Alan Jacobs

Evangelical theology cannot be ‘pro-gay’ – but neither can it be ‘pro-straight’. As I understand it evangelical theology is, or should be, opposed to all idolatries indifferently. This is precisely because it is, or should be, ‘pro-human’. I’ve argued before that classical evangelical practices of holiness in the nineteenth century involved profound subversions of then-standard ideas of masculinity and femininity. There is plenty of good scholarship on the reconstructions of femininity away from the domestic sphere into political and social activism. The reconstructions of masculinity away from celebrations of machismo, violence, and alcohol consumption and towards a more submissive, gentle, family-oriented life have not been quite so well studied. But they too are clear. Evangelicalism in its classical forms undermined and reconstructed the culturally normal gender roles of the day; it will do the same in our day, if it has an adequate grasp of the gospel.

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We lost our oldest child, our daughter Anna, suddenly in April 2008 at the age of 27; our other three daughters and three sons lost their beloved sister. Two months later, a longtime, long-distance friend of my husband was visiting us. As we sat together on our screened porch after dinner, he confided that he had been so shocked when he first received the news of Anna’s death in an accident halfway around the world that he almost didn’t respond at all. What immobilized him initially was the unimaginable thought of such harm coming to his own oldest daughter.

But he had gathered himself up and sent an eloquent letter to us, accompanied by one of the most beautifully specific gifts we have ever received – a gift rich with profound meaning. We were so moved at the time; even now, this powerful symbol and the thin stuff of words never fails to bring comfort and provide a window into that greater life. “What if,” I mused with him that evening, “you had kept silent? What part of us might not have mended, or been carried even for that day?” I know that my husband and I have survived the pressing weight of this profound grief in large part because of the grace of God conveyed through those who have gracefully moved toward us and chosen to sit alongside us.

How much grace do we withhold when we hold back? How much more might this suffering soul, this wounded Body, this broken world be healed if we who belong to Christ would simply move toward instead of holding back, or even retreating, in the face of anguish? How often do we respond not in any sort of “fullness of time,” but only at our convenience, restrained by our measured degree of comfort, if at all? Sometimes I wish He didn’t trust us so much. Sometimes I wish He didn’t entrust us with so much.

I willingly accept the ascendancy of the object which the artist has conceived and which he lays before my eyes; I then abandon myself unreservedly to the emotion which in him and in me springs from a same beauty, from a same transcendental in which we communicate. But I refuse to accept the ascendancy of an art which contrives suggestive means by which to seduce my subconscious, I resist an emotion which the will of a man seeks to impose upon me. The artist must be as objective as the man of science, in the sense that he must think of the spectator only in order to present him with the beautiful, or the well-made, just as the man of science thinks of his listener only in order to present him with the true. The cathedral builders did not harbor any sort of thesis. They were, in Dulac’s fine phrase, “men unaware of themselves.” They neither wished to demonstrate the propriety of Christian dogma nor to suggest by some artifice a Christian emotion. They even thought a great deal less of making a beautiful work than of doing good work. They were men of Faith, and as they were, so they worked. Their work revealed the truth of God, but without doing it intentionally, and because of not doing it intentionally.

— Jacques Maritain, from Art and Scholasticism

Concurrently, behind the scenes, my teaching team was asked to create a list of "learning objectives". I confess to feeling less than inspired on such exercises: it was time that could have been spent reading. Education policies both sides of the pond are very anxious to quantify learning, to be able to assess whether the students have learned what you promised they would learn, and I suppose there is a place for that. But it also implies a limit: if the students only learn what *I* have decided they should learn, they aren't learning to learn.

Cramming people through their degrees is part of the deal, and I don’t mind that on one level. But a really good class always includes that moment when a student holds the floor and introduces into the conversation some idea, or connection, or point of view, that I hadn’t thought of. When they ask a question I can’t completely answer, and we figure it out together. A really good course opens up the possibility that a student will learn something that’s right off the edges of the planned course outcomes. And the best of outcomes is not a tick-list of knowledge gained, but evidence that the students have got to grips with enough ideas to think and write and talk better, and that they are filled with enthusiasm for the next course of reading. When that happens, I am very happy indeed.

— Maggi Dawn

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “If you truly believe that abortion is murder, than the killing of George Tiller must be viewed as a success.” Get that? If you believe that abortion is murder, you cannot believe in the rule of law. (Because obviously if you believe that a murder has taken place you believe that you have the right and perhaps even the obligation to pursue vigilante justice.) If you believe that abortion is murder you must and do support terrorism.

