Blue Empires

I've been grading a lot of papers recently about the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it seems to me that the empire was not on the brink of social, moral, or spiritual collapse. Edward Gibbon had argued that Christianity had contributed to an otherworldliness that made the Romans militarily and economically absentminded.

The Christian Emperor Constantine however had been a life long soldier and was anything but lax militarily. He brought in a pax Romana of prosperity that rivaled that of Caesar Augustus. Peter Heather points out that the Eastern side was even more permeated with Christianity, and Constantinople thrived until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. If anything, Christianity prolonged the existence of the Western empire and then resurrected it in 800 under Charlemagne. Blood-sports did continue despite Constantine's ban. But at least such spectacle was disapproved of by the leader and the growing Christian population, who made up only about 10% of the empire at the beginning of Constantine's reign in 406.

Rome and the Western Empire fell for a myriad of reasons, which all led to a weakening of the military in the face of ever more powerful barbarian tribes who had Attila the Hun breathing down their necks. While Christianity counter-acted social factors the damage had been done and the Barbarians would not be stopped.

Romans had become self-absorbed and were no longer replacing themselves with children. Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity and The Victory of Reason, documents how large families came to be seen as too costly to people's careers of political advancement and self-indulgent lifestyles (See also Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine). This despite Caesar Augustus giving tax breaks to those who made the sacrifice of bringing more than two natural born Roman citizens into the world.

Depopulation, while again counter-acted by large Christian families, left a void that the Barbarians began to fill in the fourth century, when they were hired to fight in the Roman military. This created a conflict of interest however, because barbarians sometimes found themselves fighting against their own tribes who were trying to migrate into Roman territory. Heather says that the Romans created their own conquerors by enriching them through trade and equipping them with military knowledge. It doesn't take long for the enemy to notice the hand your playing and learn to play at the same game. The weakened Romans didn't know how to counter their own military strategies and weapons when used against them.

Rome had expanded through a plunder economy which eventually ran out once the empire was so bloated it was about to pop. When they needed more money they started minting more coins. When the gold and silver started running out, they coated cheaper metals which led to hyper-inflation. The now near-sighted Romans, instead of investing in finding more mines, started hyper-taxing the provinces. When the provincials couldn't pay, the empire forced the wealthy provincials to make up the short-fall.

All this led to disgruntled population defended by an under-funded military trying to protect an over-expanded empire. Once the contractions started, the barbarians gained momentum and the rest is history: Alaric in 410, Vandals in 455, and the Foederati in 476. By the end, there was no more Western empire to occupy, and so the new barbarian ruler was given a title under the Eastern Emperor in Constantinople.    

Makes one wonder what will happen to the American Empire? At least the blue sections.

Mosaic

I've been grading a lot of position papers recently on the authorship of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament). It seems that the argument for Mosaic authorship runs thus:

The "giving" of the contents of the Pentateuch is associated with Moses, who is also described as writing specific sections. It seems likely that he would have written all of it given his education in Egypt, previous access to ancient sources, his being an eye-witness of most of the events, and a prophet who received special revelation from God. This is supported by testimony from the rest of the Old Testament and New Testament that attributes "the law," the traditional way of referring to the Pentateuch, to Moses.

Perilous Navigation

David McCullough:

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

All I Want For Xmas Is These Books

Just in case you were racking your brain about what to get your favorite blogger of Christmas, here's my wish list:

Why Mutants Will Never Change by Gene Poole (co-written by the Swirling Eddies)

How to Grow a Brain by Sarah Bellum (Preface by Garrison Keillor)

Don't Eat Yellow Snow by I. P. Freely (now in its 50th printing)

Under the Bleachers by Seymour Butts (now in 100 the anniversary edition)

Writing a Bestseller without Selling Out by Page Turner (Epilogue by Garrison Keillor)

Who Goosed the Moose by Antler's in the Treetops (a true classic)

Hollywood Meets Holy Wood

There's a great article by Steven Boyer called "Narnia Invaded" over at Touchstone on the problem with the first two Narnia movies. Find it here.

Here are a few comments of my own. In Hollywood and the culture at large there can be no such thing as what Anthony Esolen calls "blessed hierarchies." When Hollywood tries to translate C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia it significantly warps the message and changes the characters. Instead a young man ready to lead, Peter is little better than Edmund at the beginning of the cinematic version of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. 

If you didn't know the book, I think the movie might lead you to believe that Edmund was first a victim of Peter and then the witch, instead of a kid who needed a new heart. The Peter of the movies is more conflicted than noble, and is a far cry from the chivalric knight of Lewis' imagination. 

Boyer points out that the movies have so far perverted Lewis' message to modernity into the message of modernity. Instead of the ennobling effects of duty to God-given authority, we have Edmund learning to not "do as he was told" and saving the day at the end of The Lion. Instead of his reign in Narnia teaching him to be a better leader in this world, Peter picks fights at the beginning of Prince Caspian and even with Prince Caspian, once he gets back to Narnia. The High King is anything but noble through most of the movies, because, as we post moderns know, kings by definition are self-centered tyrants. So Peter must learn to not be so kingly in the movies.

Aslan also becomes more like the god of Deism than the untame Lion who ruled at the top of the "blessed hierarchy." Mr. Beaver says, "Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you." When will we learn that we need royal priests and servant kings who know how to take orders from the King of Kings in the government, church, and families?

I'm still hoping against all odds for better from Friday's release of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When Hollywood meets Holy Wood the result usually leaves a lot to be desired. We shall see....

States' Wrongs

The 150th anniversary of secession is coming up (Dec. 20), and there's a good New York Times article here about the festivities being planned. The following excerpt sums up my view of the cause of war and why, I think, the anniversary should not be celebrated:

Most historians say it is impossible to carve out slavery from the context of the war. As James W. Loewen, a liberal sociologist and author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” put it: “The North did not go to war to end slavery, it went to war to hold the country together and only gradually did it become anti-slavery — but slavery is why the South seceded.”

Playing Marco Polo in the Shallow End

A recent article in Christianity Today called "The Leavers: Young Doubters Exit the Church" by Drew Dyck stirred up some reflection on the state of American teenagers and another group called "emerging adults." Dyck cited the work of Christian Smith who wrote Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Smith documents the shallowness of the Christianity we have passed on to teens.

He characterizes the worldview of American teens as "Moralistic, therapeutic, Deism." Most teens believe that the purpose of life is to be "nice." Nice people go to heaven and "not nice" people don't. So it's moral. God created us, but he doesn't get in the way. He's there if you need him, like a therapist. Other than that, he doesn't interfere. So it's deistic.

Smith found that even kids from conservative Bible-believing churches were practically deists. I would add that if we don't show our kids the difference between Christianity and other worldviews, and why it matters, we leave them in the shallows. When deep problems begin to sink their faith, it's no wonder that they climb into someone else's boat. Dyck's article cites statistics that this is happening right now in an unprecedented way.

Smith's other work Souls in Transition: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults documents a prolonged adolescence, where young people continue to experiment morally and vocationally into their late twenties.  God may be there at the end of life, but if not, at least one has made a lot of money and been successful.

For most emerging adults, life is about having a good time and settling down "someday" with a beautiful spouse, having a couple of kids, and parties surrounded by lots of toys and friends. There's anxiety about navigating all the transitions and not messing up the future. They don't put down roots in traditional communities because they are constantly adjusting to changes.

Smith's research found that most emerging adults who attend church have no idea what their church teaches or that there's supposed to be some sort of commitment to Christ. Many go to mega-churches where nobody knows them. According to this group, dubbed "selective adherents" by Smith, church is a good thing to do on a Sunday morning as long as you don't have other plans.

