Alan Jacobs

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(via Bookmarking Book Art — Leilei Guo | Books On Books)

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plansofarchitecture: Alberto Burri, Grande Cretto, 1984-2015, Gibellina, Sicily

To the extent that we look on our wounded division and blame only other parties, seeing no good in them and no fault in us, we have not yet come to that fullness of love, repentance, and unity in truth that characterizes the Christian life. “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in darkness” (1 John 2:9).

If the Roman Catholic Church, so many years after the Reformation, could claim its own share in Christian division, how can Anglicans not do the same?

I’ve been thinking a good bit lately about this passage from Julian Baggini’s review of Martha Nussbaum’s new book:

Unconditional forgiveness, in which repentance is not required, is not much better. It too sometimes “channels the wish for payback,” following revenge’s road of status by elevating the pardoner to the moral high ground. It is perhaps telling that Christianity often “juxtaposes an ethic of forgiveness with an ethic of spectacular retribution.” Nussbaum points to a fascinating passage in Paul’s “Twelfth Letter to the Romans” which makes this link explicit. Paul advises against revenge, not because it is wrong, but because we should “leave it to the wrath of God.” You should treat your enemy kindly, not to reward him, but to compound his punishment. “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Bold text my own. I checked Nussbaum’s text, and I think I see what happened. On page 77, Nussbaum introduces the relevant chapter by writing, “In Romans 12….” My suspicion is that Baggini had seen references to, for example, “2 Corinthians” or “1 Kings,” and knew that those numbers indicated separate “books,” and so assumed that Nussbaum was doing the same thing, with the number in a different place. Perhaps he assumed that Brits put the number at the beginning (12 Romans) and Americans at the end (Romans 12).

To be sure, the error might not be Baggini’s: he could have written “Romans 12” and had it changed by a copyeditor, and didn’t notice. Or noticed but thought the editor knew something he didn’t. Whose error it is doesn’t matter to me — though it’s interesting that nobody at the Prospect caught this — so much as the kind of error it is. It catches my attention because it’s the error of a person who isn’t afflicted by the kind of biblical illiteracy that people often comment on (failing to catch a biblical allusion in one of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches) but something deeper: an ignorance of even the basic shape of the Bible.

If you think that Paul wrote at least twelve letters to the Romans, how many letters do you think he wrote overall? How many books do you think are in the New Testament, assuming you know that the Christian Bible has two testaments? More generally, when you think about the Bible, what images and ideas present themselves to you?

Please understand, in asking these questions I am not in any way playing a gotcha game or reveling in the ignorance of wicked infidels. I am genuinely and deeply curious, in an anthropological kind of way, about how the Bible is imagined by people who just don’t have any clear idea what’s in it.

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nypl:

Enter the labyrinth, exit with your next read.

These and other trends have made me sensible of how different our circumstances are from those in which Neuhaus learned to speak as both a Christian and an intellectual, circumstances that were still to some degree in force when First Things was founded in 1990. As Christians, we have a place to stand—in the Church. But in this cultural moment our churches are anxious, ambivalent, and unsure (unlike mainline Protestantism in its heyday). Which means that as intellectuals, we have no solid ground.

Neuhaus always thought of himself as speaking from the center of what he liked to call the “American experiment.” I’m certainly patriotic, but I see myself speaking from the periphery. We are dissidents, not “intellectuals.”

— Speaking from the Peripheries | R. R. Reno | First Things. The distinction between intellectual and dissident strikes me as a very important one. So maybe the key question is not “How might Christian intellectuals become truly ‘public’ once again?” but rather “How might intelligent Christians faithfully and effectively play their role as dissidents — as something like the not-wholly-loyal opposition to the current power-knowledge regime?”

Sports metaphors are of course overused, but it occurs to me that one particular set of them — ones involving batting in baseball — are uniquely useful for delineating, especially in relation to writing, the many forms of failure. I just told someone that I thought Garrison Keillor’s Trump-thumping didn’t quite work, that he had taken a mighty swing but popped out to the second baseman. If I had a lower opinion of it, I might say that he swung for the fences but fouled it off his foot, or struck out swinging; if a higher one, that he flied out to the warning track. All of these options arise, in this particular case, from my sense that Keillor was trying to write the definitive put-down of Trump — that he was trying to hit a homer.

