Alan Jacobs

On all sides we hear to-day of the love of our country, and yet anyone who has literally such a love must be bewildered at the talk, like a man hearing all men say that the moon shines by day and the sun by night. The conviction must come to him at last that these men do not realize what the word ‘love’ means, that they mean by the love of country, not what a mystic might mean by the love of God, but something of what a child might mean by the love of jam. To one who loves his fatherland, for instance, our boasted indifference to the ethics of a national war is mere mysterious gibberism. It is like telling a man that a boy has committed murder, but that he need not mind because it is only his son. Here clearly the word 'love’ is used unmeaningly. It is the essence of love to be sensitive, it is a part of its doom; and anyone who objects to the one must certainly get rid of the other. This sensitiveness, rising sometimes to an almost morbid sensitiveness, was the mark of all great lovers like Dante and all great patriots like Chatham. 'My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.’ No doubt if a decent man’s mother took to drink he would share her troubles to the last; but to talk as if he would be in a state of gay indifference as to whether his mother took to drink or not is certainly not the language of men who know the great mystery.

Until about 30 years ago, writers like [Graham] Greene were not at all accessible to the reading public; they did not turn up for signings at bookstores or allow themselves to be pimped by publicists or buttonholed by TV producers who promised fame and better sales. They existed in their work, in their biographical notes and in the usually outdated photos on their book jackets. Invisible, they were the more powerful for seeming forever elsewhere. These writers bewitched the imaginations of those of us who grew up in that period of glamour and solitude, and who wished to be writers ourselves.

We have learned to find our identity in our velocity. And that’s not just physically dangerous, but spiritually devastating.

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Lin employed an equally timeless form for the nearby Riggio-Lynch Chapel of 2004, a simple but beautifully crafted wooden structure whose subtly curving contours recall those of a boat, a reference that harks back to early Christian iconography of the church as a barque akin to that of Jesus and his apostles as they fished on the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, the architectural term “nave” — the main enclosure of a sanctuary—stems from the Latin navis (ship).

The Quiet Power of Maya Lin by Martin Filler | The New York Review of Books. Filler is so right about Maya Lin, but it’s curious that neither he nor his editors know that the primary reference of church-as-navis is to Noah’s ark. The Church is the ship of salvation, the instrument of God’s rescue of His people, as the Ark had been earlier.

I’m absolutist about these matters, I guess. I think universal rules for police should be:

• If someone is unarmed, you can’t execute him.
• If someone is behaving strangely, even extremely strangely, you can’t execute him.
• If you think that someone might possibly be armed, you can’t execute him.
• If someone refuses to obey your orders, you can’t execute him.
• If someone runs away from you, you can’t execute him.
• If you shoot at anyone in any of the above circumstances, you will be fired. (Maybe prosecuted too, but that's outside the scope of a police department.)
• If you find the above rules unfair, or are unable to follow them, you need to go into another line of work.

Do you remember those kids in high school who used to brag that they laughed while watching horror films? The impulse is almost scarier than the movies themselves. Cracking up at The Exorcist is possible only if you agree that jokes are indeed epitaphs on the death of feelings and you don’t mind committing emotional suicide in order to feel aloof and edgy. This is what I thought of when the audience snickered at the moment Kee unbuttons her robe and reveals that she is mysteriously, probably miraculously, pregnant. It was what I thought of when the audience went on tittering and gigging and hooting at dozens of other inappropriate points in the film. The shot of her swollen belly is one of the most beautiful in all of cinema. To laugh at it is like walking into a museum and pointing out the genitalia in Renaissance paintings, or belching along to Wagner at the Met. The first time I heard unexpected laughter I thought it was a fluke. There are a handful of grimly amusing moments, but no real belly-laugh material in this dystopian drama about the consequences of worldwide infertility. Eventually I found myself wondering whether these people were watching a different film. The only other possibility was that they were sociopaths who had never been to the movies before.

I want us to be free – just long enough – that I have time to tell my brothers and sisters who do not know Jesus and tell them about a deeper and wider freedom. I want to tell them about the truly good and free one who came to liberate us all, not only from the ongoing legacy of racism, but also brokenness that traps us all in our sins. I would love to tell them about the king who has reconciled all of us: Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic in his blood. But that message is hard to hear when you are afraid and discouraged. That message becomes nearly impossible to appreciate when you turn to Christians for help only to be told that your complaints are an exaggeration or are rooted in your own sin. It is heartbreaking to be told that you must earn the right to be treated like what you are: someone made in the image of God. When God’s people don’t love us, it makes it harder (humanly speaking) to hear and properly respond to the Gospel.