Smith shows that emerging adults have little conviction about anything, even politics, because they confess to being trapped in their own subjectivity. Post modernism has made them aware that the outside world is socially constructed by the individual in his own time and place. People believe what they believe because that is how they were raised. Belief makes it true for the person, and there is no objective, shared reality to test truth claims. Live and let live for pleasure.

As a church, we've got to be more deliberate about worldview teaching and living. Christian redemption of the individual and the world for God's glory is the driving force of the Bible and redemptive history. We can know this because God has revealed it objectively and created us to know it subjectively. Our senses and our souls can reliably know the world because God made them for that purpose. Either we get into that epistemological stream or we're still playing "Marco Polo" in the shallow end.

Dyck appears to be critical of "seeker sensitive" services and "low commitment Bible Studies," of evangelical mega-churches. But in the end he says that there's nothing wrong with them as long as we also teach the faithful with more depth. I would suggest that Dyck has fallen prey to the post modern here, because everything he cited in his article militates against the low commitment approach with non-believers. This doesn't seem to jive with Jesus, who made his listeners count the cost up front. David Wells has pointed out, "What you win them with is what you win them to."

Now enter "When Scripture Becomes An A-La-Carte Menu" by James Tonkowich in By Faith. Tonkowich summarizes Smith's six categories of emerging adults:

1. Committed Traditionalists represent approximately 15 percent of emerging adults. They “embrace a strong religious faith, whose beliefs they can reasonably well articulate and which they actively practice.”
2. Selective Adherents (30%) believe and perform certain aspects of their religious tradition, but neglect or ignore others.” The attitude of so-called “cafeteria Catholics” is now widespread across evangelical and Reformed churches.
3. The Spiritually Open (15%) while not committed to any specific religious faith “are nevertheless receptive to or at least mildly interested in some spiritual or religious matters.”
4. The Religiously Indifferent (25%) don’t oppose religion, but don’t have any interest either.
5. The Religiously Disconnected (5%) admitted to no opinions about religion because they know nothing about, and are not connected in any way, with religious bodies or friends.
6. The Irreligious (10%) are openly hostile to all religion.

Tonkowich proceeds to a discussion of how to reach "emerging adults" who have been catechized by the culture into moral relativism. The moral relativism can be seen in the following examples cited by Tonkowich:

A man who attends a mega-church with his live-in fiancé explained to Smith why he felt comfortable ignoring his church’s teaching about pre-marital sex: “I think in my head it’s all personal opinion, whether you’re going to believe it or choose to like it and listen to it.”

“There is [a] self indulgent attitude,” ... “that says, ‘My life is difficult. I have lots of brokenness. I know it’s not right, but … .’”

Ruling Elder Bob Baldwin at GraceDC commented that when it comes to biblical sexuality, “If the rules don’t fit their cultural expectations, they mentally find a way around them, ignoring what they know to be true scripturally. What surprises me most is how carefully they have thought through their work-arounds.”

Smith documents the same pattern with the story of a young woman he interviewed: “In the middle of explaining that for religious reasons she does not believe in cohabitation before marriage, a young evangelical woman, who is devoted to gospel missionary work overseas, interrupted herself with this observation, ‘I don’t know. I think everyone is different so I don’t think [cohabitation before marriage] would work for me, but it could work for someone else.’”

Tonkowich's argues that we must reach emerging adults, especially those afflicted with moral relativism, through relationships. Tonkowich writes:

One pastor has noticed, “There are feelings of guilt, insecurity, and shame—especially shame. The problem for them is that they don’t know why these feelings exist.” In fact, these feelings hint at an authority beyond the self.

Romans 1:18-32 teaches that there are truths about life and God that we cannot not know (to use author J. Budziszewski’s phrase). We may pretend we don’t know them. We may suppress them. We may bury them under layers of carefully constructed philosophical skepticism, but all to no avail. From time to time these truths bubble uncomfortably to the surface.

Ministry to emerging adults should create opportunities founded on strong, honest relationships to explore the truths that will not be ignored, truths that explain the guilt and shame that will not go away. Apologetics begins not with correcting bad thinking, but with listening and helping to dig up the uncomfortable facts of life that, by the grace of God, will not go away.

Tonkowich collects much anecdotal evidence that opening up about struggles invites people to share honestly. Emerging adults have been programmed to "never let them see you sweat" and always exude competence. But when they see us modeling repentance then perhaps the deep end won't seem so scary.

I would add that when it comes to raising and educating children and young adults it begins with  correcting sinful ways and thinking with Bible, Bible, Bible, coupled with love deeds and modeling repentance. Constant excursions to the deep end with plenty of swimming, diving, splash fights, dunking, and laughter will build a strong Christian culture in the home that will serve them well into the future. As one pastor has noted, they will be able to "do more harm to the world than the world will be able to do to them."

Fore Golfers

A Little More Nonsense Now and Again

A Little Nonsense Now and Then

"The Gods of the Copy Book Headings"

A friend recently shared a great piece of verse with me. Rudyard Kipling, the author of Jungle Book and "Riki Tiki Tavi," wrote the marvelous poem below.

All you need to know is that copybooks were handwriting manuals for elementary school children to hone their penmanship (a lost art). At the top were short morals and Bible verses for them to copy in their own handwriting. To understand the rest all you need is ears to hear and eyes to see.


The Gods of the Copy Book Headings:


As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.


We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.


We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.


With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.


When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."


On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."


In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."


Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.


. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


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


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

Laughter is Warfare

One time G.K. Chesterton, the rolypologist, was patted on the stomach by his adversary, George Bernard Shaw, a beanpole of an infidel, and was asked what they were going to name the baby. Chesterton replied immediately that if it was a boy, John, if a girl, then Mary. But if it turned out to only be gas, they were going to name it George Bernard Shaw. 

I got this gem from Blog and Mablog.

Survival of the Flimsiest

I recently re-watched Collision with a fellow teacher and his class. Collision is a documentary of a series of debates between Atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian Apologist Douglas Wilson. Hitchens repeatedly challenges Wilson to name a good action that a Christian could do that an atheist couldn't. This receives a good but only a partial answer from Wilson.

Wilson is right when he points out that the question is not whether there are some good actions which only a Christian can do, but whether an atheist has any basis for distinguishing between good and evil in the first place.

Whenever Hitchens criticizes anyone, which he loves to do, he assumes a norm that binds us all. But if Darwinism is true, then morality is subjective and evolving too. Hitchens claims that morality comes to us through the trial and error of evolution. This manifests in our innate sense of right and wrong and our consensus with fellow humans as to what constitutes an orderly civilization. But our innate subjective feelings are not very binding nor is an appeal to consensus. That we, as a species, agree to make laws in order to survive doesn't really mean anything to a Hitler. Hitchens says that referring morality upward doesn't help. But without God, how could you challenge the authority of a totalitarian state like Hitler's?

Wilson's answer is incomplete in that he fails to concede to Hitchens that morality is innate, but not because of evolution. It is innate in everyone because we are all created in the imago Dei (image of God). Not only is it doubtful that evolution would produce common morality, but, without a transcendent standard based in God, there would be no way to back it up or keep it in place. If Darwinism were true morality would not only be subjective, but it would also be like a passing fad. You could evolve beyond good and evil like the aliens that are abducting us in all those movies. Now back to the point. It is true that atheists can do any good deed that a Christian can, but this is because, as created beings, we all share the moral law written on the heart.

