Liberal Christianity has two meanings: there are two traditions here. They are deeply intertwined, but they must be pulled apart – for one tradition infects and corrodes the other. Only once this separation is made can an authentic liberal Christianity be affirmed.One sort of liberal Christianity edges away from supernatural belief, and church ritual: it presents Jesus as a great moral teacher, the first humanist, through whose example we can learn to mend our world. It assumes a basic harmony between Christianity and the rational Enlightenment.
The other sort of liberal Christianity affirms political liberalism – the ideal of a state that rejects theocracy and protects people’s liberties. But it does not seek to reform Christianity in a rational-humanist direction: it understands that such “reform” undermines this religion, falsifies it.
Very simply, the latter sort of liberal Christianity is the only authentic version; it must be rescued from the deathly embrace of the former sort. Only thus can liberal Christianity be renewed.
The same problems bedevil the claim that we moderns reveal our essence in words we use more rather than less. Jean Twenge, W. Keith Campbell, and Brittany Gentile note that personalized and unique are up. Yes, but they replace words that once covered the same ground. Made to order has plummeted since the forties as personalized became more au courant, while unique picked up the ball from once-popular singular and ran with it. Discipline and dependability are up, and reveal us as focused on economic production and exchange? Dramatic notion, but what about how people a century ago were using steadfast even more than we use dependable now?It’s hardly that the thesis that Americans think differently than they did a hundred years ago is mistaken—what would be unusual is if Americans did not. For example, it certainly means something that I come first is now a set phrase, of a kind that it is difficult to imagine a gaslight-era equivalent for.
However, the faddish attempt to apply the Big Data approach to social psychology via Google’s Ngram viewer tool will shed much less light on these matters than many expect. In any language, concepts are expressed by several words and phrases at any given time, all of which morph eternally with the passage of time.
I think Wikipedia’s about over. To say, “some of this book’s footnotes are just links to Wikipedia articles” is universally understood to be withering. We don’t edit Wikipedia anymore. We don’t consult it for things that matter. It’s merely a good resource for finding odd facts no one cares much about. What was the name of Alexis Denisof’s character on Buffy? Was Pride and Prejudice 1812 or 1813? Is Jimmy Wales still paying attention?
A Royal Mail bus with armed guards heads out from Razmak to Jandola, April 1946.
Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic
Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!Doyle, a Scottish physician and writer, is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of crime fiction’s most beloved characters.
Holmes—and his intrepid sidekick Watson—first appeared in A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1886 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Holmes was partially modeled after Joseph Bell, Doyle’s former university professor. Doyle wrote to Bell, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes… [R]ound the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”
In December of 1893, Doyle resolved to concentrate on what he considered his more important work—his historical novels. He had Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their (ostensible) deaths in “The Final Problem.” Public outcry demanded that he revive his much loved sleuth. He did so in 1901’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, first published in Strand Magazine. He set the novel before the “The Final Problem.” Holmes was officially revived in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House, ” in which he explains Moriarty’s death and his own miraculous survival.
Pictured: 1) a 1901 publicity poster announcing the publication of Hound of the Baskervilles. It was illustrated by Albert Morrow. 2) Front cover of the original publisher’s binding, designed by Alfred Garth Jones. It sports a silhouette of a hound, printed in black amidst red cloth and gold accents.
The MOOCman cometh
Picasso, 1953
Children attendants gather supplies for an Arab diner in Algeria, February 1928.
Photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont, National Geographic
An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round.