DeMarkAtion

wind power

2009-12-10T14:07:00.002-06:00

So I'm a big fan of the Pickens Plan, without feeling a need to be a fan of Boone Pickens--which I think he'd understand. I think it's a fantasy to think that we can go it alone as a nation. Indeed, I think it's a travesty in our interconnected times to think in terms of nations, instead of thinking in terms of neighborhoods and the world. But it's lunacy as long as things are still set up along national lines to send billions to countries with which one is often at odds, and think that is okay because it's buying oil, whereas it's not okay to send a couple hundred million to countries who are on one's side, because that would be foreign aid, which is BAD somehow.

So it is with tiny joy that I note that my College is building a windfarm on top of its downtown Dallas buildings, which may end up providing as much as 30 percent of the electricity use of the College. Happy smiles.

Reading

2009-12-09T14:14:00.003-06:00

Well, mostly reading term papers and finals essays.

But also reading Anglo-Saxon history, Nietzsche's "Human, All-Too Human," and the Bhagavad-Gita in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's "Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy." Hope to read "The Historian" and finish "The Three Musketeers" over Christmas. While writing my academic paper for presentation in March...

Finished Borges's "Personal Anthology," creepy and amazing.

wowsers

2009-12-08T09:31:00.003-06:00

So I got like a million books and much love and silly things and mostly pleasant, slightly embarrassing reminiscences for my 50th. It makes it very hard to get my grump on. Jonathan and Beth coming for Christmas, expressed appreciation, upper-level administrative support at work, a wife who likes me, assistance with Diane from various and sundry lovely people, the upcoming Oxford trip--it all makes griping about home repairs and finances much less rewarding.

Now reading term papers and giving final exams. But the afterglow of a bash at Naseem and Ruben's, a dozen Facebook well-wishes, and an evening at Bengal Coast with Dawn lingers...I even got to watch a little football and squeeze in a little bathroom reading in my new history of the AngloSaxons. A brief foray into paradise's entry hall, this...:)

Me and Borges

2009-11-23T15:54:00.003-06:00

I am reading Jorge Luis Borges for the first time, his collection called Personal Anthology. It's pretty amazing. He has a piece not unlike C. S. Lewis's story about what it was like to be inside the Trojan Horse, about what it was like to be Homer going blind, and deciding to write--well, chant--a poem about the life he had lived and seen. The longest piece is 20 pages, an attempt to mix Berkeley and the Buddhist text called The Questions of King Menander (Milinda), which is as literary and erudite and yet readable as anything I've ever read. It's like a nonchristian bathroom meditations book. Amazing.

Getaways

2009-10-31T11:43:00.003-05:00

Dawn and I got to check out a b & b called the Old Rock House in Hico, Texas, southwest of Ft. Worth, this week. It's at http://www.oldrockhousehico.com. B & b's can definitely be too sweet, too cutesy, too country kitsch. This wasn't. It was great: stone walls, amazing woodwork, old plank wood floors, acreage and trees, privacy--plus the Super S Foodstore only a few minutes' walk away (an advantage pointed out by locals).

Getaways to me are, among other things, one way to keep from getting to the point where you just want to tell the other people in your life to get away from you. I don't know why change of venue leads to change of heart, of attitude, of atmosphere, but it often does. Not that it's a panacea, of course: moving to a new city still involves bringing yourself with you, the same self that struggled with XYZ in the previous city. If you can't do it here, you usually will have trouble doing it there, too. But sometimes just the facticity of geography, the bare brute fact of a move, can be life-changing. And so while getaways don't typically solve problems underlying relationships (and what relationship, marital or otherwise, doesn't acquire problems over time?), they really can be a fresh start, a breather anyway.

We had fun.

Marriage

2009-10-29T08:09:00.002-05:00

I often use marriage as an example of a widespread (philosophical) truth, namely, that just because two people use the same word doesn't mean that they mean the same thing by it. ("Hey, baby, yes, I'm totally committed to you...er, tonight...")

(Parenthetically: Ceylon tea in the morning...ahhhh...now, back to my post:)

Standing at the bus stop this morning, I had a itsy bitsy witsy realization along the marriage lines.

If extramarital sex is for you, or your cultural niche, no big deal, just fine, etc., then surely premarital sex is not going to be a big deal.

But if you're already having sex with someone, and living together, what kind of commitment are you asking of each other when you ask to get married? Although this may not be your intention, it might be that, in terms of your own and / or the other person's frame of reference, you're actually to be understood as asking for a commitment to a wedding. No wonder people, resistant to this, often think of it as "only a ceremony."

Of course there are many reasons people engage in (extramarital) sex, and many attitudes to it. And more reasons yet for why people who are married do not engage in (marital, anyway) sex. So I'm not suggesting this covers all or even most cases, only many cases at least in the US (maybe Europe and the British dominions too).

Still, I do think that this one particular dynamic might be even more the case if
1. you're not opposed to, but just have never seen a long-term, til-death-do-us-part relationship, or at least never seen one you thought as relevant to you at all, and / or if
2. having a baby is not associated by you with being married, and / or if
3. you view decisions as choices, and choices as (arbitrary) choices among options, and thus view "continuing to have options" as necessary to "continuing to be a person who is a decision-maker," i.e., a(n arbitrarily) free adult--i.e., if you think of yourself basically as a consumer.

Again, there are a thousand thousand nuances here in particular cases, and far more than one cultural development going on in America simultaneously. One of the problems with talking seriously about issues like this is that with 300+ million people, just about any generalization you might want to make is going to be true, at least among some subset of Americans, and way false of large groups of others. I certainly don't mean to reduce the existential depth of anybody's particular working through issues like this; quite the contrary, my bus stop light bulb came from reflecting on students' attitudes and questions.

Of course I've thought for a long time that the deep misunderstanding of symbols in American culture makes all of this unnecessarily hard for people to get. On the one hand, from the side of 'Does my behavior make me thoughtful about anything?', if sex isn't a meaningful act, because "we all just know" that actions aren't meaningful, then of course you're not going to think there is a connection between it and anything meaningful in one's life. If you do ask about meaning, one common worldly answer might be some fuzzy thing about emotions or a hard one about evolutionary priorities.

On the other hand, from the 'does sex have any meaning and if it does, what?', if vaginal intercourse isn't the symbol of complete commitment, what is? Manual? Oral? Anal? Group? It's a pretty universal view of cultures and religions that whatever else one thinks about sex, whatever else it is and however else one views other sexual behaviors, vaginal intercourse in marriage is somehow the sign or seal of that marriage--not, normally, that intercourse makes you married, but that marriage appropriately calls for intercourse to express its reality in physical form: that it is marriage enacted in a symbol, encapsulating it the way that sharing the dishes and the bills and the vacuuming and so forth are marriage in routine action.

A symbol is a meaning "thrown together--sym-bol" with a word, object, or action. Since we humans are ourselves symbols--meaning-filled bodies--symbolism is at the core of who we are and what we do. I think that's among the best ways to think about sex, and sex ethics.

Meds

2009-10-29T08:05:00.002-05:00

So it's coming up on three years that we've had Mom.

And among many other realizations I realized: only once in all that time have I given Mom's meds to the dog. And I'm not sure but I don't think I've given Dixie's meds (in peanut butter!) to Diane even once.

Yay!

You just know that there are memory-enhanced dogs and cats all over America from people, especially memory-impaired people medicating themselves, switching the meds.

Media

2009-10-27T16:11:00.002-05:00

I am pretty concerned about the latest report of a 10% decline in newspaper subscriptions. I do not believe bloggers, let alone twitterers, can effectively substitute for professional journalists, although they can add a mass of testimony and (usually nonexpert) commentary.

I have long thought that freedom of the press must ultimately entail no ownership of media by nonmedia companies--GE should not own NBC, for instance. Not because I think media companies somehow inherently good--Fox is owned by NewsCorp, an odious entity owned by an odious person, but a media-only and newspaper-focuses guy nonetheless. It's more on the principle that the army shouldn't own companies, because the army isn't that sort of thing, or that companies shouldn't run or own armies--armies aren't the sorts of things companies should own or run. (The fact that we use mercenaries widely I find to be one of the many, many candidates for most disheartening facts-cum-legacies of the Bush era.)

The problem is, I can't think of a business model that will really work. Of course, individual rich people or rich families can do it. The Binghams in Louisville had a media-only empire like Rupert Murdoch's, but they couldn't figure out how to keep it intact across generations, sold it (for a billion, give or take), and now all those media outlets have deteriorated. Both advertising and subscriptions have problems as funding mechanisms as well, and in any case, on the internet, no one will pay to subscribe, and advertisers are greed-motivated to violate privacy and much else.

