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.