibilities. One wonders if that is enough for a human life in common with others, much less a Christian life in the Body of Christ. The grave parson will instead be much less open to ecclesiastical jinks and more concentrated on helping his congregation to conform more fully to the image of Christ. Of course, because dying to self can become a brutal endeavor, Herbert explicitly warns against “perpetual severity,” a phenomenon one can find in Christians who unhealthily dwell on their sin, forgetting that a Christian’s new primary identity is “saint,” not “sinner.” Christians should not delight in crying at their sinfulness; it indicates that they take themselves too seriously! Herbert tells pastors to embrace genuine joviality and joy. This is why he thinks a parson should “refresh” himself and condescend “to humane frailties both in himselfe and others; and intermingles some mirth in his discourses occasionally, according to the pulse of the hearer.” .... [more]

CCEL makes The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life available here.

An Alternative to the Celebrity Pastor | Center For A Just Society

Bach

Via Justin Taylor, from the BBC, John Eliot Gardiner on Johann Sebastian Bach (90 minutes):


Gardiner is author of Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

Why is there not nothing?

In the current National Review Nicholas Frankovich responds to a letter from an atheist critical of something Frankovich had written earlier:

...[Y]ou can’t refute theism unless you understand it first, and to understand it, you have to start at the logical beginning, with the so-called God of the philosophers. Clear your mind of preconceptions. No, the most fundamental theological precept is not that “there exists God, creator of the universe.” It’s that the mystery of being is irreducible, absolutely immune to attempts at demystification. Now stop right there. Dwell on that thought for a moment. Think slowly. The closest thing that the question “Why is there not nothing?” has to an answer is the wonder that it elicits in you when you ponder it. Then stop again. This is what theists mean by theism. Many avowed atheists accept it too, except when it comes with the label “God” attached to it. That’s all. Granted, if you’re anhedonic in these matters, you won’t experience that wonder. You’ll shrug where others marvel. That does not, however, prevent you from grasping classical theism at least intellectually. Unless it does.

National Review, February 10, 2014, p. 2.

Good people and bad people

The governor of New York State last week on Republican candidates in his state:

Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

Governor Cuomo was soon walking back the statement but his intolerance sounds familiar to many of us who live in a liberal environment. Jonathan Haidt's research may be helpful in understanding liberal lack of empathy for those with whom they disagree:

.... One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”—and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this. .... [more]

Of course these are generalizations and I know quite a few liberals who behave as though they don't think I'm evil.

Jonathan Haidt on Psychology and Politics | The Volokh ConspiracyThe Volokh Conspiracy

Civil religion

From an interview with historian Thomas Kidd:

Some Christians who are also great admirers of the American founding generation are also tempted to fashion the Founding Fathers as exemplary saints, too. This is even more problematic, not only because the Founders weren't all perfect Christians (and, in some cases, weren't Christians at all), but it can turn them into heroes of a quasi-Christian patriotic faith. American civil religion is dangerous and something Christians should avoid, no matter how much they admire the founding generation's accomplishments. Admitting that someone like George Washington was imperfect (he owned slaves and refused to take communion at church, for example) is not only honest, but it helps us remember that all humans, no matter how noble, are flawed by sin and the limits of our culture. ....

...[I]t is sobering to remember that, one day, America will cease to exist, while the Kingdom of God will go on forever. In heaven, my identity as an American will likely have very little significance at all, as the great throng composed of people from every "tribe, tongue, and nation" will set aside their ethnic, racial, and historical differences. .... [more]

Friday Five Interview: Thomas S. Kidd | PARSE

Pooh and Piglet

Some quotations from Winnie-The-Pooh:

“'We'll be Friends Forever, won't we, Pooh?' asked Piglet. Even longer,' Pooh answered.”

“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.”

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.”

“Piglet noticed that even though he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.”

14 Heartbreakingly Adorable Quotes From Winnie-The-Pooh