If you go, like the Guardian Weekly and Economist, to subscriptions only, that's a high standard, but because it is, there will be few such outlets and many people won't pay for or thus see them. But there should be mass media--penny papers--and I suspect that the internet, ironically, is not a very reliable place for that.

So: how to save the journalists while a new business model is found?

Random

2009-10-26T14:22:00.003-05:00

These things just seize you. Exercising the right to freely associate, so to speak.

So I saw a headline this morning about how they (?) are going to start allowing internet urls in "non-Latin" script, by which they mean not using the Latin alphabet or roman typefaces.

And for some reason my mind flitted not to magic realist plays with tango dancing, which the phrase "non-Latin script" could have sent me to, but instead back to high school.

I was a bit of a nerd in high school.

I know this is news.

Pause.

But I was in the Latin club.

Pause.

So anyway, it was among its many other functions the refuge for freethinkers, and generally irreverent wits, in the school. So the club t-shirt, safe because unreadable by the great unwashed, one year read,

Edite plus Christianos / Decem milia ex leonibus non possunt errare.

i.e., "eat more Christians; ten thousand lions can't be wrong"

As we say at our house, free association isn't free.

Reading

2009-10-22T08:16:00.003-05:00

Currently reading:

New York Times online
CBS news online
Louisville Courier-Journal online
Johannesburg Mail & Guardian online
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason--an important text I guess I am only now ready for.
Keith Thomas, ed., The Founders of Thought. Lovely English survey of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine.

Bogged down in the last third of Alexander Dumas's The Three Musketeers.
Can't get going on Elizabeth Kostova's update of Dracula called The Historian, though I want to.
Pacing myself gently through Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Now in the Bhagavad-Gita.
Dabble a bit each night in the Loeb Classical Library Reader to keep Latin and Greek up.

Should be reading something current, but can't really motivate myself to do so. Did read Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future, which had bright spots, and re-read John Keegan's fabulous The Face of Battle.

Am using Bob and Michael Benson's Disciplines for the Inner Life for my first systematic (early!) morning quiet time in a while. Very good.

I'm supposed to be on a book lover's site that my Thames cousins put me onto, but by the time I log in to my thirty-third site of the day, I'm just tired of remembering passwords.

But I do read nutrition labels for sodium, potassium, and for saturated vs. mono- or poly-unsaturated fat. Naturally, with all this, I feel like I never get enough time to read...

And you?

Charles Taylor the Canadian Philosopher, not Charles Taylor the Liberian War Criminal

2009-10-16T10:05:00.002-05:00

It's encouraging to me as I teach and think about writing to see someone reputable fishing around in similar waters. I have taught at El Centro, coming out of the reading Dawn and I did in the 90s on postmodernism, that modernism is characterized by a certain frame of mind, that has, more or less for any person, group, or time, a certain range of components. So you can construct a field guide to modernity: if it has X many of these Ys, in greater and lesser degrees, then to that degree, she or that idea or this institution is modern.

Anyway, some of those characteristics include 1. explaining things without reference to God or anything spiritual (secularization), 2. trusting procedures more than you do people (impersonal processes), thinking that what you know best and rely on the most is yourself, not your family or church or the priest or the group or whatever (priority on the self), and 4. the belief that newer is better (evolution, progress).

And this morning I pick up a book given me as a (generous!) Christmas present this past year, the Canadian, Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age." And I realized that his earlier book I read during doctoral student days was "Sources of the Self." So maybe Taylor would agree with at least #s 1 and 3 above. J. B. Bury already has "The Idea of Progress." So I don't think my analysis is totally off-base.

Which is reassuring. It is entirely compatible with having a problem with intellectual pride to also worry about your views and second-guess yourself. It's also the case that you can be absolutely right about something, and people may not listen to you at all unless you can enlist some heavyweight in your corner. Plus,I teach, and while it's not in the Church as such, right now, I think James still applies: those who teach are held to a stricter judgment, being responsible for those they influence.

blogging? blogging.

2009-10-14T11:00:00.003-05:00

Hi, again.

There are a lot of blogworthy things.

But there are too many delivery mechanisms--facebook, twitter, email, websites, RSS feeds, on and on and on--and too many passwords and, in the end, too many electronic threats--the latest being a card that's been devised that an identity thief can stick in a gas pump card reader--or any other card reader, presumably--and read off the log in numbers and PINs of everyone who's used the reader within the last whatever. And so where to spend precious minutes "updating my status" (um: "grumpy, but committed to my current mission in life, just like yesterday"), and where to feel safe doing so, is a problem for me.

It's easy for dis-"ee-nchantment" to get the better of me--to be disenchanted with all things "e-."

But there are jokes unjoked that deserve a good joking, and occasionally there are ideas that take more than 150 characters to enunciate, and I'm pretty sure that "what's going on right now?" or "what's on your mind?" or "what are you doing right now?" are not--probably ever--the most important or interesting questions, about anyone.

(Not that I'm unappreciative to Gov. Palin for her tweets, which have given William Shatner a renewed and well-deserved, if amusing, popularity among college and high school students.)

So: having slogged through the "forgot my password" business for the 400th time (if your browser remembers your passwords for you, then anyone who hacks into your browser could...uh, do something bad...), I'm back to blogging a bit.

Many thanks to the Rudds, Joneses, and Rodolicos of the world who hold alive the hope that the whole electronic world is not so hopelessly commercialized and compromised securitywise that it'll all be shut down in 10 years and be replaced with mentats. (Spice is probably what NASA is really looking for on the moon and Mars.)

For a while, I'm back.

Vacated

2009-06-29T14:03:00.002-05:00

Having vacated for the past three weeks, I am all better now. Or mostly better.

Some of the good news I came back to:

Dawn's "Foreign Affairs" subscription's new issue came, with an article on lessons learned from history as to what to do about the Somali shipping lanes problems.

How happy, how incredibly grateful, what a lifetime dream come true, were the editors of Foreign Affairs, that they finally had a perfectly good reason for running an article on pirates?

Apropos of which, I found a $1 (adjustable) pirate hat at Michael's, and gave it to Valen. No one could vogue it better.

More soon.

Sunset

2009-06-05T14:02:00.002-05:00

Made it to Tucson yesterday. Arrived 8pm-ish amidst the most amazing multihued sunset ever in history. As a morning guy, I'm into Daw--er, dawn, and I tend to get depressed by late afternoon and even sometimes sunsets. But this was amazing. Dawn said it was God smiling on our venture here, and I'll take that interpretation.

Right now my niece is reading Calvin and Hobbes, my nephew just got in, my sister-in-law (and -in-grace, as it happens) is out counseling, my brother-in-law is gainfully employed, my daughter is reading Jane Austen next to my niece, my mother-in-law is taking a nap after her flight here this morning, the housemate guy is fixing lunch for his two kids and sick wife, and I--I have no responsibilities. Feels almost like a vacation.

See Ya Sooner

2009-06-03T19:58:00.002-05:00

The fam is going away for a bit, and I may or may not blog during the next three weeks. But I hope to have stories about Olympic National Park, Puget Sound, Monterey Peninsula, and other lovely places, plus some fab people, for the three of us soon.

Dawn

2009-05-30T11:26:00.003-05:00

Yesterday was Dawn's 47th birthday. Pretty good day, I think, all around. She said she wanted mostly help clawing our way out from under the piles of accumulated undone chores, financial arrangements, and household bidness obligations. We got out from under quite a bit of it in the past 10 days, so all is (more) well.

I should write about her, but I'll only do so indirectly, in my own reflecting on living with and trying to be a decent husband / brother-in-Christ / partner in life to her...

On the superficial level, I love the look she has these days, and am so proud to be seen with her in public.

My fifth grade Sunday School teacher, Mr. Redding, said that as we moved into junior high we needed to watch how we viewed and evaluated women. He said, more or less in these terms, that you would see a woman as she looks now, and not as she might look down the road, or as she is today, but not as she once looked. And of course you would only *see* how she *looks.* So you might say, especially of an older woman--he / we meant one past her early thirties (this was before "Desperate Housewives," 'cougars,' and "Stacy's Mom")--that she's not very beautiful. But her husband would reply, So you think, but you don't know her as I do.

Overall still in a fairly superficial, stereotyped vein, but not misogynistic, like many comments I grew up with were.

I think that while one definitely has natural "love language(s)," over time any and all expressions of love might be required, appropriate, might connect and convey effectively, in changing circumstances. So works of service and quality time were much more important this year than, say, gifts or listening as such.

