excerpt from my Sent folder: on Constantinianism
[in response to an email from a reader of this essay]
But in answer to your question — “isn’t this a better state of affairs?” — I’d like split the question into two vectors.
Is it better for us, for American Christians? In many ways, yes. Being severed from the arrogance and complacency that afflicted us in the Constantinian era is usefully humbling. (By the way, I too like Lewis much better than Niebuhr, and I think a main reason for that is that Lewis knew he was living in a post-Constantinian world and Niebuhr didn’t.)
But is it better for the world, for the saeculum? I tend to think not. What the Athenians said to Paul on the Areopagus (“We will hear more from you about all this”) is a heck of a lot better than what we hear from Rorty (“The theists can talk, but we don’t have to listen”). Sometimes, at least, people who pretend to listen can end up actually listening; but if they refuse to listen at all I don’t know how they can be reached.
So we need to be always striving to find ways to be heard without thinking that we’re owed a hearing.
[gallery] paperholm:
Crossing to Paperhom. (detail)
The exhibition Alt-w: Blush Response, featuring new work from Paperholm, is open now on the Travelling Gallery outside The Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh before touring Scotland over the next four months.
The Watchmen
Half a century ago, such figures existed in America: serious Christian intellectuals who occupied a prominent place on the national stage. They are gone now. It would be worth our time to inquire why they disappeared, where they went, and whether — should such a thing be thought desirable — they might return.
[gallery] robertogreco:
Four crows flying in a snowstorm, Maki Sozan, Taishô era–Shôwa era, 20th century
[gallery] untappedcities:
NYC That Never Was: Trinity Church Gets Eclipsed by a Massive Skyscraper http://bit.ly/185UA7w
Slavery in New York
We have it so firmly fixed in our minds that slavery was a southern thing that it seems intuitively wrong for it to have been a feature of northern city life in the 18th century. But it was. The Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam held slaves on the legal model they had developed in other Dutch outposts, from Brazil to Indonesia, which allowed for slaves in some cases to save towards their own manumission. At the British take-over in the 1670s, this was replaced by a more straightforward chattel-slave régime, in which the liberties of the white citizen were thought to be, if anything, enhanced by his possession of human property over which he had near-total discretion. By 1746, of New York’s total population of around 7000 people, 1000-1500 were slaves.
