Alan Jacobs

If we wish men to practise virtue, it is worth while trying to make them love virtue, and feel it an object in itself, and not a tax paid for leave to pursue other objects. It is worth training them to feel, not only actual wrong or actual meanness, but the absence of noble aims and endeavours, as not merely blamable but also degrading: to have a feeling of the miserable smallness of mere self in the face of this great universe, of the collective mass of our fellow creatures, in the face of past history and of the indefinite future the poorness and insignificance of human life if it is to be all spent in making things comfortable for ourselves and our kin, and raising ourselves and them a step or two on the social ladder.

— John Stuart Mill at the University of Edinburgh (1867)

I probably ought to be deeply sympathetic to this this post by Jay Nordlinger. I didn’t come from a background as impoverished as the high-powered lawyer Nordlinger knows, but my circumstances were significantly humbler than almost anyone I know in my line of work. So if I wanted to bristle when people talk about “white privilege,” I could — and sometimes I’m tempted, especially when people who attend Ivy League schools want to lecture me about it. And Nordlinger is right that such privilege is unevenly distributed, and that that is not recognized nearly often enough.

But here’s the thing: I have no doubt that being white has helped me enormously in my academic career. Once I learned to sand off some of the sharper corners of my redneck accent and put on some decent professional clothes, no one could know anything about how I grew up unless I told them. The differences in my social class and background became invisible and inaudible; and that’s a major benefit when you’re, say, applying for jobs. Just ask yourself: Would things have gone the same way for that lawyer Nordlinger met if he had been black? I’m not confident they would have.

Sometimes it seems to me that there are really only two types of Christian books: Platitudes and Planners. The Platitudes tell us with great earnestness what everyone already knows and no one would contest: that the secret to the Christian life is to love God with all our heart not just part of it; that one of the ways we demonstrate our love for God is by caring for His creation; that we do damage to our Christian witness unless we show respect for all persons. The problem with the Platitudes is not that they are wrong, but that they are uselessly correct. They tell us what we already know, but skillfully (or in some cases not so skillfully) avoid the sticky wicket of how exactly we’re supposed to live up to the things that we know to be true.

The problem with the Planners is just the opposite. The Planners have the virtue of acknowledging that putting our beliefs and convictions into practice is the really hard part of the Christian life, but they are relentlessly (sometimes insanely) cheerful about this. They tell us that we just need to organize ourselves properly and follow an invariant sequence of simple steps in order to do and be everything that Jesus wants us to do and be. For the Planners, Christian life is the simplest thing there is: it just requires … planning.

My fellow Christians seem to have an endless appetite for both Platitudes and Planners. Platitude-pushers seem to do especially well on Twitter: if you want to get yourself tens of thousands of followers, just utter banal words of exhortation, challenge, or encouragement with an air of profundity (and, of course, in fewer than 140 characters). The prophets of planning tend to have enormously popular Facebook pages, and make lucrative careers of speaking before very large audiences.

The Christian writers who are serious enough to get beyond platitudes, but also honest enough to acknowledge the inevitable vagaries of Christian living and the consequent limitations of our organizational impulses, are hard-to-find. In more than 30 years of reading Christian writers I have found only a few of them. They are pearls of great price.

At some point I’ll make a list of the ones who have meant the most to me. Ordinarily I hate doing that kind of thing, but it might be that making such a list will help me to see what they have in common.

For now, most French intellectuals are offering their rote prayers to the French way of things, saying that the shock of the Paris attacks means that French values must be deepened. But after so much investment — financial, political, and spiritual — in these universal values and the European project, what will happen if Islam reveals them to be as parochial and historically contingent as the singing of La Marseillaise? What steps into the void when the gentle gods of French universalism die as an irrelevance?

— Michael Brendan Dougherty. This is a powerful and necessary question. The whole point of "Enlightenment values" — the sole reason for preferring them to others — is that they are supposed to be universal rather than merely local, and permanent rather than "historically contingent." There is no place in the narrative of the French Enlightenment for going back, for finding the supposedly universal and permanent inadequate to human needs.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“780”] Processional cross. Bronze, tin, gold, amber, oak (now reconstructed around a modern core). Tully Lough, Co. Roscommon, Ireland, AD 700–900. On loan to the British Museum from the National Museum of Ireland.[/caption]

The customer is always right.

The Message: Our story is pretty incoherent, but we know you’ll forgive us because we have, in choosing our characters, ticked every possible box of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity (but the smartest and bravest one is the white guy, don’t forget that).

The Memory Palace: This is a podcast for people who love history, as long as by “loving history” you mean looking for people in the past who anticipate all of our most progressive values, so we can praise them while denigrating everyone who did not see the universe precisely as we do.

The Hidden Brain: Today we’re going to share with you some absolutely fascinating, amazing, brilliant research about the human brain that will be retracted in a few weeks, but you’ll never hear that from us.

Gin and Innovation: We talk to some really interesting people, but if you want to hear those interesting people you’re going to have to spend at least ten minutes listening to us ramble incoherently about the weather, how we’re feeling, and what we’re drinking (and don’t expect any editing, either).

TLDR: We don’t do stories about anyone we can’t feel really virtuous for sneering at.

Welcome to Night Vale: You people liked the jokes and riffs we did in the first two episodes so much that we just kept doing them for the next 75.

Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything: If you can’t tell how charmingly quirky I am by seeing how I spell my first name, just listen to my unbelievable caricature of a hipster voice for ten seconds, if you can bear it for that long.

[caption id=“attachment_15264” align=“aligncenter” width=“362”] Malcolm and me in our old house in Wheaton. I miss that spot — it was a pleasant place to work.[/caption]

I’m at the age at which articles like this profile of Michael Walzer are terrifying. Walzer’s scholarly and writerly career has effectively outlived his reputation. He can still get published, but no one under a certain age is paying attention. I’m about 25 years younger than Walzer, but I already can tell that there are plenty of people who have no interest in what I am saying because, and only because, of my age. I think this concerns me primarily because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

On the other hand: if you know that your audience is intrinsically and necessarily limited, why not forget about trying to increase its size? Why not just say whatever you think and take the consequences, even if the consequences are confinement to a “fit audience though few”?

It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down anyplace — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — anyplace where radicals are being inspired. The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are, because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor, in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities.

So whatever facility is being used — it’s not just a mosque — any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at.

That's Marco Rubio. I'm so sick of these damned liberals who have nothing but contempt for freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Thank God we have sound conservative Presidential candidates who respect the Constitution.