So: some movie set in Italy, maybe "Il Postino" I don't know, I saw only once. The last scene shows an older (60ish) man walking down a hill with a group of variously-aged younger men from a hilltop wedding. I think I've mentioned this before. And he's just saying, So, when you know your wife, you will know what she deals with and what she does in her days. So if you know she will need a fire that day for washing, be sure the wood is cut to the right length and in place before she ever gets to the laundry. And if you know she will want...

Still in the mode of traditional roles, but deeply caring.

We are basically like the bald kid in the first "Matrix" movie. We don't really believe that there is a spoon. So I don't think we *try* to do things "outside the box," because I don't think we really (as opposed to psychologically or sociologically) believe that there is a box. We relate as seems best to us over time, in the context of our vows and of our overall commitment to Jesus first and to missional living.

And so where's that portrayed? Where's the good model of nontraditional, nonsuperficial, nonstereotyped relationships?

Uh.

Um.

"Mr. & Mrs. Smith"? With handguns drawn over green beans? (We love the movie, but I am no Brad Pitt to Dawn's Angelina Jolie.)

Janis and Gareth in "Chef"? (Some of the very best contemporary marital dialogue anywhere, but they eventually get divorced in the end in the British tv series.)

So. Ahem. Role models?

Er.

Um.

And so we grope our way forward, with Wendell Berry's "The Country of Marriage" in one hand, numerous object lessons as to how not to do it all around, lovely examples of great relationships in cultural contexts other than our own all around, and prayer and (idiosyncratic?) biblical readings to undergird it all. She has entrusted over half her life to me, what a privilege and responsibility.

Happy Birthday, her.

Mortalia, the Muse of Gardening

2009-05-30T11:22:00.002-05:00

So we got a plumbago and planted it.

I was wondering the whole time if it was named that because its blossom was just the color of a purple Winnebago.

I decided not to share my uncertainty with Dawn.

Amusing Evening Anecdote

2009-05-30T11:18:00.002-05:00

The other night Letterman introduced a new comic, a Chinese immigrant with a very modest command of an American accent, named Joe Wong. He was hysterical. Talk about having your one chance in the big leagues and hitting a homer on your first at-bat.

Talking about getting married and having a kid: my car now has a Baby on Board sign. This is not so much of a warning as it is a threat. I have a screaming baby and a nagging wife, and I am no longer afraid to die.

Talking about buying a used car when he got here, with impossible-to-remove bumper stickers, one of which said "If you can't speak English, leave"--but he couldn't read it for the first year and a half he was here...

Must be on YouTube or hula by now.

A Fragment on the "Fragments"

2009-05-30T11:02:00.003-05:00

This morning I biked over to It's a Grind and finished Kierkegaard's "Philosophical Fragments," 140 pages of defending Christianity against secular worldviews. In very sophisticated, witty writing.

In a way he is agreeing (with the German philosopher Hegel) that human life is determined by the fact that we live in time. But whereas Hegel thought that the reality of time means that human beings are first of all historical creatures--beings with a history and who are part of a larger history (and more or less invents the idea of evolution along the way...)--
Kierkegaard says that being temporal means first of all that we are temporary: that we live ever and only in the present--a constantly moving, transient present, to be sure, but a present that is present to us every time we decide or choose or think or act. So that The Moment--the "now"--is as, if not more, important to human life as the great drama of past and future is.

So our future, and our reading of the past, is "new every morning," as the psalm says, because we believe, decide, doubt, commit ourselves to some version of them each moment of each day. Like in marriage, I made one commitment on our wedding day, but it was a one-time commitment to make thousands and thousands of subsequent commitments every following day for unknown years. It was saying Yes, I will say yes every time the decision comes up, in small or large ways.

Furthermore, every generation is as contemporaneous with Jesus as those who lived with him in the flesh on earth, in that our decision for or against Him is no less immediate than theirs. A decision now is a decision now, regardless of when that "now" is. And if the original disciples had him to see for themselves whom we do not have, we have the whole historical unfolding of Christianity which they did not have.

And so the day for decision is always, as the Bible says, "Today."

Reading about the World

2009-05-24T15:32:00.003-05:00

Finished Immanuel Kant's short (45 pages) book "To Perpetual Peace," which was where the idea for the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, and lots of other stuff originally came from. Amazing that he packs so much into such a short space, and that he foresees and imagines so much that has or could come to pass--and does so in 1795!

Basically he says that if there's an argument for people having a country, then there's an argument for countries having a super-country. If we need a government among ourselves, then governments need a government between themselves, and for some of the same reasons.

Why?

Because...
Opponents are better things to have than enemies, all other things being equal. Lawsuits are better ways to fight than fighting, all other things being equal. Competition to push everyone to achieve their best is better than competition to eliminate the existence of the losers, all other things being equal.
Cooperation is not only better than competition, all other things being equal, but it is necessary for there to be healthy, life-giving competition at all. (Can't play football til everyone agrees where the sidelines and goallines are.)

Of course there's a "government is the problem" school in the US right now. Government is certainly A problem--as is big business, and any other large social institution: the church, the public schools, the Catholic schools, the hospitals, the prisons, etc. But it is not THE problem. (Human evil is, ultimately.) The idea that government is just a bad thing is actually a Marxist conclusion, which makes it funny that it is associated with Reagan. (But then Lewis said extremists of right and left are hardly distinguishable in the end.)

The bottom line is that people who gripe about the government do so under the umbrella and standing on the shoulders of the government. Like it or not, if you are suspicious of vaccines, it's only because the government has implemented vaccines so successfully that we and our children live in a place generally healthy enough to think we can get by without vaccines. If we didn't have them, we'd be screaming for them, and not allowing that other parent's kid to come to school til they got their vaccine--which is where that law came from in the first place.

If you hate the public schools, it is only because we had the social benefits that come from four or so generations of on-balance successful universal public schooling that we're in an economic position to talk about alternatives. If schooling were all home, there'd be a movement among homeschooled kids who were now adults to insist that our kids get the best, most professional teachers rather than caring amateurs. If it were all private, we'd be far more money in the hole as a society than if we just properly funded public education, and the underclass would be even worse educated, because it wouldn't be educated at all, since they couldn't afford it.

If you think private charity would fix all this, think again. The US defense department spends in six weeks what all the charities of all kinds--religious, community, educational, health, everything--spend in a year in this country. The budget to provide basic health, education, and social work care to people in need is probably ten times, taking state and local moneys into account as well as federal, as whatever is given charitably in this country. When we start tithing, we can start griping about charitable institutions not running benevolences in this country.

The car I drive to the restaurant I eat at, and the food I eat at the restaurant, while I gripe about taxes or government decisions or whatever, are both safe because the government requires businesses to make them be. Otherwise, plenty of businesses would cut corners at your and my cost in life and health, and we'd be back in Sinclair Lewis days. Regulation was popularly and morally demanded a hundred years ago, and now we're going to have to rejustify and reinvent it all. But the antigovernment crusade almost got us back there, robber barons (Halliburton, big pharma, hedge funds), unregulated products (peanut butter!), no safety net (1/4 of the country with no health insurance!) and all.

Am I an enthusiast for government? No. Rather, I'm annoyed by historical ignorance and astounding political naivete. Almost everything which other people around the world and down through history have striven for works for us, pretty smoothly. Any idea how, exactly, public sanitation happens? routine police work? tax collection? Delivery of gasoline to gas stations? We're oblivious, but only can be because these things work generally well. If they didn't, we'd all know it, and be up in arms about it, like a Dickens or a Jane Addams.

Government is good and bad, necessary and at the same time no substitute for my own freedom or my own responsibility. Eternal vigilance is still the price of liberty, at any scale, from your local congregation to the European Union. A United Nations with teeth--with a judicial and police system that worked--would be all the more susceptible to the temptations of absolute power. That's why the American system of open transparency (no government secrets in the interests of "national security"--i.e., so I won't get caught and can do whatever I want), checks and balances (no holding without trial, no unilateral decision-making or implementation of laws), and federalism is such a genius thing. It accommodates both our worth as people created in God's image (and so deserving of freedom and dignity) and our status as people fallen into evil (and so not deserving ever of getting everything our own way).

So Kant has turned out to be a pretty smart guy in political affairs after all. So much to apply to the news today from it. Good book.

Meetings with Deluxe Intransitive Vampires and Other Denizens of the Dictionary

2009-05-24T08:55:00.003-05:00

We have a road cd that, among many other things, has several covers of the old, burlesque-y song "Fever."

Two things.

First of all, who in the world wrote this song? How do you come up with lines like "Now you've listened to my story / Here's the lesson I have made / Chicks were born to give you fever / Be it Fahrenheit or Centigrade"? Amazing.