Hitchens points out that some Christians are just as guilty of moral evils as some atheists. This is true, but there is the difference: When a Christian does evil, he is being inconsistent with Christianity. But when an atheist does evil, he's not being inconsistent with atheism.

Wilson gets Hitchens to admit this at one point, and I don't think Hitchens realizes that this is a major weakness. People can be good without God, but they can also use atheism as a premise for changing the game in frightening ways. Exhibit A: Hitler. Exhibit B: Stalin. Exhibit C: Mao. Exhibit D: well, you get the picture. In fact, if survival of the fittest is the mechanism of evolutionary progress, it's hard to justify things like caring for the sick or giving blood. In such an act of charity, we are helping the weak survive and undermining the fitness of the species. It amounts to survival of the flimsiest!

A Superb Discussion on C. S. Lewis

Alan Jacobs, ND Wilson, and Doug Wilson in conversation | Full Edition from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

Economics as the Possession Not the Pursuit of Happiness

Being Consumed by William T. Cavanaugh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Cavanaugh argues that globalism is a counterfeit of the church. Consumerism is the worldview that drives the structures of globalism and it is a direct challenge to the Christian faith. Cavanaugh writes:

Consumer culture is one of the most powerful systems of formation in the contemporary world, arguably more powerful than Christianity. While a Christian may spend an hour per week in church, she may spend twenty-five hours per week watching television, to say nothing of the hours spent on the Internet, listening to the radio, shopping, looking at junk mail and other advertisements. Nearly everywhere we lay our eyes -- gas-pump handles, T-shirts, public restroom walls, bank receipts, church bulletins, sports uniforms, and so on -- we are confronted by advertising.

Such a powerful formative system is not morally neutral; it trains us to see the world in certain ways. As all the great faiths of the world have attested, how we relate to the material world is a spiritual discipline. As one corporate manager frankly put it, 'Corporate branding is really about worldwide beliefs management' (47-48).

Consumerism seeks to exploit our restlessness, while Christianity seeks to cure our restlessness. St. Augustine, Cavanaugh's primary discussion partner and guide, once "confessed," "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."


Thus the worldview of consumerism and its quasi church of globalism with its sacraments of technology are  idols meant to replace Christ, his universal church, and the sacraments of bread and wine. Cavanaugh shows that as we consume we become more "detached" from the things we consume. Because consumerism is based on desire for desire instead of the object that is desired, we constantly throw away what we consume as we move on to our next purchase.


But in the Eucharist (the Lord's Supper/communion) we become consumed by what we consume. Instead of detachment, we experience greater attachment to Christ and thus satisfaction in Him. Cavanaugh points out that in consumerism possession kills desire, but in the Eucharist possession transforms and satisfies desire. This is because God made us for himself. We were created to know God and enjoy him forever (Westminster Confession of Fatih), but we worship and serve the creation instead of the Creator (Romans 1).


Cavanaugh expertly diagnoses the problem but he also gives solutions, at least on the individual and local level. Cavanaugh is not as ascetic who is trying us feel guilty about consuming materials. He wants to reform our view of what we consume. Every created object contains traces of the Creator. When we use created things we should be enjoying the Creator. Created objects don't satisfy us when they are treated as an end in themselves. The satisfy us when we use them to point us to their source in God. Thus, the things of earth don't go strangely dim, as the misguided hymn says, but they grow, as one of my friends likes to say, "strangely alive."


Cavanaugh brings in Hans Urs von Balthasar for a philosophical discussion of how we see the universal and the particular united in Christ. In globalization we see only particulars unrelated to anything universal or as mere interchangeable stand-ins for the universal (as in the liberal idea that all religions lead to God so it doesn't matter which one). Thus particulars are dispensable. But in the incarnation of Christ, we see the universal Son united with the finite Jesus. By becoming man, God makes room for every particular. Every material object, just like Christ's humanity, can be set apart for God's purpose.


God created us to create under him. Thus we should consume what we produce and produce what we consume. Cavanaugh realizes that we can't produce everything we consume, so he says we should consume locally and get to know our producers in order to make God-glorifying choices.


We don't realize that our clothes, coffee and other consumables are produced by poor people in third world countries who are being exploited by businesses feeding our consumption. Do we know how our God-given cows are being treated? Cavanaugh does. He buys his beef from a local farmer who feeds his herds healthy, naturally produced food instead of drugs meant only to bulk them up. The cows are clean and not penned up in their own muck. Does the meat cost more? Definitely, but a little less beef goes much farther in terms of satisfaction. Adam Smith could not have been more wrong when he said that the market provides all the knowledge necessary for the consumer to make rational choices for the common good.


Cavanaugh argues that Adam Smith's and Milton Friedman's definition of freedom as the absence of coercion, actually leads to a coercive capitalism. He argues for a return to Augustine's definition of freedom as the ability not just to choose but to choose the Good. We must choose the Good as defined by God who created human nature. Without the Christian understanding of the chief end of man, nothing remains but lust for power through profits.


Cavanaugh compares the Mandarin Co. who outsources jobs to El Salvador with the Mondragon Cooperative Corp. in Spain who hires locally. The Mandarin Co. widens the gap between employer and employee by forcing workers to put up with substandard pay and working conditions. If the workers protest, as they have, the company simply threatens to leave El Salvador for cheaper labor elsewhere. The workers aren't coerced. They have a choice, but few options, and they can't afford the consumables they are producing.


A priest founded the Mondragon Co. on Distributist principles, which means that the employees are owners and the highest paid in the co. only makes six times more than the lowest paid. Compare that to the average CEO who makes 300 times more than the lowest paid worker in a modern corporation. Mondragon is a multi-billion dollar company who has created a healthy, educated local community with low crime rates. "Which has promoted human freedom?" asks Cavanaugh. Neither group is coercing its employees to work there, but one of them as enabled human flourishing and the other is oppressive.


What Cavanaugh doesn't address, and this is probably the major weakness of the book, is how to restructure the state, national, and global economy along the lines of Augustine's definition of human freedom and the principles of Distributism. Distributism seeks not to redistribute wealth through taxation but to distribute ownership to as many people as possible. G K. Chesterton did address how to implement this at the national level, and he needs to be heard along with Cavanaugh.


View all my reviews

Pearcy on Secularism (click here)

Faith, Works, and Scissors

According to the Bible, works aren't the basis of our relationship with God, but they are a test of whether we believe in that God. If someone said I believe in Christ, but I don't want to be baptized, we would question whether they actually believe. Thus our relationship with God is by faith alone, but if we refuse to do the good works he commands we don't have the faith we think we do. We are Christians by faith but without Christian works we are not Christians.

Thus C. S. Lewis quipped that arguing whether faith or works is more important is like arguing over which blade of the scissors is more important.

Risus bellum!

Spurgeon wrote:

The man who serves his God with his whole heart is apt to forget his surroundings, and to fling himself so completely into his work that the whole of his nature comes into action, and even his humour, if he be possessed of that faculty, rushes into the battle (Eccentric Preachers, pp. 75-76).

I got this quote from Doug Wilson's blog. Risus bellum (Laughter is warfare).

An Artist with a Prophetic Voice

Click on the post title to read a letter to North American churches written by Makoto Fujimura. He is an abstract impressionist with a prophetic and learned voice.

What a God, What a Gift!

When the Greek men thought of an Almighty god, they created a lightening wielding, womanizer whose every seduction resulted in a pregnancy. Zeus fathered at least 100! God equals ultimate virility.