But of course batters don’t always try to hit homers: some of them are singles hitters, some of them look to walk a lot; occasionally one will be called upon to, or will decide to, bunt, and bunting can be done sacrificially or for a hit. The point being: batting in baseball offers us a remarkably varied vocabulary of aspiration and failure (or success). And that’s very useful for describing writing too.

Christopher Sykes, in his biography of his friend Evelyn Waugh, recalls how Waugh treated the soldiers under his command in World War II:

To the naturally weak he was as merciless as he had been in his bullying school days. I witnessed the spectacle many times and it always utterly disgusted me. It was useless to remonstrate as I sometimes did because he was always ready with a witty and plausibly logical defense.

This is the same man whose response to the death of an infant daughter was a brief note in his diary — “Poor little girl, she was not wanted” — and who would later taunt his older children by forcing them to watch him eat treats that he denied to them. “My children weary me,” he told his diary. “I can only see them as defective adults.” For one of his children he was simply “a figure to dodge” as completely as possible. For another, “The worst punishment our nannies would threaten us with was to be sent down to the library to see our father.” (He did, however, encourage his children to ride trains without paying on the grounds that as long as the Labour party was in charge England was “an occupied country.” Not that he had voted Conservative, mind you: “I have never found a Tory stern enough to command my respect.”)

When Nancy Mitford told him that he was scarcely an advertisement for Christianity, he replied, “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.” It is difficult to imagine how much worse he could have been without ending up in prison or the victim of murder. Sykes reports that during the war he and some other officers had to keep close watch on the men in their company to prevent them from killing Waugh. If the men had managed to do so, there might have been a slight loss to literature but probably an overall gain in the happiness of the human race.

Waugh is one of those converts in whom Catholics take great pride. If I were in their position, I would do everything in my power to prevent the world from finding out that he belonged to my communion. If the rightly administered sacraments are presumed to be instruments of grace, it appears that Waugh, at any rate, was invulnerable to their power. I would appreciate it if my Catholic brothers and sisters took the unremitting nastiness of the man more seriously. I have yet to hear one say that when Waugh took the Sacrament he did so unworthily, though I do not believe, given his gleeful and freely expressed hatred of almost everyone he knew,  that anyone could reasonably say that he did so worthily.

He believed that by becoming Catholic he had ensured his own salvation, and from that elevated seat taunted his friends who remained Outside: “Awful about your obduracy in schism and heresy,” he wrote to the Anglican John Betjeman. “Hell hell hell. Eternal damnation.” Only someone wholly unacquainted with Waugh’s views would think he was joking. Betjeman certainly didn’t.

What Jacobs doesn’t happen to mention, however, is the attitude of most Baby Boomers toward Christianity as One of the Things We Definitely Aren’t. That whole generation has defined themselves against their parents, and most of their parents were at least nominally Christian. So who wants to hear more from that quarter? Everybody knows what Christianity is, and says, and does. It’s boring and outmoded at best; oppressive and retrograde at worst. Buddhism or Hinduism? Exotically interesting.  Judaism? Well, if it’s Kabbalah, at least, it’s cool. Islam? Dangerous, and so it leads the evening news. Christianity, though? Yesterday’s news and good riddance.

Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown and author of the book How to Win at College, has interviewed hundreds of students about their college experience. Based those interviews and observation of his own students, Newport believes that those who chose majors simply to please their parents are more likely to give up or burn out. ‘It’s just harder to weather the hard times if you don’t have the intrinsic motivation,’ he said. You might not expect college freshmen to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. In the real world, most physics majors don’t become physicists, most psychology majors don’t become psychologists, and most English majors don’t become writers or teachers. You’ll find a surprising number of philosophy majors at hedge funds and lots of political-science majors at law firms. I was an American studies major. Among chief executives of the largest corporations, there are roughly as many engineers and liberal arts majors, in total, as there are undergraduate majors in business, accounting and economics combined. Indeed, one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields. 'Choosing a major is not choosing a career,’ says Jeff Selingo, author of There Is Life After College.