Second: in I think the verse about Romeo and Juliet (not making this up), the final line of the verse is "thou giveth fever." Okay; amusingly faux-Shakespeare. More amusing: in the Michael Buble cover, he corrects the grammar. The -eth ending is third-person singular, and "thou," which is the subject of the verb and should govern its person and number, is the old *second*-person pronoun. So he sings the syntactically correct "thou givest fever." I was the only one laughing, but then that happens a lot.

The grammatically-aware must take our enjoyments where we can find them. See the great book "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" for further on this point (as well as the book whose title is the inspiration for the title of this post). Oh, and also my all-time fave New York Times crossword puzzle clue: three letters, "Art today." The answer: "are."

Self-Sufficient, Whim-Driven Androids

2009-05-24T08:34:00.002-05:00

Just finished Alisdair MacIntyre's "Dependent Rational Animals," a fabulous book, relatively brief (165 pp.), and I think readable by non-philosophers. He's a little too correct in his grammar (there are some things up with which he will not put), but he mostly avoids jargon and footnotes and insider references.

The book is about how we have to take not only our rights and responsibilities and opportunities as members of society into account, but we also have to have an approach to rights and responsibilities and opportunities that covers all the facts about our social life. For instance, babies can't vote, nor should they be able to. Neither can felons, the insane, those declared incompetent, and so on.

But where do they fit? We don't want anyone speaking for us when we can speak for ourselves, but what about those who can't? Well, they can't; why say any more about it? Well, because DNR orders and living wills and powers of attorney are indications that there are times when any of us--in many (most?) cases all of us--will be so incompetent to exercise our rights, fulfill our responsibilities, or take advantage of our opportunities, that we depend on other (reliable!) people to look after our best interests.

If you spend your life looking out for number one, what happens when you cannnot do that, and you depend on someone else *not* looking after *their* number one, but after you---who are their number two, or twentysixth, or fourth surgery of the day, or whatever?

So we have to have and exercise with each other not only the "adult supervision" the president has justly called for in our responsible-citizen lives, we also have to have literal adult supervision whenever there is real dependence--illness, childhood, disability, senility, in cases of compromised competencies of all kinds.

To me this ties in to the African notion of community. One criticism African thinkers make of the West is that, having let capitalism run amok and not only run our economy but our minds and hearts as well, we only value people for their productivity, and thus only value them for their productive potential or track-record. But of course infants are not productive people, the senile are not, the mentally ill are not, and so on. The guy telling me this said, So of course you guys warehouse your old people and have bigtime trouble with unwanted pregnancies.

Aristotle defined the human being as a rational animal. MacIntyre here is modifying that to say that we are (inter-)dependent rational animals. Good book.

Shampoo Planet--with apologies to Douglas Coupland

2009-05-24T08:19:00.002-05:00

Yeah, so my current use-any-bottle-of-whatever-someone-else-left-here shampoo is called Waves of Envy. I'm pretty sure it's called that because anyone using this it is instantly envious of other people who get to use *good* shampoos on their hair.

Grrrr

2009-05-13T11:51:00.001-05:00

Still can't figure out the link thingies.

here's the link:

www.grossnationalhappiness.com.

mgt

DeMarkAtion: Let's get happy

2009-05-13T11:50:00.000-05:00

DeMarkAtion: Let's get happy

Let's get happy

2009-05-13T11:44:00.002-05:00

If you have not been to this site brought to you by the government of Bhutan, it's a must. The Gross National Happiness is intended as a replacement for gross national product, which the king of the country a few years ago found an awfully thin and materialistic measure of a country's health. Love it.

Of the 72 (!) factors quantified to calculate one's GNH , my faves include "number of persons per room" living in your house, "walking distance to healthcare centre," "you wish you were not part of your family," and "frequency of playing traditional games." Of course LGBC vets would be among the higher-scoring Americans on "number of days spent annually attending community festivals"...

Survival Musings

2009-05-13T11:40:00.002-05:00

So a big building housing the Dallas offices of the huge multinational accounting firm had three of its five-foot-high letters fall off the building. Whatever injuries ensued were worth the outcome: the building now proudly says "Ernst and Yo"--which is either the result of a merger with an Asian accounting firm, or it's post-Madoff, post-meltdown accounting firms trying to change their image and get more "chill."

Trekkie devotional

2009-04-22T15:55:00.001-05:00

In missions, it is good to remember Mr. Spock's words. "Sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one." And in caregiving, it's good to remember Captain Kirk's reply: "And sometimes the need of the one outweighs the needs of the many."

Howdy, Stranger

2009-04-21T15:39:00.003-05:00

Well, it has been the better part of a year, summer of 2008, in fact, since I last posted.
Not that I didn't think of you, gentle reader(s?).
It was just that, as Inigo Montoya put it, There was too much to explain. Indeed, there was too much to even sum up.

I will say, briefly, that Dawn's mom is still living with us; that Jonathan is graduating from college as Beth has entered it; and that I am now the permanent professor and "coordinator of the program in" philosophy and religion at El Centro College in Dallas. Dawn is still at the hospital.

I remain steadfast in not googling myself.

The Somali pirate thing would be a great boon to my sense of humor if it weren't so awful right now.

I do not put my trust in any worldly government, or business, or system--economic or political. Nevertheless, I'm in favor of gooder government and betterer business. More than ever, having watched politics in the US and worldwide the past several years, I'm convinced that I can't see my enemies, and if I can see you, you're probably not my enemy.

I'm on bloodpressure meds. It's either that or a comfy chair with fluffy pillows for eighteen hours a day, and I'm not quite there emotionally yet.

What was it like to be one of Stephen Colbert's friends in college?

I'm reading Jurgen Habermas's "Between Naturalism and Religion." I hope I get to see him before he dies--he turns 80 this year.

I'm stuck at starting Book VI of "Harry Potter."

I've read George Berkeley's "Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous," Rousseau's "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality," Leibniz's "Discourse on Metaphysics," and a big chunk of Aristotle's "Metaphysics" since we last spoke.

Dawn and I have started reading together again, what a healthy thing for friends or a couple to do: we're starting into Eugene Peterson's "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places."

I find Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, parts of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, Krod Mandoon, and reruns of "Chef" essential viewing. But no one is broadcasting my viewpoint: I often enough disagree with these folks, too, just in a different way.

No new discoveries on the music front. Blues at Alligator Cafe is the saving grace in that department for me right now.

I did finally present a paper, for the first time in two years or more, at the North Texas Philosophical Association, a few weeks ago.

And to wrap up this tour, no one famous has visited us in *months*...

Mark's Life in Review, July 08 Installment

2008-07-20T17:39:00.004-05:00

I am a mix of deep satisfaction and deep dissatisfaction. This makes me a high-functioning whiner? or a confident troubled person? or human? or....?

Very deeply satisfied...that Jonathan is heading into his senior year at University of Washington, is learning Cambodian, talks with me and Dawn and Beth, is looking into grad school.

Deeply unsatisfied that Alzheimer's is a condition no one, including the specialist docs, can tell you how it will go, other than that it will gradually--at some pace or other--get more and more dismal, but how, in what order, requiring what when, they can't say. And so Dawn's mom...

Very deeply satisfied that Beth has graduated, has graduated from the #2 public high school in the country, has graduated #2 in her class, is accepted and going to Washington University in St. Louis, has received about 90% funding, and has saved some money to take with her, is interested in Africa.

Deeply unsatisfied that Dawn and I can't--don't?--have more of a mid-range, if not long-range, plan for What's Next: mostly due to the uncertainties attending our caretaking situation.

Very deeply satisfied that Dawn swallowed her numerous objections and accepted the biggest gift her fan club has given her in a while, namely a twelve-day trip to Spain to walk the Camino del Santiago. She went, she really got there (emotionally) while she was there, and it is sticking with her. Additionally, Beth went with her, and then zipped up to England to see my sister and brother-in-law, and longtime LGBC friends Connie and Ted.

Unsatisfied that Dawn and God haven't gotten fully together yet on what the overriding call on her life for the second act of our life dramedy is going to be.

Deeply satisfied that I got the permanent position as professor of philosophy and religion at El Centro College late this past spring.

Deeply satisfied with teaching intro philosophy, ethics, world religions, social and political philosophy, ancient philosophy, modern philosophy, contemporary philosophy, and other courses in various terms.

Satisfied with building and running a program: offering more sections of more courses, hiring adjuncts, developing a major, developing student interest and enthusiasm, etc.

Deeply unsatisfied with the halting state of my writing. Working very hard to blame it on others; that's not going well.

Deeply satisfied with the aggressive state of my reading. Have read the Ramayana, the great Hindu epic, in a (500-page!) "abridgement"; read Plato's Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Meno, Symposium, and Republic; reading Aristotle's Metaphysics and Kierkegaard's Training in Christianity and Habermas's Between Naturalism and Religion.

