Alan Jacobs

Now more than ever is the time for our statesmen, legislators, and enlightened writers to talk up the Puritans in the name of the most sublime faculties, those with which we can be happy as human beings. The justice of the middle-class American, as Tocqueville says, is that nobody is above or below being a being with interests–someone who is free and who works for himself (DA.2.2.8). But the Christians provide the indispensable addition that each of us is more than a being with interests, and so each of us share in a kind of greatness the aristocrats reserved only for themselves. So each of us was made to enjoy civilization and liberal education and the leisurely, social, conversational contemplation of who we are under God. Truth to tell, we’re much more repressed and unhappy these days than the Puritans ever were, at least at their best.

material developments

copia

university presses

reader’s report: Jane Smiley

The problem, as it appears to me, is that we are using the wrong language. The language we use to speak of the world and its creatures, including ourselves, has gained a certain analytical power (along with a lot of expertish pomp) but has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or affection or devotion toward it. As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously reduces to an assemblage of perfectly featureless and dispirited 'ecosystems,’ 'organisms,’ 'environments,’ 'mechanisms,’ and the like. It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

PHILADELPHIA—Historians at the University of Pennsylvania announced the discovery this week of a personal diary from the late 18th century that reveals the first U.S. flag sewed by Betsy Ross was originally intended as a shirt for her flamboyant gay friend Nathaniel.

‘This has completely upended the accepted narrative behind the first American flag,’ said historian Kenneth Atwood, who led the team of scholars analyzing the long-forgotten journal of prominent Philadelphia homosexual Nathaniel Linsley. ‘Now we can say with certainty that our nation’s most enduring symbol of freedom, strength, and prosperity is actually just the result of Nathaniel’s desire for a sassy, tight-fitting top.’

'We’ve all been taught that the 13 stars and stripes of the first U.S. flag represented the original 13 colonies, but this is simply not the case,’ Atwood added. 'In fact, Nathaniel thought that stripes were slimming, and he just really, really liked stars.’

Then, just last month came the well-publicised British study that suggested that a little drinking during pregnancy is healthy, and that children whose parents drank a little bit were in fact, if anything, slightly more intelligent than children whose mothers refrained entirely. One might think this new evidence would challenge the absolutism of our attitudes about drinking and pregnancy, the near-religious zeal with which we approach the subject, but it’s equally possible that it won’t actually have much effect. Our righteousness and morally charged suspicion that drinking even the tiniest bit will harm an unborn child runs deeper than rational discussion or science; we are primed for guilt and sacrifice, for the obsessive monitoring of the environment, for rampant moralism and reproach, even before the baby is born.

busyness continues . . .

… which means that I haven’t been able to blog here. I have managed, though, to post some quotes to my tumblelog. A poor substitute, I know, but hey, they’re pretty cool quotes.

I look forward to the day where studying biology is a prerequisite for a PhD in Classics, and biblical criticism can help round out your doctorate in evolutionary biology.