underwriting democracy
From an interview with James Davison Hunter:
In this tangle between very powerful institutions and very powerful cultural logics, there are serious problems that are deeply rooted. The great democratic revolutions of Western Europe and North America were rooted in the intellectual and cultural revolution of Enlightenment; the Enlightenment underwrote those political transformations. If America’s hybrid Enlightenment underwrote the birth of liberal democracy in the United States, what underwrites it now?
What is going to underwrite liberal democracy in the 21st century? To me, it’s not obvious. That’s the big puzzle I’m working through right now. But it bears on this issue of culture wars, because if there's nothing that we share in common — if there is no hybrid enlightenment that we share — then what are the sources we can draw upon to come together and find any kind of solidarity? …
I have this old-fashioned view that what we’re supposed to do is to understand before we take action, and that wisdom depends upon understanding. That basically makes me a conservative today — but it also makes me a progressive by conservative standards.
James is a friend, but still, it’s true: His work becomes more and more important, its prescience becomes more and more clear, as time goes by. I have recently been re-reading To Change the World and am really struck by the ways it anticipated all the pathologies that have wounded American Christianity in the past decade.
John Shelby Spong
John Shelby Spong is dead. If he had been an intelligent man, he would have developed more coherent and logical arguments against the Christian faith; if he had been a charitable man, he would have refrained from attempting to destroy the faith of Christians; if he had been an honest man, he would have resigned his orders fifty years or more ago. May God have mercy on his soul.
scholars
A scholar can never become a philosopher; for even Kant was unable to do so but, the inborn pressure of his genius notwithstanding, remained to the end as it were in a chrysalis stage. He who thinks that in saying this I am doing Kant an injustice does not know what a philosopher is, namely not merely a great thinker but also a real human being; and when did a scholar ever become a real human being? He who lets concepts, opinions, past events, books, step between himself and things – he, that is to say, who is in the broadest sense born for history – will never have an immediate perception of things and will never be an immediately perceived thing himself; but both these conditions belong together in the philosopher, because most of the instruction he receives he has to acquire out of himself and because he serves himself as a reflection and brief abstract of the whole world. If a man perceives himself by means of the opinions of others, it is no wonder if he sees in himself nothing but the opinions of others! And that is how scholars are, live and see.
— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”
On the one hand, your noble and essential work is being mocked. On the other hand, it’s being mocked by illiterate Nazis.
a church in crisis
First-century Athens, Greece, was just as intellectually averse to Christianity as twenty-first-century Athens, Georgia – and far more sexually “liberated” too. And the gospel went forth and the churches grew. The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigorous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings. The problem is not that they reject the idea that God could send anyone to hell but that, when they see the church covering up predatory behavior in its institutions, they have evidence that the church believes God would not send “our kind of people” to hell.
If people reject the church because they reject Jesus and the gospel, we should be saddened but not surprised. But what happens when people reject the church because they think we reject Jesus and the gospel? People have always left the church because they want to gratify the flesh, but what happens when people leave because they believe the church exists to gratify the flesh – in orgies of sex or anger or materialism? That’s a far different problem. What if people don’t leave the church because they disapprove of Jesus, but because they’ve read the Bible and have come to the conclusion that the church itself would disapprove of Jesus? That’s a crisis.
For those of us who would love to see genuine Christian renewal in America — and not just people deciding to call themselves “evangelical” because they support Donald Trump — Russell Moore’s voice is an absolutely essential one.
Last week I read Kate Shellnutt’s long and carefully reported piece on the conflicts at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, and afterwards something was vaguely nagging at my mind. After reading Russell Moore’s essay I finally figured out what it is: The entire controversy at BBC is essentially a struggle about which group gets to rebuke another group. People are fighting at church over their right to rebuke their sisters and brothers.