When the Hebrews received revelation from the one true God, he was "holy, holy, holy," and sex was his gift of one-flesh union to married couples. This loving union participated in the creative ability of God's own love. Out of the loving union of the Trinity, flowed creative acts that created people in his image ex nihilo. Out of the loving union of the married couple, flowed a creative act that produced children in the image of God. What a gift, what a God!!

Let's Talk About Conversation

Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Miller traces the history of the "conversible world" of friends and acquaintances who discussed the big ideas of their day and how they shaped their world. The ancient world gets short shrift, but the 18th c. British  coffee houses get their due. Miller covers the likes of Samuel Johnson and David Hume and their discussion partners and contrasts this golden age of conversation with the lack of meaningful conversation happening today. Miller argues that the conversible world has shrunk. People no longer visit coffee houses for conversation but to use the wifi. We prefer friends at out fingertips rather than face time for important issues. Contrast this with the world of Johnson and Hume who made face time with friends one of the greatest joys of their intellectual lives.  


Johnson and Hume work well as about the only value they shared in common was a love of conversation. It would have been quite a spectacle had they ever met for coffee. Hume was the consummate skeptic who despised people who thought they were the most interesting topic of conversation. Miller agrees as he makes Rousseau the villain of this history. Rousseau thought his life worthy of a "Confessions" not written to God, like Augustine's Confessions, but to his fellow man. Rousseau's audience was evidently supposed to think that Rousseau's Confessions were some sort of anti-septic for all his questionable deeds.


Johnson sought out conversation to cure his melancholy. Recent research (not from Miller) has shown that it is a natural drug more helpful than any anti-depressant, though the anti-depressant can help get you out of the pit and back into the coffee house. Johnson and Miller like raillery and badinage instead of preoccupation with the self. Raillery is the jocular intellectual dueling that isn't underhanded but usually so over the top that it's just good clean fun for those who don't take themselves too seriously. Badinage is playful conversation that is usually refined by intellectual and experiential knowledge. It reminds me of GK Chesterton's tremendous trifles.


Miller's book is never dull, despite what other reviewers have said on Goodreads, and is a veritable gold mine of wisdom for learning the ropes of good conversation. If you want a practical guide for avoiding boredom and conversation stoppers and stimulating community then Miller's book is a great place to start. From a worldview perspective, Miller is a secularist who values religion for the issues it raises for rational discussion. He finds his religious friends, even those who accept the authority of the Bible, to be great discussion partners.


Miller however, never addresses the challenge that secularism poses to substantive conversation. Secularism promotes the idea that people must check their ultimate commitments at the door of public debate. This is the real conversation stopper and the greatest weakness of the book. Miller's work does serve as a good reminder that curiosity is born in conversation which demands a conversing community of honest intellectuals. This is a declining ideal.


View all my reviews

Way Beyond the Blues!

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, For Tomorrow We Live Forever.

William Cavanaugh in his Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire argues that Christianity and consumerism are basically at odds. Christianity promises to cure our restlessness but consumerism tries to exploit it. But this doesn't mean that Christianity is totally against consumption. Worldly consumption actually detaches us from the objects we consume. We use something, throw it away, and then go shopping. No big deal. But when we consume our Lord's body and blood, we don't become detached but rather more attached to him.

Cavanaugh also points out that creation contains revelations of its creator. So when we consume it, we should be growing closer to him in our enjoyment of the created objects. They point beyond themselves to him. I remember being struck by how many times God told Israel to feast, and said that he would be with them in the midst of their enjoyment. Let's eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we live forever!!

Infectious Hampsters!

The Not So Slippery Greece

Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times by Thomas R. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Solid overview but with no substantial thesis. Martin focuses on the plight of the common man, women, and slaves whose existence changed little from down through the ages. Martin documents it as "nasty, brutish, and short" no matter the period: prehistoric, classical, or hellenistic.

The prose is accessible though not not especially memorable. Discussions are informative with a few quotes from the primary sources but more would've been welcome. The arts are given a fair shake as well as the philosophers. The dramatic changes in society via Themisticles, Pericles, etc. are understated and it comes across a little lifeless. On the positive side, Martin is clear, generally concise, and great for giving the reader the big picture. It filled in a lot of gaps for me while leaving me disappointed that the glorious moments seemed a little "ho-hum."

My main criticism is that author's personality seems to hide beneath a veneer of objectivity when he could've revealed it by arguing various theses or points of view. This approach usually makes for more interesting reading than the objective approach. I would rather an author take a position and try to be fair to his opponents than be dull and uninteresting by trying to "appear" objective.

View all my reviews

Linkage Here

My friend Jason Carter has posted a Distributist Biblio on his blog Outlines of Sanity. I highly recommend your taking long draughts from this well!

Coercive Commercialism

I've just begun William T. Cavanaugh's book Being Consumed. He observes that Milton Friedman's definition of freedom as the absence of coercion has ironically led to coercive commercialism. It doesn't force anyone to buy, but it does surround and manipulate. "Consumers feel besieged by marketing and surveillance" (1).

The free market promises to make the individual his own god, determining good and evil for himself as a consumer. It promises to liberate man from definitions of right and wrong but it enslaves him to his appetites. It is guided by no definition of human nature and thus no position on what is good or bad for humans. Man is left without a telos or goal of human fulfillment to strive for. In this vacuum, man's will is at the mercy of the marketers. It is not even a battle. The will of the consumer helplessly acquiesces to the relentless onslaught of the marketers.

We need a positive definition of freedom. The classical and Christian view is that freedom is the ability to choose the Good. This means we need a definition of the Good to serve as a guide for human consumption. Where are we going to get that if not from Christianity? Don't we need Christianity to be honored again in the public square? To the extent that we still pay lip service to the common good aren't we living off of borrowed capital? The checks are starting to bounce and we are in trouble. We must return to font of living water as individuals, families, and a society. Lord help us!

Darwinists Admit They Have No Morality

Click on the title of this post to read a review of a new book called Sex at Dawn and some other confessions of what it means to be a consistent Darwinist.

Against Christianity?

Against Christianity by Peter J. Leithart

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Christianity has become the label for the church marginalized by the modern secular state. So Leithart is against Christianity but not the church. Leithart calls the church to repent of its retreat and reassert its culture, language, and influence in the world at large, which includes the state. The church must return from its state imposed exile.

Haven't we tried this before you ask? What about the evils of medieval Christendom? Leithart convincingly argues that the evils of Christendom were inconsistencies, and not a problem intrinsic to that social order. The church and state may cooperate in ruling under God without coercing its people. The church was never meant to rule Christendom but Christendom was supposed to be ruled by a state with "Christian politics."

Leithart agrees that the church's message to the state is countercultural, but he also maintains that this is compatible with a Christian political realm outside the church. Leithart doesn't talk much about the direction of influence between the state and the church, but seems to assume that both are in need of constant reform and renewal by the dynamic of the gospel.

Leithart does appeal to Augustine's city of God. The church is political because it is a polis and ekklesia which commands loyalty greater than any state. The church is a threat to the usurping state. It is the true United Nations. If the state won't respect the spiritual, moral, and theological authority of the church then all the worse for the state. The church is not a part of the polis, it is its own polis, say Leithart (28).

This rings true. Modern liberalism has "cleansed" the public sphere of religion but this hasn't helped us agree or get along. We are more polarized than ever. What modern liberalism has done is take away the basis of persuasion. The Christian conscience has been erased from the public square. Without the ability to make religious arguments, we are at the mercy of our ruling appetites.

Patrick Henry proposed that a non-sectarian Christianity be declared the state religion of Virginia. Jefferson and Madison opposed Henry and this was never tried. What about Massachusetts Bay Colony? Well, I would point out that that was a coercive Christendom which failed because it was too strong where it needed to be permissive to dissenters.

