Alan Jacobs

… When I think about the larger context of all this, I am always reminded of something Lewis says in a preface to Mere Christianity: that he got the strongest support and commendation for his project from Christians of all types who loved and were faithful to their own tradition. The deeper the Methodist got into Methodism, and the deeper the Catholic got into Catholicism, and the deeper the Orthodox got into Orthodoxy, the closer they got to one another. It was the people who stood at or near the periphery of their own tradition who were most suspicious about historic, orthodox, “mere” Christianity.

So I don’t think any particular tradition, whether Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox, will survive the coming attacks unless it goes deep into its own resources; and I think if it does go deep into its own resources, it will thrive, in character and substance if not in sheer numbers. But this will not happen at the level of any tradition as a whole; it will happen at the level of the parish, the local community. Right now, I don’t see such “going deep” to be any more likely in one tradition than another. And I don’t think it will ever be the norm.

The Christian communities that thrive will

• be radically Christ-centered always;
• refuse to be therapeutic, but rather emphasize the worship we owe to the God who made and redeemed us;
• connect imaginatively and substantively with Christians throughout the past and around the world;
• be open to all, but reserve leadership to those who are willing to commit to radical obedience;
• turn the other cheek and go cheerfully on when attacked by the world; and
• recognize these practices in other communities, even those outside their tradition.

… that the Chicago Tribune’s editorial on the current Wheaton College kerfuffle is considerably more charitable and fair-minded than the bloviations of some prominent “liberal” Christians. 

The process whereby ‘faith and works’ become a stock gag in the commercial theatre is characteristic of that whole tragic farce which we call the history of the Reformation. The theological questions really at issue have no significance except on a certain level, a high level, of the spiritual life; they could have been fruitfully debated only between mature and saintly disputants in close privacy and at boundless leisure. Under those conditions formulae might possibly have been found which did justice to the Protestant — I had almost said the Pauline — assertions without compromising other elements of the Christian faith. In fact, however, these questions were raised at a moment when they immediately became embittered and entangled with a whole complex of matters theologically irrelevant, and therefore attracted the fatal attention both of government and the mob. When once this had happened, Europe’s chance to come through unscathed was lost. It was as if men were set to conduct a metaphysical argument at a fair, in competition or (worse still) forced collaboration with the cheapjacks and the round-abouts, under the eyes of an armed and vigilant police force who frequently changed sides.

— C. S. Lewis, from Poetry and Prose in the Sixteenth Century. See also: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"

I have no opinions on controversies in the evangelical Christian world — including those concerning the college where I was employed for many years — about which I have access to extremely limited, and therefore obviously insufficient, evidence. This stance appears to distinguish me from almost everyone.

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“1484”] Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds over Utah[/caption]

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“600”] Money bags, collected by Ben Schott’s grandfather[/caption]

These are really well done, as opposed to those.

My colleague Philip Jenkins on the extremely violent and politically disrupted era in which Jesus was born.

Richardson and Levy stand on opposite sides of a busy road, watching technology speed past towards a clouded horizon. If the future of sex (as all arrows seem to point) is in robotics, then Richardson is right: it requires a thoughtful discussion about the ethics of gender and sex. But while she identifies the relationships that appear to be emerging as modelled on sex work – the robot as passive, bought, female; the man as emotion-free and sex-starved – surely rather than calling for a ban on them, to forlornly try stalling technology, the pressure should be to change the narrative. To use this new market to explore the questions we have about sex, about intimacy, about gender.

Source: Sex, love and robots: is this the end of intimacy? | Technology | The Guardian. It's fascinating, in a deeply depressing sort of way, to listen to people trying to debate the ethical implications of sex with robots when they* have almost no moral categories or moral vocabulary to work with. Levy: "One has to accept that sexual mores advance with time, and morality with it." (Or, as the poet put it, "Whatever is, is right.") Richardson: It’s all about “hyper-capitalist societies driven by neo-liberal ideas” — so call in the therapists! (Yes, of course, modern psychotherapy has nothing to do with hypercapitalism and neoliberalism.) Our fearless journalist, Eva Wiseman: Um ... let's "change the narrative" and ... um ... "explore the questions we have." Or whatever. So confusion. Such flounder.

*The people, not the robots. The robots may have much better moral algorithms, for all I know.