Deeply satisfied with extended family relations, although not fully satisfied with how much (little) I'm myself putting into them: our relations with Dawn's aunts and uncle and cousins, and with my Mom's family, are good. Our relations with Dawn's sisters and the two brothers-in-law are very good. My sisters and their husbands are really really good to us and to our kids; I'd like to be better to them. I'm not sure we're seeing my folks often enough, but the relationship is good and I at least do get up there every six or so weeks. The Thameses had their biennial family reunion in New Orleans, no less, this summer, and that was lots of fun. In addition to the touristy stuff--Preservation Hall, the Ursuline Convent, breakfast at Cafe du Monde, the McIlhenny family's tabasco factory in New Iberia, etc.--the family time was really good, and several relationships were renewed or deepened.

Bittersweet is the most adult taste, I'm told; and certainly one should be able to feel both joy and grief fully, even when they're right next to each other. I'm not so sure that living in the tension not only of obedience and temptation, but of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, is very mature, even though I think it probably is quite characteristic of many adult lives. It is of mine right now, anyway.

First

2008-05-18T17:01:00.002-05:00

I have no ornithological idea whether cardinals really mate for life or not, but I am happy to firmly believe that they do. At any rate, they're my marriage bird. Sure enough, on our anniversary trip, there were cardinals outside our bed and breakfast in Fredericksburg, in our campsite (on the picnic table!) at Garner State Park, and waiting for me near the second flet on our zipline canopy tour at Cypress Valley.

Twentyfive more up than down. Some to go. Good. And, thanks for the cardinals...

Aca y Alla

2008-05-10T14:57:00.003-05:00

I'm done! Yay! Grades turned in, any residual fires to be put out later, whew, yay.

Now off to play in the Hill Country. Gotta make a trip cd.

In the meantime, Diane got "memory jewelry" today; a sterling locket and bracelet, each with essential ID information engraved on the back. They're beautiful, beat an index card on a lanyard, and take some worry out of our lives. But what an utterly strange disease: you know who you are, but not where; you worry about some routine self-care issues very much, others hardly at all (kind of reverting to being a typical freshman guy, that). You don't know if you've eaten, but can follow Obama and McCain closely and in detail on MSNBC. Very, very odd.

I voted this morning. So as Richard Nixon used to phrase it, let me say this about that. Big school districts, like big government, big business, and, actually, anything else that's a really big persistent organization, have huge standing flaws. But I want you to know that we had about as good an experience as a family could have had, and had it in Dallas public schools.

Mind you, we planned on raising the kids in the local mine school or the British / Indian international school in Lusaka. We didn't, back then, know if we'd have to send them away to boarding for high school at RVA (Rift Valley Academy, near Nairobi, where jillions of missionary and other kids are educated). And Jonathan started kindergarten in Louisville, a town I much prefer overall for family-raising to Dallas.

But you know, Stonewall Jackson was and is one of the best elementary schools around. Jonathan's kindergarten teacher there didn't blink when I described our and Jonathan's situation, but set to work making him feel at home and be successful right away. And the sign language they got into kept their multilingualism alive.

Of course junior high was mediocre, at least from a parent point of view, because, so far as I can tell, it just is. But the School for the Talented and Gifted was rated number one public high school in the country the past two or three years running, and it just baffles me that people in Dallas don't know that.

So yes, I voted Yes on the billion-three dollar school bond issue. Is that a lot? I guess; Plano's is $700 million. So maybe it's not. Anyway, why in the world say we should save money on property taxes when the end result of that must eventually be to destroy the school system, parks, libraries, police, and so on, that make your property valuable enough to live in, and to tax, in the first place?

So that's done. And now, without further ado, I give you: Our Anniversary Vacation.

Twentyfive

2008-05-08T11:15:00.002-05:00

To be in one's mid-twenties is no bad thing. One should never have to apologize for being the age one is at the time in history that one is that age. John Mark was twelve when the biggest thing in his life happened; Anna the prophetess was eightyfour...

Hence: twentyfive (of a jillion) things I associate with Dawn and my marriage turning twentyfive...

1. Camping
2. Backpacking
3. Scrabble
4. Jon Stewart
5. Miami Vice nights, 1984
6. thirtysomething
7. MASH reruns
8. Princess Bride quotes
9. all the Lord of the Rings movies and Matrix movies at midnight of the day they came out
10. "Chef" episodes (the British Lenny Henry series) recorded for us by friend Susan
11. all the Christmas specials on one tape recorded by sister Rachel
12. Steve Martin, especially "L.A. Story," Stephen Wright, and Eddie Izzard
13. Chipangali Wildlife Refuge in Bulawayo, and the Arboretum in Dallas
14. Jonathan's birthday party at Munda Wanga zoo south of Lusaka, and the Egyptian Mystery birthday party at the Vickery house
15. Beth singing, at age 4 or 5, "nobody knows the sorrow I've seen," after our first family meeting about how kids have to do chores
16. Dawn's amazing preplanned anniversary trip to Austin
17. "Sneakers" and "Hunt for Red October" and "Spy Game"
18. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver costumes the year of "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe"
19. Cinnamon and Ginger and Kapushi and Prickles and Allora and Dixie
20. St. James Art Fair in Louisville
21. Mike Cross and West Point on the Eno in Durham
22. the Richmond house, the Food Hole, brunch, and Christmas tree bonfires
23. in the dark house together after Dawn killed power to the house when I got electrocuted in the attic
24. Jonathan's birth after 18 hours and Beth's after 6 or so
25. now

We're off to the Hill Country come Sunday, through next Saturday.

Thanks to Dawn, and thanks to the grace of God, we are here. Thanks to you, as well.

Talk............Reeeal...........Sllloooooowwwlly....to...Me

2008-05-01T16:59:00.003-05:00

Random thoughts about transportation and communication...

I am happy to report that it now costs about half as much to take a train from Seattle to Chicago as it does to fly...although it takes about ten times as long. Now if it were half as much for twice as long, we'd do it.

It seems to me that since you can't talk to everyone instantly at the same time (even blogging only approximates that), that talking to someone for the first time in five weeks happens at the same speed whether you've written a letter in longhand and posted it, or you text them.

I'm trying not to lose the communication in the bandwidth...

Chesterton tells the story about the guy taking the train from London to Edinburgh, who ran to the front of the train to speed up the trip. As Claudius supposedly told the Senate upon his nomination as Emperor, surely it is the content of what one says, not the speed with which one says it, that counts.

But I am about talked out this semester, come fast or come slow. Time for a break, not just R & R, although that, but also quiet and listening and waiting until there is, again, something to say. I need this.

Wild Order

2008-04-30T08:39:00.004-05:00

This morning doves--not pigeons--were on the ground in the backyard. Before I let Dixie out, our female cardinal was on the patioway between the kitchen French doors and the covered portico.

In the front, the prosaically named bottle brush plant [also far less pleasantly known as donkey spurge (don't think)] is blooming a brilliant brick red, if you can imagine that. Mint nearly a foot high is thickly carpeting the southwest corner of the yard, and while the pansies still bloom under the fruitless pear tree, petunias and impatiens are in full go as well. The bizarre-looking orange "blooms" of the kangaroo paw are up in profusion; the ajuga's purple stalks are finished, but sedum is blazing with tiny yellow and white flowers, and the dwarf rose is pink atop the center rock garden. The Shumard oaks out in the parkway are each adding 12-18" to each branch, and the easternmost Eve's lace, up by the southeastern corner of the house, is surging out over the roof and headed for high over neighbor Jo's driveway. She'll trim them at the property line. The yaupon hollies look raggedy, but are doing well. The first burst from my foxgloves is about done, but they are sending up subsidiary stalks, which I didn't know they did.

As Wendell Berry points out again and again, caring for what is entrusted to you for as long as it is entrusted to you is essential for responsible "earth-keeping." And while we have not meant to, we have been at the BabySwiss longer than any other residence in our lives. The staying with it is beginning to show, because Dawn insists on cooperating with nature. You can see this, in the healthier trees, the gradual encroachment on grass of the flower garden and rock garden plots, the slow accumulation of don't-have-to-buy-them-again perennials, the juxtapositions of plant and stone textures as the diversity of plants (and stones) grows.

This is ironic to me, because this house feels less ours than any ever has. I don't think we've ever bought the "if we're renting it's not ours, but if we're buying then it's ours" thing. That hasn't ever made any sense to me.