There is a lot more here than a defense of Constantinianism. There is a robust view of the sacraments as an efficacious union of the symbol with the reality. This also works for Leithart as a spearhead against the secularist divorce of the natural and the supernatural. Leithart also highlights ethical transformation as part of the gospel. The gospel seeks to transform the community. "She withdraws from the world for the sake of the world" (135). He points to the work of Rodney Stark who documents the rise of christianity through social transformation in the cities. This led to Christendom and to use the title of one of Stark's books The Victory of Reason.

Leithart's sword cuts through so many layers of secularist armor that it's shocking and refreshing at the same time. Only God can make obligatory. Otherwise everything is permissible and the state wields brute force while the culture festers. The separation of church and state doesn't promote liberty but only slavery to appetite.

Leithart's prescription for change is worship and liturgy. He calls worship is an historical exercise that reenacts redemptive history through word and sacrament. These center us in redemptive history and teach us to "name the world through the Word" just like Adam (72-73).

The church's mission is not to accommodate her language to the existing language, to disguise herself so as to slip in unnoticed and blend in with the existing culture. Her mission is to confront the language of the existing culture with a language of her own (57).

He says that worship is a language course and liturgy is the teacher. Excuse me, I think its time for class.

View all my reviews

Compassion and Conviction

Compassion without conviction breeds license.

The Way We Were

Our seminary curricula are largely identical to what they were around the First World War, but the entering seminarian is a profoundly different person than was the seminarian of the early twentieth century. Then, the individual was well-read in poetry, and had studied nearly a decade of classical language (Latin, Greek, or both), learning by reading poetry and ancient languages to read texts carefully. He had written compositions almost weekly in many of his academic classes, and often wrote letters to friends and family. In contrast, the entering seminarian today has the faculties of a sixth- to eighth grader sixty years ago, and the seminary curriculum cannot make this seminarian an adult by the time he graduates (Gordon, Why Johnny Can't Preach, p. 68).

I got this off of Doug Wilson's blog. This was certainly true of me.

The Frontline Against Secularism

In anticipation of Peter Leithart's Defending Constantine, due out in November, I am reading Against Christianity, and it has helped crystalize something for me.

The church's liturgy revels in the union of the natural with the supernatural. It revels in the wedding of word, water, bread, and wine with grace, forgiveness, cleansing, and strengthening.

This is the frontline in the battle against secularism, which marginalizes the supernatural to the private sphere of personal belief. It divorces grace from the natural order of everyday life. It tries to make the things of God off limits to public discussion (90-91).

Does Nature Have Meaning?

Does creation reveal its meaning to us or do we confer meaning onto it?

This is an important question. If we believe that creation is given to us by God and reveals its God-given meaning to our senses and intellect, then we will be more likely to respect it. But if we believe that nature isn't created by God, then it has no God-given quality that we are bound to respect. It is reduced to raw materials that we may manipulate. We can give it any meaning we want.

Now which worldview is more likely to take better care of the earth and use biotechnology for human good?

Grace Before, Mercy After

Before the fall God gave Adam more than he deserved. After the fall he gave him the opposite of what he deserved. Before the fall there was grace, after the fall grace took the form of mercy.

Why Richard Dawkins Needs to Get His Science from iCarly

I was recently watching a rerun of the preteen television show iCarly with my children, and lo and behold Albert Einstein was quoted by Spencer:

The thing that can't be proved is the scientific nature of science itself.

I couldn't believe my ears, and I thought I would have to wander through the rest of my life wondering if I had really heard Einstein quoted on a preteen pop-culture tv show. Then I remembered we had just acquired the modern technological marvel called DVR. So I grabbed the remote from my kids and re-round iCarly. They thought I was going to change the channel. So when my seven year old daughter's cries of protest changed to surprise: "What are you doing dad?" I realized that I actually had heard Spenser quote Einstein.

This just goes to show you the relevance of pop culture to those still stuck in modernity.

I say this because Richard Dawkins, whose stuck in the Enlightenment, obviously needs to get his science from iCarly. This is because he and his friends, like Christopher Hitchens, seem to assume that science does not involve faith. But it is really an act of faith to rely on our sense perceptions.

The scientific method proceeds by observations from our senses, and these are interpreted by our minds. To accept that these are reliable impressions of reality and that our mind interprets them accurately is to assume a lot. It is again an act of faith. This faith is justified, I would argue, if and only if our sense perceptions were designed to interpret reality. Otherwise faith in our sense impressions and our interpretations of them is unfounded. Thus, Dawkin's position is not only based on faith, but on an unfounded faith.

So what if Richard Dawkins was made to sit down and watch a kids show, and all of a sudden he thought he heard Einstein being quoted. Could he "believe" his ears? Yes, but only if they were designed to pick up sound waves, and if his brain was designed to interpret the meaning intended by the source of those sound waves. But this kind of confidence in science would lead to the God of Christianity, and that would be unbelievable, wouldn't it?

A Child's Education

Why is a child's education so important?

Augustine writes:

Virgil certainly is held to be a great poet; in fact he is regarded as the best and the most renowned of all poets, and for that reason he is read by children at an early age--they take great draughts of his poetry into their unformed minds, so that they may not easily forget him, for, as Horace remarks,

New vessels will for long retain the taste

Of what is first poured into them (City of God I.3).

What I Have Written, I Have Written

Quod scripsi, scripsi.

Order in this Order

We know things left to themselves tend toward disorder. So who put the order in this natural order?

Augustine, Distributism, & Empire

In preparing to teach on on Augustine's City of God I ran across the following passage:

Let them see the possibility that good men really shouldn’t rejoice at the expanding of the empire.[1] … ; and human affairs being thus more happy, all kingdoms would have been small, rejoicing in neighborly concord; and thus there would have been very many kingdoms of nations in the world, as there are very many houses of citizens in a city. Therefore, to carry on war and extend a kingdom over wholly subdued nations seems to bad men to be felicity, to good men necessity…. [Victory] would have surely been the case if, instead of a stone on the capitol,[2] the true King of kings and the Lord of lords would have dwelled there and been known.[3]

Augustine believed that the city of God was the last best hope for the city of man. The Roman Empire was too big for its own good and had gotten to where it was by being bad. Rome did not conquer because it had to wage just wars, but because it worshipped Jupiter. It hurled its lightening bolts around the Mediterranean until they began to short circuit.

The Barbarians had been biding their time and now, a la St. Jerome, the city of man that had taken the world was about to be really taken. Too bad they hadn't worshipped the true king of heaven (at least until lately and even then half-heartedly). Maybe then they would have stayed small and neighborly. Trying to do too much as an individual or a nation only diminishes you. Stay small and beautiful. Empires are for chumps.

__________________

[1] Trans. mine: Videant ergo ne forte non pertineat ad uiros bonos gaudere de regni latitudine. The rest is Dod's trans. unless noted otherwise.

[2] Statue to Zeus/Jupiter.

[3] Trans. mine: Quod profecto haberetur, si non lapis in Capitolio, sed uerus rex regum et dominus dominantium cognosceretur atque coleretur.

The Individual Good vs. the Common Good

Someone has said that after all other motives for art have been discarded, the only one left was self-expression. The Greeks were motivated by the idea of beauty as perfection. The Romans were into gritty realism. The glory of God motivated Christendom art. In fact, most medieval artists didn't even sign their art. The Renaissance recovered the Graeco-Roman portrayal of man but, in the light of Christendom, saw him as made in the image of God. The Romanticists were motivated by nature as the ideal place for man.

