[gallery] Mat Bingham, the badgers and foxes of Cutlers Rough
As women have taken greater positions of leadership in the United States, they have also left a leadership vacuum behind them. In middle-class, highly educated communities, women may be busier and more tired than their mothers and grandmothers once were, but they mostly figure out ways to advocate for their kids at school-board meetings or volunteer to chaperone a class trip to the zoo. The people who have suffered most aren’t white and well-off; they’re lower income, poorly educated, and largely disconnected from the rich network of membership-based associations that used to provide both a local sense of community and a national voice in politics. Women in these positions have lost access to one of their only means of gaining leadership skills. And while many of their educated, wealthier peers now have alternatives to the suffocating housewife’s life that so enraged Betty Friedan seven decades ago, some experience it as an opposite kind of suffocation: a never-ending, ladder-climbing work life, the height of which is making money for someone else rather than building a world in which they’re invested.
pigeonholes
One of the most frequent comments I’ve heard in response to my essay in Harper’s is that it’s self-refuting: If a Christian intellectual is writing for such a prominent magazine then the problem Jacobs seeks to identify is either non-existent or minor. To that I have two answers, one short and one longish:
Short: A handful of swallows do not a summer make.
Longish: What was Jacobs allowed to write, as a Christian, about in Harper’s? Answer: Christians. I could have written about other things for the magazine — and indeed I have, at least for the website. (That was originally going to be a piece for the magazine, but it got bumped.) But I was not writing there in Christian terms. And in general I think that’s how it goes: consider, for instance, my friend Ross Douthat, who is welcome to write (even in the New York Times!) as a Christian, as long as he is writing about the Pope or the church more generally. When he writes about politics he’s expected to write as a conservative. I don’t say that he keeps always to his pigeonholes; but usually he does, and I suspect that that’s an unspoken condition of his employment. The notion that the intellectual resources of Christianity might be useful in reflecting on politics — or technology, or the arts, or engineering, or war, or climate change — and useful not only to Christians but to everyone — that’s a long-lost notion indeed. We generally assume that on any given issue of social import there might be a socialist take, or a feminist take, or a take rooted in the experience of a particular ethnic identity, that we’d benefit from hearing; but a Christian take? Not typically one of the options. There are no prominent Christian intellectuals addressing whatever happens to concern the body politic in a distinctively Christian way and for a general audience.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Stanley Fish commented (a passage I cite in my article): “If you persuade liberalism that its dismissive marginalizing of religious discourse is a violation of its own chief principle, all you will gain is the right to sit down at liberalism’s table where before you were denied an invitation; but it will still be liberalism’s table that you are sitting at, and the etiquette of the conversation will still be hers.” A good warning, and the history of Christianity is littered with examples of Christians editing out the prophetic elements of their faith in order to meet the etiquette of various tables of power. But it’s also true that only those who have a seat at the table can hope to shape, gently and patiently, its etiquette.
So it seems to me that Christians can either look for ways to get back to that table or accept their exile from it and make the best of the possibilities that exile affords. (Learning to be dissidents rather than intellectuals.) But the claim that Christians really are comfortably seated at liberalism’s table seems to be an unsustainable one.
If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. Christian leaders seem to think that they need more distraction to counter the distraction. Their services have degenerated into emotional spasms, their spaces drowned with light and noise and locked shut throughout the day, when their darkness and silence might actually draw those whose minds and souls have grown web-weary. But the mysticism of Catholic meditation — of the Rosary, of Benediction, or simple contemplative prayer — is a tradition in search of rediscovery. The monasteries — opened up to more lay visitors — could try to answer to the same needs that the booming yoga movement has increasingly met.
[gallery] rickinmar:
Monticello…..designed by Thomas Jefferson, and drawn for him by Robert Mills in 1803. Collection of Massachusetts Historical Society
[gallery columns=“1” size=“large” ids=“16735”]
Illustration from an article on how to tell if you’re a jerk. When I saw that image I had a sudden vivid memory from my teenage years, when I worked for a B. Dalton Bookseller in my home town of Birmingham — an experience I wrote about here. One very busy, but also rainy, Saturday at the height of the Christmas rush, my co-worker Morris Styles and I left the mall for lunch and went to a nearby Mexican restaurant. When we returned we couldn’t find a decent parking place and had to park in an auxiliary lot a long, long walk from the mall. As we trudged back in the rain we came across a car — I believe it was a pimped-out Camaro — parked like the one above, except it covered at least three spots. Morris paused to contemplate it. Then he bent down to unscrew the caps on the valve stems of the car’s tires, furled his umbrella so he could clearly see its pointed tip, and employed this improvised instrument to let every bit of air out of all four tires. Then he opened his umbrella again and we silently returned to the bookstore.
humility, shame, etc.
I want to follow up, briefly, on yesterday’s post.
The presiding spirit of the ESV, from its beginning to its conclusion, is J. I. Packer. Packer just turned 90, and, as a result of macular degeneration, can no longer read. Since he has always written at least his early drafts by hand, and since travel can be extremely difficult for people who can’t see, he has called a halt to his career in ministry — or rather, he feels that God has called a halt to it. This of course means also an end to his work on the ESV.
Given Packer’s strong leadership at every stage of the project, it is difficult to imagine how he might be replaced — especially since several other members of the translation committee are near or beyond retirement age.
Yet Stanley E. Porter and David I. Yoon insist, repeatedly, in their original post and in the comments, that the only possible explanation for cessation of work on the ESV is that the translators believe “there is no room to improve or change their product” and that “they think of themselves as infallible translators.” The behavior of Packer and his colleagues is therefore “inappropriate,” “hubristic,” “manipulative”; the “whole enterprise smacks of incredible arrogance”; they need “lessons in … humility.” To sum up: “Shame on them”!
In response, I want to say two things. First, I hope that, should Porter and Yoon serve the church as well and as long as Packer has, even if they have made mistakes — in translation, for instance —, they’ll be granted more charity. (Any charity at all would, of course, be more.) And second, I hope that if they are so blessed, they’ll pause for a moment to remember how they treated Jim Packer.
My own kind of incrementalism draws on a different attitude than a lot of what you hear on the right and the left for the past few years. I am not of the view that we are at an abyss and that if we don’t take drastic action immediately everything will fall apart. I’m of the view that we’re failing to thrive and that we’re allowing too many people to live lives that don’t enable them to flourish. That’s different. That means we could be doing a lot better. To me, the great tragedy is that we just allow this to happen. There are a lot of people on both sides of our politics who think in much more drastic, cataclysmic ways about this situation. They’ll say, ‘This election, if this doesn’t go our way, there’s no turning back.’ It seems to me that what it means to be a Burkean conservative is just not to believe that.