Alan Jacobs

How squirrels land at Stan Lee’s house

But if liberals need to come to terms with these failures, religious conservatives should not be smug about them. The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.

What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God … the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

It is a generational thing, of course. The worst offenders are teenagers – in terms of the group who are the most distracted because this is the generation who never knew life when it was “real”. They live in the continuous future. They have no experience of subtlety, nuance or considered responses – only of instant, illiterate and ill-considered ones. The gratification teens crave is not the warm smile of affection or the approving comment from another human, but the sense of achievement they gain from electronic validation. Emails, texts and updates pinging in reassure them they are alive and popular and abreast of rolling social news.

I have just learned from this interview with P. D. James that her first editor at Faber, Charles Monteith, wanted to get W. H. Auden to become Adam Dalgleish the poet — that is, write some poems that could have been placed in the novels as examples of the policeman-poet’s verse. I have no doubt that Auden would have done this had the opportunity arisen. Auden loved detective stories (he wrote one of the seminal essays on the genre) and loved writing poems on commission. He was always insistent that a poet who had mastered his or her craft should be able to write well for any occasion. I bet he would have enjoyed the challenge of trying to work out what kind of poet Dalgleish needed to be.

By the end it’s clear that one form of bravery the film celebrates is affective: It’s the bravery to see and name our mistakes, to apologize, and to help each other unbecome the monsters we’ve created, and to do all of this without submitting to an unreasonable or unjust authority.

This is important.

Far be it from me to say that the film is perfect, or that there aren’t real critiques to be made of it. The pacing is sometimes off and there are stretches that are less compelling than others. But there are three things Brave absolutely isn’t, and there’s something pernicious about the fact that reviews repeatedly refer to it as precisely those three things. Whatever Brave is, it’s not predictable, it’s not Just Another Princess Movie, and it’s not — my God! — lacking for deeper layers.

heracliteanfire:

Illustrations from Living Lights: A Popular Account of Phosphorescent Animals and Vegetables by Charles Frederick Holder (1887) (via Living Lights - 50 Watts)

The Daily’s business model combines two limiting factors that make it worse than your average, run-of-the-mill website. Its business model purposely limits its audience—from the billions online, to the meager millions who have an iPad. (To the thousands willing to pay for The Daily.) Its newspaperesque publication schedule is a step backwards from the web’s always-on schedule. The entire premise of The Daily is two huge steps backwards from currently accepted media standards. It’s as if a movie studio declared that they were launching a silent film division, which would only be shown at drive-ins.

Twitter has figured out what it wants to be when it grows up. It wants to be The New Media. Twitter doesn’t want to come to you. It wants you to come to it. This, we’re told, will provide a better experience. And it will – for their advertisers and their investors.

In its youth Twitter might have thought it purpose was to empower us as creators. But it has grown up, and the conventional wisdom of grownups is that it’s far more profitable to think of everyone as consumers.

This is just the natural outcome for a social network once it leaves the hands of its early adopters and reaches scale. Twitter isn’t trying to create a Horrible Network for Kardashians. It’s just a reflection of all the normal people that showed up to use the service. At least, that’s what Anil Dash argues. But Anil is wrong. Twitter has the hand that guides the users, not the other way around. Twitter gets to decide whether the engineering priority is to support Justin Bieber having millions of followers (here’s @biz with the Bieber boxes) or whether all users should be able to access all their old tweets.

Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

That’s unequivocal. Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

These days, that and $2 will buy you a small cup of Starbucks’ coffee. Strident secularism is on the march and freedom of religion is the target, with secularist warriors attempting to drive religious practice behind closed doors be redefining religious liberty down to a hyper-restricted, “freedom of worship.”

What’s the difference? Under freedom of worship, the Catholic and Orthodox churches both remain perfectly free to teach that the Eucharistic bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ. Muslims can continue to require women to be segregated from men at the mosque. But outside worship contexts, the state may compel the faithful to violate their faith by acting in accord with secular morality rather than consistently with their dogmatic precepts.

Here’s my prediction of what will happen as a result of the exposure of the profound corruption at the heart of the Penn State football program and indeed the whole university leadership: absolutely nothing. The NCAA won’t shut down Penn State football. The NCAA will itself continue to be a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy, and will neither undertake voluntary reforms nor be reformed by any external power. University administrators across the country will continue to be as deferential to football coaches as they ever have been, because they know that if they slacken in their reverence they will be fired. Congress will pass no new laws to control college atheltics; it will address neither the pervasive corruption of the whole system nor the medical hazards specific to football, because Congressmen are subject to the same pressures, in this regard, as university administrators. A few people will seek to use existing laws to hold universities accountable; they will experience some minor successes, but the legal system will ensure that no grievous harm comes to the collegiate sports enterprise as we now know it.

Americans love college football with a great passion, and will not be deprived of it. It is among their chief of our circuses. Anyone who tries to end or even limit the corruption endemic to the system will be ignored, if they are small and weak, or, if they possess authority, will be deprived of power. For the foreseeable future, the Penn State disaster will be completely inconsequential, except that the best football players won’t want to play there and the team will slowly decline in success and prestige. Also, some of the former administrators will be convicted of crimes, though plea bargains will almost surely keep them from doing time. All else will remain as it is now.

You heard it here first.