Things start to fragment from there. After Christendom the center doesn't hold. Without a conception of the glory of God and man as made and then remade in God's image, man is set adrift. When there is no king in Israel, everyone does what is right in his own eyes. Man's view of himself and the world begins to depreciate until the only thing left is money and experimentation.

Patrick Deneen the author of Democratic Faith (click on the blog title) said in a Mars Hill Audio interview (volume 91) that when he asks his students to define democracy the most common set of answers has to do with the freedom of the individual to pursue his preferences. This is democracy as self-expression.

Deneen points out that this is much different than what Aristotle meant when he defined democracy as "rule and being ruled in turn." Everybody took a turn, even the poor, in Athenian democracy. Today, with the church relegated to the margins of society, it's up to the individual to find or make his own meaning.

The church has been told that it can make no claim on any world except its own. The individual is left to himself. He wanders with no commonly held view of human nature. There is nothing intrinsically bad or good for him. There is only what he wants. In this way, there is no common good there is only the individual good.

Instead of democracy preserving the common good, it is reduced to protecting our individual conceptions of the good. This means the individual can do anything he wants as long as he doesn't physically harm is fellow man. The liberty to swing my fist ends at my neighbors nose. This impoverishes democracy by handing it over to our appetites for sex, money, and power. "It's just business" is really insidious when you think about it.

Gravitas

I lifted this quote from Doug Wilson's blog:

The old seminary professors used to speak about a necessary trait for pastoral ministry called gravitas. It refers to a soul that has developed enough spiritual mass to be attractive, like gravity. It makes the soul appear old, but gravitas has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with wounds that have healed well, failures that have been redeemed, sins that have been forgiven, and thorns that have settled into the flesh. These severe experiences with life expand the soul until it appears larger than the body that contains it (Barnes, The Pastor As Minor Poet, p. 49).

The Way We Live

The way we live is only self-evident to us. Ask our pilgrim fathers or just about anyone else before the 19th century if it is in the best interest of freedom to separate church and state, and they will probably look at you as if you just arrived from a distant star. Christopher Dawson pointed out, in the mid 20th century, that "it is no exaggeration to say that all civilizations have always been religious."

Putting on "Intellectual Muscle"

Steven Loomis and Paul Spears recently did an interview on Mars Hill Audio Journal about their new book Education for Human Flourishing (click on the title). I have listened to it now many times and am resonating with great resounding echoes!!

Spears makes the point that failure plays a major role in any intellectual pursuit. We cringe at that because we are quantifiers. We know that if we quantify trial and error after error in a culture where we've programmed students not to fail it will create anxiety. We've created a culture where self esteem is the ultimate good.

Spears also points out that the Socratic method is all about failure, and to the extent that we incorporate it we usually teach kids to do faux dialogue. This means that students will tend to only ask questions that they know the answer to and proceed to show off their knowledge in conversation with the teacher. This way they get some cache in front of their classmates. This also explains why students are usually reticent to answer our questions. What if their wrong in front of their classmates?

This is the opposite of what Socrates was up to. His dialogue partners went away hanging their heads but at least they knew themselves better. Socrates motto was "know thyself" and his second one was like it: "The unexamined life is not worth living." This means that Socrates was a successful teacher and his students were learning whether they realized it or not. It seems to me that Jesus taught a lot like this too as well as his followers.

Spears says that until we find out how little we know, how much we need to learn, and just our uninformed our assumptions are, we are not really on the path of learning. Doug Wilson commented that our motto is: "Thou Shalt Feel Good About Thyself."

I didn't really experience this kind of learning until my master's work and it wasn't full on until my doctoral program. I remember walking away from class day after day thinking, "Matt, you are such an idiot." Well I'm sure I still am, but hopefully I'm a little wiser. Now listen to the way C. S. Lewis describes the manner of his education from about age eleven with his tutor Kirkpatrick:

I soon came to know the differing values of his three openings. The loud cry of "Stop!" was flung in to arrest a torrent of verbiage which could not be endured a momnet longer; not because it fretted his patience (he never thought of that) but because it wasted his time, darkening counsel. The hastier and quiter "Excuse!" (i.e. excuse me) ushered in a correction or distinction merely parenthetical and betokened that, thus set right, your remark might still, without absurdity, be allowed to reach completion. The most encouraging of all was, "I hear you." This meant that your remark was significant and only required refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error. Refutation (when we got so far) always followed the same lines. Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? Had I any evidence in my own experience? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion, Do You not see the that you had no right, etc.

Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer.... Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down suffiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety (Surprised by Joy).

It's no wonder that Lewis nicknamed him "The Great Knock." Now what if Kirk had been quantifying young Jack's performance and mailing report cards to his father and building up a transcript to send to Oxford? What if the educational establishment kept asking Kirk about the level of assessment that his student was on and to please hurry and send those standardized test scores.

When we combine our approach with our equally disconcerting message that students go to school in order to get a good job. it's no wonder they get disillusioned. Spears documents that by California social science standards, students are to thinking about their "human capital" in third grade! He explains that this is an economic term which is intended to get kids to think about what they will contribute to the "economic flourishing."

This is disillusioning because students get the message that humans go to school not because they are rational souls who need to develop into their true selves, but they go to school because humans need money and society needs them to make money. (Where is it that we are warned about the love of money?) Don't we need to return to education for "human flourishing" as defined by the Word so as not to be "conformed by the pattern of this world" (click on the title).

Distributing Ownership Instead of Money

Anthony Esolen in his Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization points out three factors that contribute to lower birth rates:

1. High taxes
2. Scarcity of land for private property and agrarian lifestyles
3. Poor living conditions

The Wall Street Journal just published the following on the increased cost of child-rearing:

A child born in 2009 will cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or about $222,360, to raise to maturity, up a little less than 1% from 2008, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday in its annual report on the average cost of raising a child. (The department runs the survey to help courts and state governments set child-support guidelines.) Expenses for child care, education and health care rose the most compared with 2008, while the cost of transportation for a child actually fell, the department said. Annual child-rearing expenses for the average middle-income, two-parent family range from $11,650 to $13,530, depending on the age of the child, the department says.

Child care accounts for 17% of the total spending, and education for 16% of the total. The cost of housing makes up nearly one-third of the total; this is gauged by the average cost of an additional bedroom. But the tally excludes any spending on kids over age 17, so it doesn't include one of the biggest and fastest-growing single financial outlays many parents make: the cost of sending your child through college. Higher-education costs aren't included, the department says.

Families in the Northeast have the highest costs, followed by cities in the West, then cities in the Midwest. Families in rural areas and in Southern cities have the lowest child-rearing costs.

For families with many kids, however, there is some good news: The more children you have, the less it costs to raise each one. These economics of scale deliver 22% savings per child for families with three or more children. That is because kids can share a bedroom, hand down clothing and toys to each other, and consume food purchased in bulk quantities, reducing costs. Also, private schools and child-care centers may offer sibling discounts. The data is compiled based on spending by 11,800 two-parent families and 3,350 single parents with at least one child under 18 living at home.

What if we started distributing land instead of money? What if we created tax laws in favor of small business, family farms, and distribution of ownership to employees instead of corporate combinations owned exclusively by big businessmen?

In such a new climate, would we find our work more fulfilling and quit working for a paycheck? Could we start finding fulfillment in our families instead of individual consumption?

Might I propose that God made us to flourish in families, living in gardens, working with our own tools, and not on assembly lines, working with other people's machines, and looking forward to the weekend and our next spending spree.

