Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special beneficent agreement would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.
Uninhabitable parts of the earth–the sea and the deserts–divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally. The inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts (for instance, of the Barbary Coast) in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts (for instance, the Bedouin Arabs) who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposed to natural law, even though it extends the right of hospitality, i.e., the privilege of foreign arrivals, no further than to conditions of the possibility of seeking to communicate with the prior inhabitants. In this way distant parts of the world can come into peaceable relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. Thus the human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world citizenship.
But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world.
Ahmed
There are many, many things that could be said about Ahmed Mohamed’s experience, but the most important one, I think, is this: the staff at his school continue to believe that the most reasonable and appropriate thing they could have done when they saw Ahmed’s clock is to call the police and have the boy taken away in handcuffs and interrogated. Not talk to Ahmed, or ask him serious questions about the device he made, or warn him that such a thing could easily be misinterpreted, or contact his parents and get them involved … nope. Call the cops, cuff him, interrogate him.
[gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson:
Lesser Ury (Germany 1861-1931)
Abendstimmung am Grunewaldsee - Evening at Grunewaldsee (1910s)
oil on canvas 115.5 x 85.4 cm
The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy. Apple has simply enabled us, the users who are fed up with this crap, to do something about it. If aggressive content blocking were enabled out of the box, by default, I could see saying the result is “because of Apple”. But it’s not. What’s about to happen is thus because of us, the users.
God, endow the king with your own justice, his royal person with your righteousness, that he may govern your people rightly and deal justly with your oppressed ones. … May he give judgement for the oppressed among the people and help to the needy; may he crush the oppressor. … For he will rescue the needy who appeal for help, the distressed who have no protector. He will have pity on the poor and the needy, and deliver the needy from death; he will redeem them from oppression and violence and their blood will be precious in his eyes.
(via triadic)
[gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson:
Max Ackermann (Germany 1887-1975)
Weisse Linien spielen - Play, White Lines (1946)
oil on cardboard 55 x 37.7 cm
An Unprofessional Review
Ashley Null’s review of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer is really irresponsible work. Let me briefly explain.
Null writes that Jacobs “welcomes the rise of the Oxford Movement, since the ‘flamboyantly emotional and wholly word-based’ approach to spirituality which preceded it could only be ’effective in the short term’ but in the long run was ‘disastrous’ (127) — a conclusion so many evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail have reached in our own day.” He describes this as my “having happily nailed [my] colors to the mast” — my Anglo-Catholic colors.
But here’s what I actually wrote:
The Tractarians believed that the evangelicals pursued this goal [of the spiritual renewal of the English people] by wholly inadequate means, and that the evident waning of evangelical energy and influence in the first decades of the nineteenth century demonstrated this inadequacy. For Newman and his confederates, Whitefield’s neglect of the traditional formal worship of the church in favor of a flamboyantly emotional and wholly word-based model of spirituality may have been effective in the short term, but in the long had been disastrous. Even Wesley’s attachment to formal worship had been deficient; his followers were far more neglectful. The evangelicals, like some of the seeds in Jesus’s parable of the sower, had sprung up quickly, but “when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away” (Matthew 13:6).
Quite obviously, then, I have not nailed my colors to the Anglo-Catholic mast: I am describing the Anglo-Catholics’ own view of things (“the Tractarians believed” … “For Newman and his confederates”). How Null came to the conclusion that views I so clearly mark as belonging to others are my own, I cannot imagine.
In fact, while I strive throughout the book not to take sides in the various Anglican controversies but to represent everyone as even-handedly as possible, at the end of that same chapter I couldn’t refrain from expressing some concern about the Anglo-Catholic way:
All this was done in professed and usually genuine obedience to the Ornaments Rubric, but the practices nevertheless can feel quite distant from Cranmer’s belief in the power of words to convey theological truth, and his consequent insistence that priests should enunciate their prayers clearly and “in a loud voice.” The auditory churches of the Restoration era did much to capture this impulse, even as they neglected much of the ceremonial power of the pre-Reformation church, but in justifiably seeking to restore those ceremonies, the Ritualists may have erred in the opposite direction. They transformed Cranmer’s powerful words into a kind of ambient music, often heard without acknowledgment, received aesthetically but not necessarily with the ear of understanding.
Like C. S. Lewis, I prefer to think of myself as “a very ordinary layman … not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else,” but if I were forced to describe myself as belonging to some wing of Anglicanism, I’d call myself a high-church evangelical — an echo of John Wesley’s self-description. I am certainly not an Anglo-Catholic.
Yet Null, whom I have never met and who clearly knows nothing about me, confidently states that “Jacobs considers Anglo-Catholics to be the true guardians of the Anglican prayer book tradition. He’s a member of their tribe.” And then he reads my entire book in light of that assumption.
Criticize my scholarship or thought, by all means! This is what scholars do. But to claim to divine the inner lives and unexpressed beliefs of writers is unprofessional in the extreme.
[gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson:
Fernand Léger (France 1881-1955)
Stairway (1925)
oil on canvas 55.5 x 46.7 cm
[gallery] lawrenceleemagnuson:
Max Weber (1881-1961)
Chinese Restaurant (1915)
oil, charcoal, and collaged paper on linen 101.6 × 122.2 cm
Whitney Museum of American Art, USA
