Alan Jacobs

Just posted an update to my Buy Me a Coffee page.

In many of my courses I ask my students to explicate certain key passages from the texts we read — to dig in to the details, to see how the passages do their work. Here’s a selection from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago — the chapter called “The Ascent” — that some of my students are writing about: 

You are ascending…. 

Formerly you never forgave anyone. You judged people without mercy. And you praised people with equal lack of moderation. And now an understanding mildness has become the basis of your uncategorical judgments. You have come to realize your own weakness — and you can therefore understand the weakness of others. And be astonished at another's strength. And wish to possess it yourself. 

The stones rustle beneath our feet. We are ascending…. 

With the years, armor-plated restraint covers your heart and all your skin. You do not hasten to question and you do not hasten to answer. Your tongue has lost its flexible capacity for easy oscillation. Your eyes do not flash with gladness over good tidings nor do they darken with grief.

For you still have to verify whether that's how it is going to be. And you also have to work out — what is gladness and what is grief. 

And now the rule of your life is this: Do not rejoice when you have found, do not weep when you have lost. 

Your soul, which formerly was dry, now ripens from suffering. And even if you haven't come to love your neighbors in the Christian sense, you are at least learning to love those close to you.

Those close to you in spirit who surround you in slavery. And how many of us come to realize: It is particularly in slavery that for the first time we have learned to recognize genuine friendship!

And also those close to you in blood, who surrounded you in your former life, who loved you — while you played the tyrant over them….  

Here is a rewarding and inexhaustible direction for your thoughts: Reconsider all your previous life. Remember everything you did that was bad and shameful and take thought — can't you possibly correct it now? 

Yes, you have been imprisoned for nothing. You have nothing to repent of before the state and its laws. 

But … before your own conscience? But … in relation to other individuals?

From a 1999 interview with the members of The Police:  

Sting: People thrashing out three chords didn't really interest us musically. Reggae was accepted in punk circles and musically more sophisticated, and we could play it, so we veered off in that direction. I mean let's be honest here, "So Lonely" was unabashedly culled from "No Woman No Cry" by Bob Marley. Same chorus. What we invented was this thing of going back and forth between thrash punk and reggae. That was the little niche we created for ourselves.

Stewart Copeland: It was also the first time Sting said 'screw the punk formula'. Sting started playing the song and I distinctly remember Andy and I making farting noises and going, 'Yeah, right'. But then he got to that steaming chorus, we looked at each other and realised that maybe we should give it a try. In spite of our kerfuffling, Sting persevered and made us create something new.

Sting: The other nice thing about playing a reggae groove in the verses was that you could leave holes in the music. I needed those holes because, initially, I had a hard time singing and playing at the same time. So if we had a signature in the band it was...

Andy Summers: Big holes?

If you read Tim Keller’s books or listen to his sermons, some things will (or should) become quite clear to you:

1. He thinks of himself first and foremost and always as a pastor.
2. His job as a pastor, as he understands it, is to make disciples of Jesus Christ, and then form and strengthen and encourage those disciples.
3. When trying to understand how to do that, Keller – as a conservative Protestant with a high regard for Scripture – turns to the Bible.
4. There he sees Paul on the Areopagus reasoning patiently with the intellectuals of Athens; there he sees Paul counsel the followers of Jesus at Colossae to “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience”; there he sees Paul tell the church in Galatia that “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control”; there he hears Jesus bless the meek and the poor in spirit.
5. He draws the conclusion – again, as someone with a high view of Scripture – that this counsel is counsel for us as much as it was for its original audience.
6. So he teaches his congregation and his readers accordingly.

If he is wrong so to teach now, then he was also wrong thirty years ago. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever; in him there is no shadow of turning; therefore the lives of His faithful disciples, while they may vary in details according to circumstance or personality type, will always take the same essential form.

Those who say that Keller’s message is not suited to this political moment, that it is not an effective political strategy, are therefore, I believe, laboring under a category error. Keller’s pastoral role has not been to articulate a political strategy, but to make disciples. If he is correct in thinking that the counsel of Scripture is indeed counsel for all of us, and if the passages I cite above are indeed in the Bible, then it doesn’t matter whether obeying them is politically effectual (according to whatever calculus of effectiveness you happen to employ) or not. The task of serious Christians is to become Jesus’s disciples, to become formed in the image of Christ – including Christ in His suffering – whether that “works” or not.

That’s never easy, but it has the merit of being simple. So there’s no need for me, as a Christ-follower, to raise my wetted finger to test the prevailing cultural winds. I know what I’m supposed to do and to be. And woe unto me if I don’t.

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UPDATE: It occurs to me that I should call back to this post from last year. Like Diogenes with his lantern, I’m looking for one critic of Tim Keller who shows some awareness that Christians are commanded by their Lord to act in certain ways and to refrain from acting in others. To think only in terms of what is effective or strategic is to fight on the Devil’s home ground. As Screwtape said to Wormwood about the junior tempter’s patient: “He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily ‘true’ or ‘false’, but as ‘academic’ or ‘practical’, ‘outworn’ or ‘contemporary’, ‘conventional’ or ‘ruthless’. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.” Christians who evaluate Keller not by asking whether his message is faithful to Jesus’s message but rather by asking whether it’s suited for this moment are inadvertently following Screwtape’s advice.

Julia Evans makes really cool zines for people who want to know more about computer programming, or, more generally, about being a power user of computers. Her most recent zine is called How DNS Works, and it’s excellent — plus, there are some leftover pages about registering and maintaining your own domain. For example:

Other images with more detail here.

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a big fan of owning your online turf — or coming as close to it as you can get — for reasons I explain in detail in this essay. Evans’s zine-within-a-zine about domain registration and maintenance does a great job of explaining exactly how it works — and in the process, I hope, makes it seem less intimidating than it otherwise might.

In David Thomson’s The Big Screen, largely a history of movies, there’s a chapter on television that contains a sentence, a simple and straightforward sentence that’s nonetheless worthy of serious and extended reflection: “This book is not interrupted every sixteen pages by a cluster of advertisements.”