You are where you are, for some temporary time, longer or shorter. You are responsible for what you have an opportunity to effect. What a particular economy happens to call ownership or leasehold or whatever is arbitrary and incidental to your God-given role as human-among-earth-things, and your social-historical identity as citizen-in-a-culture-which-outlasts-you. So caring for the built and natural environment is what you're about, and you just manage the particularities of that as they are created and constrained by things like laws and attitudes at any given time.

We've always felt that what we rented belonged to us. And we have a strong sense that what we own now is a temporary trust. Realtors and homeowners' association advocates do not easily resonate with us, I suspect...

The house on Broad was ours, though a piece of paper said we were renting it for $250/month. Within a few months of getting married, we had an informally-placed foster kid and several college friends living with us. The Rice apartment (not called that because that was all we could afford to eat, although it could have been) was ours. It was our main seminary residence, and where we were when Dawn finished her African studies degree, and where we first got used to living around people we didn't know ("who's that?" "the woman from the couple across the stairwell" "how is she?" "she looks like a new egg" "what do you mean?" "freshly laid." Ah, apartments.)

The house on Belvar, all 750 square feet of it, was very much ours; it was where we were when the kids were born, when I finished seminary, from which we went to Zambia. The house in Zambia was a prize: no heat or air, but 1800 square feet, bars and iron gates, an acre of land, and Africa. Then there was the house we shared with the Roaches on Vickery (now a McMansion), where the kids were for the amazing Stonewall elementary experience and Cub Scouts, and where Lower Greenville began. Then our real house, the Richmond house, the giant American foursquare friend Connie and we got to house the growing church. Right across the street from the Food Hole, right off Lower Greenville. It was ours. But those who think law and economics are real said otherwise, and so it was that we had to go, this time to the BabySwiss, which has been a good house for high school, an okay place for LGBC for a while, a great place to write a dissertation (thanks to Dawn and the kids for the shed, to Dawn and friend Kristen for the uninterrupted time, and to Dixie, for safety in isolation), and a great place for housemates and Dawn's mom.

The orange daisy-like flowers at the foot of the steps are playing out, but the coneflower is rising, and the alyssum we've never been able to grow is starting to spread over the rocks and choke out the grass. By inches, order and wild work toward beauty.

Uwannabe?

2008-04-29T08:49:00.002-05:00

A multi-degreed woman who is a friend of ours confessed to me this past week that she was a "Dawnnabe"--someone who wants to be more like Dawn.

Well done, you, I say. And if Spain and the rest works out, maybe people who have only known Dawn in the last few years, when she has been at the lowest point in her life, will see why being a Dawnnabe would be understandable.

The Wheel Is Turning, But There Is No Hamster

2008-04-28T15:44:00.002-05:00

I know. This will be fun. How can we spend ten years and a gazillion dollars and thousands of lives constructively? How? Oh, oh, pick me; I know...

Have an energy problem. Spend more energy on something, anything really--large cars and trucks, extra wars--that doesn't go towards fixing the problem. Spend the money you could spend on fixing the problem--helpful things like developing clean coal, carpeting Nevada with wind turbines, hybridizing your entire fleet of internal-combustion-engine vehicles, and ultimately,producing hydrogen-powered cars and the infrastructure to service them--instead on driving black SUVs around a tan country having a bloody-red religious civil war. While you're doing this, refuse to tax your energy companies or to invest in any significant or transformative way in mass transit or alternative energy sources or human-scaled, walkable / bikable cities. Also, it helps if you refuse to encourage people to switch to less energy-intensive lifestyles by increasing the cost of those lifestyles and lowering the cost of energy-parsimonious lifestyles.

Now, be surprised, nay, shocked, that your currency is falling, inflation is taking off, the environment is worse off, your competitive position is no better, and probably worse, than it was ten years earlier, and others' respect for you is in the toilet. To cap it off, leave it all to the next person to deal with, without a single apology or good-bye or useful suggestion or anything.

Elephant-class problems, gerbil-class leadership.

Thank goodness all three of the replacement candidates show signs of being 1. vertebrates (having a backbone), 2. mammals (caring about their young), and perhaps even 3. hominids (using reason rather than brute force to adapt to (rather than pave over) and master (rather than crush) their environment).

But if the gerbils, on their way out, draft my kids to shoot their way into Iran and out of this mess--or, out of us paying attention to this mess--they've gotten themselves and all of us into...

Pontifex Minimus

2008-04-27T18:45:00.003-05:00

Friendcouple Naomi and Dave got seen last night. How very good it is to maintain relationships over time. We just stepped right back into important and real conversation right away. Wonderful.

There's a sort of person who, when they drive by, bridges just spontaneously burst into flames all around them...If such people see renewed contact with lovely human beings like happened last night, which such people surely must from time to time, you'd think they would get a clue there's something wrong with their current abutment abatement program.

The whole friend thing turns out to be worth it--not the Friends thing, being united in a common haircut and a common conspiracy to never hold one another to a higher standard--but the real friends things: it's worth it. The patience is worth it; the tried and failed attempt at *that* joke is worth it; the not-about-you-ness of it is worth it; the long prayers and late evenings because that's when you can get together and that's what needs doing, is worth it.

Of course, I suppose many never have coherent or caring relationships ever really modeled for them. Sigh. Hence Big Brothers, adoption, mentoring programs, neighborhoods, letting people board ahead of you on the bus, and all of that.

But we, my family and I, have had many great, and many good, examples of how to make and keep a relationship, and for that, on an afternoon when I'm so tired I can't lay down or sit or stand up or walk, I'm grateful. If you get a chance, and you come to some watershed event in somebody's life, if you can't build a bridge over a river, then at least throw a log across a brook.

What I'm Reading

2008-04-26T10:46:00.003-05:00

Reading recently...

I got my first job away from home (as a cataloguer of Latin books at Duke University Library's Rare Book Room) because I knew the difference between juvenilia (works by and about teens and young adults) and Juvenalia (works by and about the Roman writer Juvenal). But I'd never read Juvenal. So I found a half-price copy of the Satires and read them on the bus to and fro each day. Pretty caustic, often funny, pretty sad as far as the state of upper-class Roman society at its peak, and very instructive as to what Roman life and attitudes were like. I excused spending time on this because I'll teach ancient philosophy in the fall.

There's a warhorse standard introduction to Hindu thought that I've had for a while, Outlines of Indian Philosophy, by Hiriyanna. I finally hauled it out, and it's my current bus book.

I am very slowly making my way through the last few chapters of Randall Collins's Sociology of Philosophies, which shows how groups of people generate ideas and how ideas generate groups of people. Total command of an enormous global literature. At the other end of social-scientific assessments of philosophy, I'm reading the marvelously-named Ben-Ami Scharfstein's The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Work, which takes a psychological approach. It deals with philosophers' biographies, and personal reasons why this or that aspect of their work appealed or made sense to them as it did.

My bedtime book is Mere Christianity, which I have not reread in a long time. No, it's not perfect, and Lewis shouldn't be idolized. It's still better than almost anything else out there trying to do the same thing: reach skeptical people with a thoughtful presentation of Christianity.

I've stopped reading Augustine's City of God after Book XI or whatever, where he ends his critique of ancient philosophy and pagan religion, and begins a tour of religious history and theological development. I've picked up Confessions again instead, which I last read all the way through in college.

For sanity I watch John Stewart and occasionally flip open Stephen Colbert's I Am America. I was rereading John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces, but that has been crowded out by work-related reading. It's still the funniest book ever written, for a Southerner anyway. Imagine the novel Toole (who committed suicide in the mid-60s) would have written in his old age (he'd be 75 or more now) about the Katrina fiasco.

I hope to read some fiction in between spring term and summer school. We'll see. Everything put off needs to be done then, too, so who knows what there'll actually be time for.

Respect the 'Stache.

2008-04-25T22:04:00.003-05:00

Yeah so in the leadup to our twentyfifth and Beth's high school graduation, a photo of your humble correspondent on my and Dawn's first anniversary came to light. A certain household member who shall remain mostly nameless, and who had apparently seen VeggieTales at some formative time in their life, observed of the mustache I was then sporting that it was "suavamente."

greetings, earthlings

2008-04-23T12:52:00.003-05:00

Newsy bits first, before the rants begin...

Elizabeth has been accepted (to 6 of the 8 colleges she applied to, by the way, including one Ivy, said the obnoxiously proud parent) and will be attending Washington University in St. Louis this fall. She intends to double in literature and African studies.

Yes, this means that simultaneously Jonathan will be at the University of Washington and Elizabeth will be at Washington University. That's funny. Dawn and I think we should get t-shirts that say UWASHU.