And what do we Americans do with terrorists?

A similar simplifying and calcifying of thought can be seen in a recent post about why Coates has become an atheist:

I think that those of us who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality.

Atheists like TNC don't believe, they understand. (The rest of us just don't understand, I guess.) And in relation to religion all the arrows of “history” point in one direction.

I used to enjoy reading TNC; I don’t any more. What was once a supple mind, open to a range of experiences, willing to treat even people whose opinions are deeply alien to his own as people while never weakening his own hard-earned convictions, has been for the past year or more retreating into a ever-narrowing sphere of sympathy. More and more people are excluded from this sphere, and therefore from compassion and even basic fairness. I don’t think TNC is even trying any more to understand those who are unlike him. And that’s a real shame, because he used to be one of the best.

Here’s something I do in my research sometimes when I don’t own the books I’m looking into:

• If the book has a preview of relevant passages in Google Books ...
• I take a screenshot of the passage;
• Open the screenshot in Preview;
• Export as PDF;
• Open in PDFpen to OCR it;
• Copy and paste the passage into my document.

When I'm working with many such passages I save them into a single folder, and then use an Automator workflow to process them all (though I still have to copy and paste individually).

There may be a more elegant way to do this, and if so, please let me know on Twitter. (For instance, I know Evernote will automatically OCR your images if you have a Premium account, but I like to own my data.)

The sophistry that undid me is common to the majority of men, who deplore their lack of strength when it is already too late to make use of it. Virtue is only difficult through our own fault. If we chose always to be wise we should rarely need to be virtuous. But inclinations which we could easily overcome irresistibly attract us. We give in to slight temptations and minimize the danger. We fall insensibly into dangerous situations, from which we could easily have safeguarded ourselves, but from which we cannot withdraw without heroic efforts that appal us. So finally, as we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because I made you strong enough not to fall in.'

— The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Book II

(Another post from a class blog.)

Bunyan’s emotional and spiritual turmoil is caused, primarily, by one core element of the Calvinist theology that he espoused and never seemed to question (that is, he either believed in this theology or no theology at all). That element is the doctrine of election in its specific strict Calvinist form, that of double predestination. As the Canons of the Synod of Dordt put it, God did not just predestine some (the elect) to salvation, but also predestined all others (the reprobate) to damnation. He chose “to leave them in the common misery into which, by their own fault, they have plunged themselves; not to grant them saving faith and the grace of conversion; but finally to condemn and eternally punish those who have been left in their own ways and under God’s just judgment, not only for their unbelief but also for all their other sins, in order to display his justice.”

So the question for Bunyan is this: From before the foundation of the world God chose me to be either among the damned or among the saved, but how can I tell which it is? That is, there was nothing he could do to change his predestined place; all he could do was to read the signs, interpret the events of his life to see what pattern emerged. For him and all the other Puritan autobiographers, this was the reason for self-writing: to discern the pattern that would tell  them whether they were damned or saved.

Bunyan illustrated this great divide between the elect and reprobate in a widely-distributed “Mapp Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation.” Click on the image below to get a larger version. 

(What follows is a post I wrote this morning for one of my class blogs, which are private.)

Erasmus is sometimes referred to as Erasmus of Rotterdam, but that’s primarily to distinguish him from his namesake, St. Erasmus of Formia, also known as St. Elmo, patron saint of sailors. (That Wikipedia page also says he’s the patron saint of abdominal pain, whatever that means.) But our Erasmus really wasn’t of Rotterdam at all, even if he was born there. He considered himself to belong to that international group of scholars and writers that would later come to be called the Republic of Letters. His “countrymen” were Thomas More, who happened to live in England, and Aldus Manutius, who happened to live in Venice, and Johannes Frobenius, who happened to live in Switzerland.

Centuries later, as World War II was breaking out, the poet W. H. Auden would write of that same sense of connection with people separated by citizenship in the modern nation-states:

Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

In contrast to this highly cosmopolitan vision, we should be aware that Machiavelli is much more aware of himself as a citizen of one particular city, Florence, whose greatness he wishes to restore. He is as local and particular as Erasmus is universal and general.

And yet, when Machiavelli was in exile from Florence he wrote of how central to his life was his reading of, his conversation with, the great writers of the past. Here he sounds like the truest possible humanist:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.

Machiavelli was a complicated guy.