Why does the American church today “disapprove of Jesus”? There are many reasons, but I think the essential one, the one from which everything else flows, is this: Jesus tells us to worry about our own moral and spiritual condition rather than that of our neighbor. He tells me to attend to the log in my own eye before I worry about the speck in someone else’s. If my neighbor abuses me, I am to pray for him and bless him. Rather than thanking God that I am not like that [black person, homosexual, Trump supporter] over there, I am to pray “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.”
When Christians begin to obey, or just begin trying to obey, Jesus in these matters, then we’ll have taken the first and essential step towards restoring our legitimacy. But until we take the commandments of Jesus seriously, why should we expect anyone else to?
When you’re teaching Thomas Aquinas and are trying to fill in the theological background, you need a big board. (I misspelled homoousios, but oh well.)
Envoy
repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand
— "The Envoy of Mr. Cogito" by Zbigniew Herbert
numbers
The impacts of a society predicated on boundless economic growth via boundless sensory stimulation are at least in some ways measurable. Visit this website, for example, and you can see a real-time counter which will tell you just how much waste has been dumped around the world this year as a result of this way of living. At the time of writing, the counter is reading 1.4 billion tonnes. It’s only September.
We can enjoy our little towns here in the richer bits of the world because the waste we generate through our excitable purchases of big-screen tellies, lego sets, foreign holidays, cheap clothes, cheap food and all the rest of it always ends up somewhere else. The dioxins and PCBs go into the water and soil, the plastic goes into the oceans, the carbon dioxide goes into the air. Fifty million tonnes of ‘e-waste’ is shipped every year to the poorest countries on Earth, which are least equipped to deal with it. But then they’re not really supposed to deal with it: they’re supposed to keep it away from us. We don’t know what else to do with all this crap, so we — for example — ship 4000 tonnes of toxic waste, containing carcinogenic chemicals, to Nigeria, and just dump it on the beaches. The same way we dumped 79,000 tonnes of asbestos on the beaches in Bangladesh, and 40 million tonnes of our poisonous waste in just one small part of Indonesia. The same way we run our old ships up onto the beaches in China and India, and leave them for the locals to break up — if they can. The same way we dump nine million tonnes of plastic into the oceans every year.
I unequivocally support the point Kingsnorth is making here, but … I really dislike this kind of numerically bludgeoning rhetoric. The problem, as so often, involves scale. One point four billion metric tons of waste is obviously a lot … but is it, you know, a lot? How even to think about these matters? Wolfram Alpha tells me that the earth weighs 5.97×10^21 metric tons; in comparison to that 1.4 billion isn’t even a rounding error. The mind boggles at these digits, does it not?
What would be a reasonable amount of waste for seven billion people to produce, an amount that would indicate ecologically appropriate living? Whatever the answer is, any number expressing it would still seem massive to us. If you cited it readers would be horrified. Or maybe just numbed, as they are by these numbers.
Richard Wilbur was right to warn his imagined prophet against invoking “the long numbers that rocket the mind.” Similarly, Zbigniew Herbert’s Mr. Cogito reflects on the ways our attention is naturally drawn to smaller rather than larger tragedies — this, he thinks, is the inevitable, the human, “arithmetic of compassion.” A few photographs would serve Kingsnorth’s point better than the incomprehensible numbers he cites.
Very nice to see from Crossway these lovely new editions of some of Jim Packer’s books.
Mid-century modern lives on.
ebooks bad
This Ian Bogost essay on e-books is an oddity, in the sense that about a decade ago we had thousands of essays on this same theme, but have had very few since. That, I think, is because everything got hashed out back then as thoroughly as it is likely ever to be. I am not sure what Bogost’s essay adds to that long-ago conversation, but I know the chief thing it neglects: eyesight. Many people who love codex books (myself included) read e-books when the combination of poor eyesight and poor book design makes reading a given codex painful or even impossible.
R.I.P. Norm
You know, I think about my deathbed a lot.
What do you think about it?
I think I should never have purchased a deathbed in the first place.