Do We Share 99% of Our Genes with the Town Mouse or the Country Mouse?

I asked a friend last night how long naturalism will be able to hold up against the onslaught of Stephan Meyer's argument in his Signature in the Cell. Meyer's basic thesis is that evolution by natural selection and random genetic mutation cannot explain the diversity of life much less the origin of life. The main problem here is that it can only select from what's there or change what's there. They cannot supply what's there. These mechanisms cannot produce genetic information, which is akin to digital code.

This would be like saying that the consumer market and viruses can account for all computer hardware and software. The consumer market selects particular computer hardware and software for survival, and virus and spyware can damage it, but neither of these impersonal agents can produce it. How do you go from computers the size of houses to iPads through consumer choices and hackers? Without intelligent computer programmers we would not only never have a computer but the iPad would never assault us with its sexy sleekness.

Now check this from James Le Fanu, a guest blogger at the Discovery Institute, who writes on " The Last Days of the Façade of Knowing":

Interchangeability across species reaches its apotheosis with the finding that we share 99% of our genes with a mouse. How so trivial a genetic difference can generate such diversity of form defies all explanation, other than to suppose it must be ‘something to do’ with gene regulation, ‘the turning on and off of genes at different times and places in the course of development’.

The implications are clear enough. Biologists could in theory sequence every living creature on the face of the planet, but this would only confirm they all share the same core set of genes that account for the nuts and bolts of the proteins and enzymes of the cell of which all living things are made. But beyond that the really interesting question — that of ‘form’ — what it is that so readily distinguishes the elephant from the octopus, fireflies from foxes would remain as elusive as ever.

The genetic instructions must be there of course because otherwise the tens of millions of our fellow species would not replicate themselves with such fidelity from generation to generation. But we are compelled in the light of these extraordinary findings of the recent past that we have no conception of why we should become so different from a worm or fly.

And the same applies though more significantly still to Darwin’s proposed mechanism of evolutionary transformation. There is, to be sure, persuasive evidence of a shared or common ancestry in the interchangeability of, for example, our genome with that of a mouse and our primate cousin — but beyond that the myriad of random genetic mutations that would provide a basis for the transformation of one form of life into another are nowhere to be found. “We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees”, observed Svante Paabo Chairman of the Chimpanzee Genome Project on its publication in 2005 — “part of the secret is hidden in there, but we don’t understand it”. Nothing has subsequently emerged to challenge that conclusion.

The standard scientific response to these anomalies and perplexities is to concede that ‘it’ has turned out to be much more complex than originally contemplated — which is certainly true. But nonetheless, the argument goes, the accumulation of yet more biological data, the sequencing of yet more genomes must eventually, like a bulldozer, drive a causeway through current perplexities. Perhaps, but more certainly, the reverse for the more that science progresses, the more genomes that are sequenced, the more striking the irresoluble discrepancy between the similarity of the genetic instructions and the diversity of the living world (click on post title to read the whole).

Go Fish!

Stanley Fish reviews three new books on classical education. Click on the title of this post and take a trip!

Our Forgotten Father

I caught Victor Davis Hanson on Book TV (C-SPAN 2) talking about his new book The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (click on the title of this post for more). He argued that we have no stomach for war because we are therapeutic, affluent, and technological.

Westerners have fought wars because they believed that life was supposed to be hard and to win a war you had to be harder. But in a therapeutic culture this worldview falls on "hard" times. Being affluent, we enjoy leisure and war and leisure don't mix to well. A long protracted struggle in the dessert is not our idea of the good life. We also expect wars to be manageable by technology. The Enlightenment dream is that we can wrap our machinery and communication around war and control every facet of it. When we run up against the unknown, which war inevitably is, we don't know what to do. When it comes down to fight we seek flight. Hanson argues that until recently our civilization knew that wars were a test of will.

Someone asked him if he would still support the war in Iraq given what we know now about the absence of weapons of mass destruction. He answered that there were many more reasons for going to war against Sadam than WMDs. But George W thought that would be the best way to present the security threat to the American people, so he hitched his simplistic wagon to the wrong horse.

I also got the sense that Hanson was saying we must return to the just war tradition. If we don't have a just war policy, the world will try to get away with unjust war. Without a deterrent, people and nations will try to push you around. Hanson defined a deterrent as a strong military and the will to use it, even preemptively. The question isn't pre-emption or not, unilatereal or bilateral, but who you're dealing with. If it is a bad guy who is committing crimes against humanity and plans on including you, then you have grounds for a just war. But this requires a definition of such things as good and evil, which is problematic in our post-modern world.

Hanson also point out that we have a post-modern president dealing with pre-modern dictators. Dealing with them, he argued, is like dealing with his neighboring farmers (yes he farms!) When they want to take your irrigation for themselves, and you tell them its my turn, they look at you as if to say, "Stop me." Then, he said, you have to convince them it's not in their best interest.

My lone criticism of Hanson's presentation is based on the Micah mandate, which he did not address, but perhaps it's in the book. Micah 6:8:

He has showed you, O man, what is good.

And what does the LORD require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.

We haven't tended "to act justly and to love mercy" but build up our military and do whatever we want. We aren't Hanson at the irragation ditch. We're usually the guy stealing the water! We demand that third world countries repay their debt to us while we continue to rack up our own in the trillions. We comfort ourselves by saying nobody will come calling because we're too important to their economy. If they do we can bomb them to kingdom come. I actually had somebody explain it this way to me about three weeks ago. We may think we're righteous because we give more than any other country to world relief, but we give less as a percentage of GDP than any other first world country. If we tithed ten percent of our military budget we could end world hunger within our lifetimes. Read Hope in Troubled Times by Goudzward, etc.

We will never be able to fight a just war without an eternal perspective. As long as we're affluent, therapeutic consumers who worship at the altar of technology, we will be bound to a temporal perspective. This means that it will be difficult for us to conceive of just war or bear the cost of one for our neighbor. In order to fight for justice we will also have to learn how to do justice and love mercy and might I put in a plug for a chastised Constantinianism--walk humbly with our God. Then we may be able to create a new world climate of love instead of fear.

Remember Your Fairy Tales

C.S. Lewis wrote in “The Weight of Glory:”

Remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years.

We need to remember that the disenchantment of the world is an enchantment. Nothing breaks the spell like Scripture and fairy stories remind us that Scripture reveals God's enchantment of the world.

Pious Gold

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
O'Connor is literary "shock and awe" in the best sense of the metaphor. She pitted herself against what she called "pious trash." She is also one of the best anti-dotes to trashy-trash nihilism that I know of.

She writes so convincingly about what biographer Ralph Wood calls "the Christ-haunted South." The characters are almost tangible to the imagination. As I read I became convinced that I knew people like this whether it was true or not. This happened especially while reading "The Displaced Person" and "Greenleaf."

O'Connor is shocking and redemptive at the same time. Read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Revelation," and especially "The Artificial Nigger." The latter is one of the most profound stories, short or long, that I've read. "Parker's Back" is lightly allegorical about the love/hate relationship between Catholicism and a kind of Protestant evangelicalism. The former is ignorant of itself but down to earth, the latter knows what it believes but is, at the same time, impoverished by those beliefs.

"Good Country People" is a critique of naive nihilism by a coherent nihilism: "You ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born." Self-righteousness is a constant theme that she crushes in her narrative crucible, especially in "Revelation." Many of her stories resonate with Jesus' parable of the "Pharisee and the Tax Collector." "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is O'Connor at her theological best. The Misfit knows that without God there is no final justice and "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead ... and If He did what he said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't ... No pleasure but meanness."