This won't be for long, however, since Jonathan is racing towards the victory line on his undergraduate; he may finish this very December, with a degree in southeast Asian studies. He's looking towards graduate school in perhaps the fall of 09. He also made Phi Beta Kappa. 'Bout time he gets recognized.

Beth will hopefully work this summer, in between her graduation trip and family reunion and orientation. (Apparently the number one pet peeve of Wash U students is that after saying you're going to Washington University in St. Louis, people routinely ask, 'where's that?') Jonathan is headed off to immersion Cambodian language learning in a program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I guess it's the Baptist heritage...

Beth's graduation trip, like Jonathan's was, is to visit her Aunt Kathy in England in June (and LGBC alumna Connie as well). Howsomever, her route there is a tad different. That's because many persons, including the few beloved readers of these humble pages, contributed to make it possible for Dawn to walk the Camino de ('del'?) Santiago pilgrimage in northwestern Spain this summer. But...since she didn't want to go alone, she is going with Beth. Then when she comes back to the States to go back to work, Beth will fly on from Madrid to London.

In other news, in early April I got the permanent position in philosophy and religion at El Centro College, which I badly wanted. (I did not even sent out a resume to any other possibilities, was how sardined in all my eggs were in the El Centro basket.) Community colleges in Texas don't have tenure per se, but this is the equivalent--and, by contemporary standards, is beaucoup job security.

The Sweaty Moment in the process was due to the fact that in teaching-oriented institutions, candidates are often asked, as part of their formal job interview, to do a teaching demonstration for the search committee. This is faintly bizarre, since the committee may be faculty, administrators, or staff, and with anything from no interest at all to lifetime professional specialization in whatever you're asked to teach them. As it happened, my assignment was in religion rather than philosophy: compare Christian and Muslim notions of compassion. So I had to (well, friend Cynthia said *I* had to, although no one else would have *had* to) do a word study on the terms in the New Testament and the Quran. But I don't have Arabic, I'm just looking stuff up in concordances and dictionaries and so forth. And then the kicker is that I walk in and the committee has a fluent Arabic speaker on it. Fortunately, I apparently didn't botch that part, because I got the job...

That news caps happily two years of full-time probation at the College. This term I'm teaching intro philosophy and world religions and ethics, as always, but I'm also teaching a course in contemporary philosophy as well, which has been lots of fun. I'll do bread-and-butter stuff over the summer, and then get to teach ancient philosophy in the fall.

More anon from moi, but first, and last...Dawn's mom Diane continues with us, lovely CurrAngela continues with us, my folks are okay, and my underappreciated sister Rachel got big-time travel industry kudos for the new portal her team developed for travelocity. Check it out: http://labs.travelocity.com/experiencefinder/index.html.

The roses at the BabySwiss house are blooming in wild profusion. It is encouraging in the morning...

The Feel for the Real

2008-01-20T08:16:00.000-06:00

I've been comparing the 90s to the 00s ("aughts"??) in my head lately. The idea that it was ten years ago that we moved into the Richmond house is just flooring me. Anyway, one thing I notice is that whereas the nonchristian opinion-making class was getting more and more interested in new agey spirituality in the 90s, now that class is being led by an aggressive move to explain things out of evolutionary biology. And when I say explain things, I mean things that are doubtfully explicable that way, like human love relationships, and things that are certainly inexplicable that way, like the coming to an understanding of two minds. Part of what I find interesting is the change from the 90s attempt to see how much of reality is stuff we make up, and the intense desire to ground beliefs in "real" reality external to us and our agendas. There are many facets here, of which perhaps I will write more anon, but atheists want something besides us to be the grounds of why we are as we are, and currently Darwinism of a certain sort is what they're trying out. And the religious want a real god with meat on his bones, so to speak. Science and religion? Science as religion, religion as science...? God and...energy?

This in turn reminds me of something about how we talk about all this stuff.

One of the things that all-time weirdo-Austrian and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein contributed was a quote to the effect that we should not allow ourselves to be bewitched by our own language. One, maybe (Wittgenstein is difficult), of the things that means is something like this: that things do not have to be what we call them.

In the first instance, this means the Escape from Monolingualism. Spanish people don't know that the yellow fruit is a banana, but just perversely insist on calling it a platano (sp?) or whatever. It is what it is regardless of what, and indeed, whether, anyone calls it anything at all.

But next this means that our words do not imprison reality. Reality can shrug off our labels any time it wants. So if we have in our mind that a certain demographic term--a racial or gender term, for instance--entails other stuff, like intelligence or morals or culture of a certain kind, then guess what? We will meet someone who matches the demographic but not the associations our word has for that. Stereotypes aren't utterly groundless, usually, but they almost always fail at the individual level.

Moreover, Wittgenstein's comment means that maps are smaller than the things they map. Stephen Wright has a nice routine about a map of his city he had that the scale on it was 1:1: one inch equals one inch. He said it was very accurate, but kind of hard to carry around. So the things we have words for can be more than the words. For instance, we know that "light" is a word that applies to the electromagnetic wave spectrum; that there are parts of the spectrum that we can't see with the kinds of eyes that we have, but which can be detected and might be visible to other kinds of lifeforms with different sorts of "eyes." Same for sound, notoriously (dogs and high pitches).

But the bigger deal, here, is of course that we also have words for "realities beyond our words," and the point is that even here, the reality that these words point to doesn't have to conform to them. In talking about the gaps in our ability to explain the world, a word like "gaps" means, in this context, what we can't explain. But if we ever experience or figure out what it is that is in those gaps, it won't be a "gap," it'll be a...somethingorother. More importantly: Whoever God is, (insert correct pronoun here) doesn't have to be what we think a god is. He can be more just, or kinder, or anything at all (he) wants. The very pronoun problem itself (which some African languages don't have) is an indicator; it may not be wrong to call God "he," but what we mean by "male" can't be all we mean by God, even vis-a-vis gender, sex, and related matters. And a word like "energy"? Well, as far as I can tell that is, like "god," a throwing up of the hands and surrendering before reality. It means, roughly, "we have no idea what, exactly, but something is going on here."

The difference, linguistically, between "god" and "energy" is, in this respect, that energy is the thing utterly beyond us which we measure; God is the thing utterly beyond us that we talk to.

Civil Eyes

2007-12-03T13:12:00.000-06:00

Because Dawn is nice and kind, we spent time at Barnes and Noble this morning. A berry tart, a blueberry spice scone, and a breakfast pannini with coffee and tea, sitting at a table for two on a raised dais overlooking the bookstore--it just felt like a nice, non-trashy thing to do. We made lists of Christmas shopping and home improvement work that Has To Be Done, and looked at leather journals.

So I liked that. In the past fifteen years I've pulled alternators and redone foundation piers and balanced other people's checkbooks and climbed 8,500-foot mountains with a 45-pound pack. So I feel like it isn't terminally pretentious of me to really enjoy some aspects of a humane and literary lifestyle for a bit from time to time. I know it fits the stereotype of the middle-aged academic, and I hate fitting stereotypes. But if I at least listen to cool stuff, to Mark Knopfler and Medieval Babes and the Chieftains rather than opera and Schoenberg, surely I still have not utterly descended ("ascended"?) into ivory towerhood?

For Dawn's birthday in May, I'm starting to think of themes. How about, "Bringing the Crunch for over Twenty Years"?

I'll be 48 tomorrow.

Is It Fitting to Adapt Intellectually to Darwinism?

2007-12-01T11:05:00.000-06:00

I'm basically agnostic about some of the issues in the evolution debates. My pantyhose remain unknotted at many points. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a theist on good grounds, already. So to whatever extent it eventually turns out that biological adaptation occurs, I think we will find it to occur under the hand of, if not directly because of, God. And to whatever extent it doesn't occur, then what does occur is under the hand of God, and we might find some (other) way of gaining insight into and describing that. I use technology, and I pray, so clearly there is, I believe, substance to both. But I can get my prayers wrong--mistaking the character of God, the nature of prayer, or my own needs or role in the world--and scientists get their efforts to encounter reality effectively wrong, too. So I think of scientific theories, like religious interpretations, as tending towards realism but fallible, generally reliable but always slightly and sometimes significantly revisable (people convert; science undergoes paradigm shifts).

But while it rarely makes me angry, I do have to say, reading things like David Sloan Wilson's evangelistic tract on behalf of Darwinism as a surrogate religion, "Evolution for Everyone," that, as friend Maggie and I once discussed, sometimes the evolutionists' explanations get out of hand. In reading again how yes, evolution explains that, too--whatever 'that' is--begins to sound to me more and more to me like pre-Copernican Ptolomaic astronomy: epicycles upon epicycles of explanations, doing whatever you have to do to save the theory no matter what. Which either is TINAism--the belief that There Is No Alternative, and the sky will fall if the theory doesn't account for EVERYTHING, or indicates that your reasons for holding the theory have to do with other considerations than the theory and its actual supporting evidence and arguments.

