Alan Jacobs

Pro-life rhetoric isn't the real issue for pro-choicers anyway. The bedrock pro-life view -- which, if you haven't figured it out already, I share -- is that abortion is the unjust killing of living human beings. Any expression of that view, any political action taken to advance it, is going to offend many pro-choicers, and could lead some people to violent acts. Pro-choicers who want pro-lifers to stop saying that abortion kills unborn children aren't objecting to the pro-life movement's rhetoric; they're objecting to its existence.

— Ramesh Ponnuru. This is exactly right, and should be read in conjunction with Ross Douthat’s recent post on the same subject.

Source: Amazing Micrographs Show What Cells Really Look Like | WIRED

Rod asks about “hermeneutical democracy” and one scholar’s insistence that Protestants “own their Protestantism” by accepting that they have no guide but their individual consciences. The hermeneutical challenges of Protestantism have been a regular concern of mine over the years — see for instance this essay from 2003:

When King James commissioned his Companies of Translators, the people most thoroughly educated in the various humanistic disciplines were also those most learned in the biblical tongues. The celebrated “poetic” or “literary” qualities of the KJV are a function of this long-lost union. But in the last two centuries the training of biblical scholars in what has come to be called the “grammatical-historical” method has assumed a character alien to the literary and rhetorical education rooted in the schools of the Roman Empire. A model of Christian learning shared — not altogether but to some degree — by Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin had virtually disappeared by the end of the eighteenth century.

This happened largely as a result of Protestant theologians’ responses to Catholic charges that they, lacking guidance and correction from a Magisterium, were liable to say pretty much anything about the Bible. The charge stung: What was to prevent this or that Protestant leader from offering a bizarre interpretation of some passage of Scripture and claiming as warrant for it the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? From the need to answer this charge arose the characteristic trait of Protestant biblical scholarship: an obsession with method. Method would be the Protestant scholar’s Magisterium — that is, his or her principle of constraint and limitation; therefore, ultimately, training in biblical exegesis would become training in the kinds of intellectual skills that could be described in methodological terms: grammar, textual history, historical philology, and so on. Sensitivity to metaphorical nuance is perforce not a part of this training; nor is general literary knowledge.

The elevation of method to magisterial principle was supposed to make it possible for scholars to discern, and then agree on, the meaning of biblical texts. Instead it merely uprooted them from Christian tradition and Christian practice — as Michael Legaspi has shown in a brilliant book — and left many of them unequipped to understand the literary character of biblical texts, while doing nothing to promote genuine agreement on interpretation. In fact, the transferring of the guild of interpreters from the Church to the University, given the University’s insistence on novelty in scholarship, ensured that no interpretative consensus would be forthcoming.

There really is no way to promote general agreement among Christians about the interpretation of Scripture without some doctrine of Holy Tradition.

In June, racist Dylann Roof massacred nine black Christians meeting for a mid-week Bible study. He hoped to launch a race war, as he explained in a manifesto you can read over at Mother Jones. The second paragraph of the manifesto begins, “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case.” He talks about all the media coverage of the case and how it radicalized him. Some in the media immediately linked the shooting in Colorado Springs to videos showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing human organ harvesting and trade as part of their abortion business. The implication — if not outright claim — is that people shouldn’t talk about what Planned Parenthood does, much less speak against the injustice of abortion, because some people might take such discussions the wrong way. But you may remember that nobody in the media suggested that they shouldn’t have highlighted the killing of Trayvon Martin for fear that some racist might be set off of by the discussions. And that’s a good thing, because the idea that the media shouldn’t cover news because someone might be so bothered by it that he goes on a rampage would be very stupid.

— Mollie Hemingway

This is an isochronic map – isochrones being lines joining points accessible in the same amount of time – and it tells a story about how travel was changing. You can get anywhere in the dark-pink section in the middle within five days – to the Azores in the west and the Russian city of Perm in the east. No surprises there: you’re just not going very far. Beyond that, things get a little more interesting. Within five to ten days, you can get as far as Winnipeg or the Blue Pearl of Siberia, Lake Baikal. It takes as much as 20 days to get to Tashkent, which is closer than either, or Honolulu, which is much farther away. In some places, a colour sweeps across a landmass, as pink sweeps across the eastern United States or orange across India. In others, you reach a barrier of blue not far inland, as in Africa and South America. What explains the difference? Railways.

— Time travel | Intelligent Life magazine

In 1904, more men of talent in Alabama than California — so at least some things haven’t changed.

— Rebecca Onion, Map of the Most Intellectual States in the Early-20th-Century US

… that political rhetoric leads to violence only when some people are talking. 

I might as well put this on record: 

1. I don't believe that there is a Second Amendment right to personal gun ownership; that's a politically motivated reading of the text. 
2. I'd like to see much stricter gun laws everywhere in America, even here in Texas. 
3. But stricter gun laws would do nothing at all to reduce the numbers of mass shootings; guns will remain obtainable by people who are willing to break the law, and those who plan to shoot and kill their fellow human beings aren't worried about that. 
4. Desperate, twisted, alienated people who want to be heard and heeded are given powerful incentives to murder by our media, including our social media. 
5. In the aftermath of mass shootings, people shout louder and louder about gun control as a way of distracting themselves and others from the real problem, which is insatiable curiositas. 

  via Steven Kawalit

I’m an edge case. I want an untangled web. I want everything I do to copy back to a single place, so I have one searchable log for each day’s thoughts, images, notes and activities. This is apparently Weird and Hermetic if not Hermitic.

I am building my monastery walls in preparation for the Collapse and the Dark Ages, damnit. Stop enabling networked lightbulbs and give me the tools to survive your zombie planet.

— Warren Ellis

This essay by Jacqueline Rose on the Oscar Pistorius trial is powerful and provocative, and I commend it to you without reservation. What follows is not, therefore, meant to deter you from reading it.

At several points in the essay Rose refers to a tattoo Pistorius wears on his back, which she refers to as “one line of a verse from Corinthians.” Here’s her fullest discussion of the tattoo and its context:

The full citation from Corinthians tattooed on Pistorius’s upper back reads:

I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air; I execute each stride with intent; I beat my body and make it my slave I bring it under my complete subjection To keep myself from being disqualified After having called others to the contest.

The line about making my body my slave is not in most translations from Corinthians, nor is subjection described as ‘complete’. Pistorius was raising the stakes.

A little research would have revealed to Rose, or to the editors of the LRB, that “the line about making my body my slave” is indeed in every translation of that text; it’s just that many translations are not that bluntly literal. A little attention would have suggested that the word "stride" makes no sense in the Pauline context, though it surely does in that of Pistorius. A little curiosity would have set them on the path to discovering what translation Pistorius used, and how (if) he modified it; and from there it would have been only a short step to asking what Christian groups or denominations prefer that translation; and that knowledge in turn might have led to something worth knowing about Oscar Pistorius.

But neither Rose nor the editors of the LRB were interested in any of that. They weren’t sufficiently curious about such matters even to discover that there are two books of the Bible that contain the word “Corinthians.”