View all my reviews >>

God Loves the French

Huguenot Heritage Presentation from Daniel Foucachon on Vimeo.

Is America Democratic or Bureaucratic?

I recently put the wraps on a year of teaching American history and am beginning my preparations for teaching Ancient history. To that end I am reading Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization. We stand to learn much from the history of Greece and Rome since we took our democratic cues from their civilizations. Esolen writes:

Note what such a State cannot be. It canot be an empire, because empires steal from men the opportunity to govern themselves. It cannot be anarchy because lawlessness makes one's life too uncertain for the leisure to pursue the good of the intellect. It must somehow take into account human nature as we find it.... The State cannot be so vast that we fall into anonymity, and government is imposed upon us rather than created by us and for our purposes. Thus the modern "democracy," neither republican nor democratic but bureaucratic, distant, imperial in its all-encompassing demands ... is poor soil too for man's thriving.

What then? "Man is political animal," says Aristotle. He thrives in a community of families and clans who govern themselves freely and well, providing for more than a basic subsistence. What they mainly provide is freedom: free time, leisure for conversation, an arena for debate, for struggles that have consequences, for reading and arguing, for sport, for contemplation, for honing all the practical and intellectual virtues. True civility has more to do with a well-ordered fight than with the bonds of niceness (36).

By taking responsibility for its citizens the State takes responsibility away from its citizens. Consider the what Alexis De Tocqueville said about the despotism of too much government:

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Government needs to be strong enough to provide for human flourishing and weak enough not to get in the way of its citizens' flourishing. Government needs transcendent morality that can only be provided by the church and its God and it must enforce it. The government also needs to respect the image of God in man and trust it to take care of itself.

Man needs freedom but freedom without morality is not true freedom. Luther spoke of "royal freedom" as the ability to do what is right. Today in America we have reduced freedom to choice. Esolen points out that both Plato and his student Aristotle "saw that if freedom means 'being free to take what you like, within the law," then no nobler faculty of the soul beyond the appetite will be developed." We want De Tocqueville's "small and vulgar pleasures." This makes us weak and malleable for the state to form us to its liking. We lose ourselves.

Plato wrote in his Republic: "The father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents" (8.562e). Esolen comments:

Teachers fawn upon their students; students ignore their teachers. A lawless egalitarianism descends upon all, along with a great touchiness, an inability to bear any restraint, until finally, slaves to their appetites and plunged in chaos, the people choose to be slaves to a 'protector' who can rein them in. Hence tyranny--welcomed!

We need the civility of a well ordered fight! We need a contentious democracy and citizens who imbibe from the wells of revelation!

Acres of Literature or Mark Twain on Being a Printer

One isn't a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature and learning, unconsciously at first, consciously later, [and] to discriminate between the two and meanwhile consciously acquiring what is called a style ("The Turning Point of My Life").

The Ball & the Cross

A recording of G. K. Chesterton's The Ball and the Cross is available at Librivox.org. Just click on the title of this post for the link.

I recorded the first three chapters and another reader completed the novel. I must confess that I am a bumbling amateur but it was a labor of love. The reader who completed the novel did a fine job and her sound quality is superior. So if you can barely make it through the beginning, just hang on!

The book is a great story of a Christian and an atheist who challenge each other to a duel, then become friends and try to convert each other as they travel through England trying to finish their chivalrous fight. The modern world keeps interfering because it doesn't believe in duels, because it doesn't believe there's anything worth dying for, especially religion. The story is a hoot!!

Was Jefferson a Secularist?

Jefferson wished his epitaph to read:

HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.

In his letter to the Danbury Baptists he expresses his interpretation of the First Amendment:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" thus building a wall of eternal separation between Church & State. Congress thus inhibited from acts respecting religion, and the Executive authorised only to execute their acts, I have refrained from prescribing even those occasional performances of devotion ... as religious exercises only to the voluntary regulations and discipline of each respective sect.

Leonard Levy in his Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (1989) writes:

Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia: "Instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children, at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious enquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history."(17) Religion was also conspicuous by its absence from Jefferson's plan of 1817; his Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education enumerated only secular subjects. In an effort to eliminate possible religious influence in the public schools, Jefferson specified that ministers should not serve as "visitors" or supervisors, and provided that "no religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practised" in violation of the tenets of any sect or denomination.(18) Clearly, Jefferson opposed the use of public funds for the teaching of religion in the public schools.

It is generally assumed that the Founding Fathers were for some sort of Christian education. But Jefferson seems to be following the logic of separation of church and state in such a way as to exclude any form of Christian education. Jefferson seems opposed to even the influence of religion on any state run institution. He believes in the hyper-privatization of faith and religion as a matter of opinion. Perhaps Jefferson was our first secularist calling for religion free zones of public life.

Delivering the Good Thesis Pt 2

The introductory paragraph should not only state the thesis but explain how you are going to prove it. This includes method as well as lines of evidence.

To Change the World!

Alexis De Tocqueville said:

Americans have used their liberty to combat the individuality born of equality, and they have won.

This is old-fashioned populism. The problem with this, according to James Davison Hunter in To Change the World (click on the title), is that populism tends to ignore high culture and leave it untransformed. High cultural forms like academia, media, and government build the plausibility structures that makes the gospel seem implausible to moderns.

Hunter says that we will not change the world until we assume a "faithful presence" in the centers of high culture.

Delivering the Good Thesis

This is my Tenth year of teaching, and I've read a lot of thesis papers and tried to teach students how to write them. So this is my moment of frustrated clarity on what a good thesis paper should look like. The thesis must be stated in the introduction, argued and defended in the body, and restated and reviewed in the conclusion.

A proper thesis paper must rehearse a controversy or disputed issue, take a position, and state it as the thesis. This all happens in the introductory paragraph and should hit the supporting arguments like a preview for an action movie. Grab the reader by the throat, strap on his seatbelt, slap his bare cheeks with aftershave, cast a spell, I don't care, but get us into the heat of the controversy immediately. Nobody wants to go around the block before they cross the street or on a journey of knowledge Captain Quidnunc.

The thesis paper must distinguish primary and secondary sources!

The thesis must be argue against at least one opposing position in the secondary literature. It must show support from primary sources and interpretations from expert scholars in the secondary sources. This is to say that the thesis must engage the scholarly world and not be written in a hermetically sealed universe of its own pretense. This prevents the paper from sounding like an encyclopedia article, report, or, worst of all, a personal reflection.

A professor friend of mine told me recently that "Jesus does not make good cameos." I laughed my head off! I don't know how many times I've been reading a well intentioned student who inserts his Christian point of view, saying we all know that a certain philosophy is wrong because the Bible says so, and Jesus will prove it when he returns, and I will have won the argument. This comes across as hubris to those who are on the outside looking in, and is usually an unwarranted appeal to authority. If the philosophy is wrong, then Jesus has probably left evidence and arguments in his world to prove it wrong, so that we don't have to invoke his name like it's a heavenly sledgehammer.

We don't always need to argue from a Christian point of view. Sometimes we argue merely from the nature of the research to a conclusion that any human being can understand. If it is done well, it will be compatible with the Christian worldview, and we won't have to get preachy. If we are arguing from an explicitly Christian point of view, then all we need to do is write: "From a Christian point of view ...."

A thesis paper must also restate the thesis in the conclusion and remind the reader of the points scored like the sports reel on ESPN. The introduction is the movie preview and the conclusion is the highlight reel and the body links the two by "delivering the goods."