In Book VII, Chapter 19, of "City of God," Augustine, in reviewing Marcus Varro, the leading pagan theologian of Rome, says "But what shall men do who cannot find anything wise to say, because they are interpreting foolish things?" He concludes that "even the acutest men are so perplexed that we are compelled to grieve for their folly, also." He isn't chucking rocks; he admires their intellect and their effort, and genuinely regrets that such integrity and skill is being put to use in the service of a cause not worthy of such an effort. Because dis-real beliefs and ideas fall of their own weight, eventually: "Thus, those things which come not out of the truth, do very often, without being impelled by anyone, themselves overthrow one another."

So for me I get the adaptive "fittedness" of cooperation, the survival value of altruism, and so forth, but the way the enterprise of coming up with these explanations is something I watch with a just-slightly raised eyebrow, since in those convolutions all the purpose and meaning in human life are attributed to the correct (whatever this might mean, really) functioning of what they never fail to insist must be a meaningless and purposeless process. Until they come up with an anthropology that meets a bare minimum standard of what we already know human life to be like--symbolic as much or more than behavioral, internally as much or more than externally purposeful, existentially and cosmically meaningful, first-personal and so phenomenal and qualitative, second-personal and so communicative and relational, semiotic and not merely instrumental, mentally causal, and personal--all metaphysical terms that are anathema to them--I will be amused, curious--and wary.

Mawwiage and Us

2007-12-01T10:17:00.000-06:00

This week was twentyfive weeks till our twentyfifth anniversary. That's weird, in a happy way. In the circles in which I run, 25th anniversaries are so rare that it makes us oddities of a sort, weirdos in a presumably admirable sense. But it is all due to God's patience with us.

I think a wedding is a visible symbol of a marriage, and a marriage is a visible symbol of human love, and human love is a visible symbol of God's love for us and for, if one may put it this way, himself. So a wedding is not an inturned event, where the couple curve in on themselves to the exclusion of the rest of us, any more than a marriage should be inwardly turned, ostensibly self-sufficient and excluding others. Because God, whom all these things symbolize at some remove, is not inwardly turned. Aristotle was wrong; God does not sit around, smiling in a self-satisfied way and saying, My, I certainly am satisfied with myself just the way I am. God is turned out, towards (among others) us.

As artists living in isolation from community find that the self is an inadequate source of meaning and creativity, so relationships. Dawn and I could not be where we are without the great cloud of witnesses, gadflies, advisers, chief cooks and bottlewashers, babysitters, prayer partners, movie watchers, and all the rest. We don't do acquaintances that well; love doesn't fear friends (as potential romantic rivals) or envy them (as robbers of time and attention), nearly so much as it needs them.

We are us. That's kind of it. We--Dawn and I--are us: the Thameses. We--Dawn and I and our circles of friends and care and prayer--are us: a colony of the Kingdom. That's how we--I anyway--get through. And that's a good thing.

I Got Uh Ri--THUmb

2007-11-29T16:15:00.000-06:00

So there is something to be said for standing around, Lebowski-like, trying to figure out which rug will really bring your Shaker room together, and, more especially, will make it livable, given that you don't plan to pay for heat this winter. Did this with Dawn yesterday. Reassuringly domestic, once I stopped being irked by it.

I do actually find the rhythms of life interesting. Like in a real concrete way, the way I find that I walk faster than most people seem to through the hallways at college here. So people think I'm real busy, or think I think I'm real important. But then I am more still (stiller?) than others when I get where I'm going and it's time to discuss whatever it is. And people think it's weird. To me, steady movement in the morning seems appropriate, along with sitting quietly just staring out into the middle distance does in the evening. Dawn's more or less the reverse.

It's no surprise, I'm sure, that I feel like my rhythm is almost always out of synch with everybody else's rhythm. Doubtless that's partly because I'm an INTJ, and a morning person.

In AmbitionNotes, the new occasional DeMarkAtion blog feature describing things I probably won't (get to, or get around to trying to) do, I shall endeavor, a la PigPen, to clean up my blog space by New Year's: it's a New Year's p/resolution. Maybe get a photo or two if Beth will help, maybe figure some other aspect of it out and have more excitement pour vous. Probably not, though. We'll see.

Going into Advent, my music: The Strayaway Child, by the Chieftains; edifying reading, Eugene Peterson's Subversive Spirituality; hope, making progress on 25th anniversary plans (shhhh, don't tell Dawn, she doesn't know. I mean really: she doesn't.); favorite blog, dooce, as it's almost the only one I read; favorite website, none, but I'm having to visit academic.cengage.com a lot for work...

First wish for 2008: no more Shrubbery, as Molly Ivins would put it...
Second: the end of credit card debt.
Thir

iMe

2007-11-26T08:53:00.000-06:00

So at your friendly neighborhood camping store (REI or Whole Earth Provision will do nicely), the slightly ironic, mildly vulgar backpacker culture has generated another piece of gear in the tradition of the "bite-me" hydration valves. The new entrant in skewed names for niche camping gear is the "IPood," a collapsible, lightweight, aluminum shovel for digging catholes (i.e., one-person latrines).

So, to cash in on this bonanza of sinking one's teeth into Apple's coattails (an image upon which one should not tarry), I want to copyright the term" iMe." This would be a useful domain name for a personal website. The logo certainly suggests itself readily enough: any photo of moi will do. Can it be the name for an electronic device, bound to fly off the shelves at BestBuy in 09? Sure, simplicity itself; all you need is a mirror with a little running screen below it, a la CNN, that can be programmed to tell you things about yourself. This device could help insecure teens, business execs experiencing "senior moments," people in recovery needing positive thinking therapy, and probably midlife trophy-hunters obsessed with their gorgeous boomer selves. As for applications in the geek sense, i.e., software, iMe would be a great name for an app that sends all your relevant info to someone else. So you could multiple-y configure it to have your resume on it, your match.com and eharmony access info, or your personal medical records needed in case of an emergency. There could even be an intentionally misleading section called "My Personal Data" that would trick identity thieves into downloading it, but it would really be a program that would feed *their* info to the police. Am I the Mark Haitian of innovative marketing ideas or what! I mean Cuban.

The Spanish version would be YoMe, and the German IchMich. The possibilities are endless.

Fort Knight

2007-11-25T09:54:00.000-06:00

So sorry about the two weeks off.

Things.

We just got back from three days camping on a lake north of Denton. We took Mom and Dixie. Each had a tent, although Dixie preferred to stay in Mom's. Mom's was new, a gigunda cabin type tent with two rooms and walk-in doors. Someone also realized that with mattress sets starting at $400 and up, there was bound to be a sellable price point below that where a super-high quality inflatable mattress would compete. And...sure enough, now in addition to the $5 or $10 things you float on in a pool, or had for slumber parties, there are $50 to $200 inflatables with motorized pumps and actual sheet-set sizes. Weird. So anyway we got Mom one of those, so there was sleeping in style, despite the fact that...

Winter abruptly arrived. 80 degrees on Tuesday and--woops! 38 on Wednesday night. So much arcticness, but we all (a couple of other households cam out with us) did okay.

Seeing my winter wardrobe emerge, friend Curran observed that I was embracing my inner squire. Well, I'm English, so wool, tweed, leather, herringbone--it's all in the heritage, baby.

I decided not to teach the winter term, which is three of the four weeks of Christmas break. We could use the moolah, but it's Beth's last Christmas before high school graduation, and Jonathan will be home for most of it. So we're going to do family and stuff, and I'll get a break. The chance that I'll be a humane human in the spring will go way up, I suspect. It's been too long without a real break this fall. Like my jeans, I fray a bit at the edges when I haven't taken real breaks. So in a neat combination of self-interest and care for others in my targe--er, around me, I promise to do better next term.

Reading.
I'm reading slowly through Augustine's "The City of God" for the first time. I am amazed at the detail in which he deals with sort of all the other views on offer in his day. He obviously knows pagan religion, and interacts with everything from popular superstitions to the leading pagan theologian, Marcus Varro, for pages and pages. He also knows the philosophies and worldviews of the day, and gives them hundreds of pages.

I really wonder what it would take to do such a thing today. Marxism's no issue any more, but national chauvinism masquerading as patriotism is many people's functional religion; consumerism is another, and Darwinian humanism another. But now you have to really deal with Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism, at least, of the world religions, and maybe stuff like Mormonism and Scientology depending on your circle of care. Of course "City of God" is 600 small-print pages for a reason; what would a similar work take now?

I'm reading Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor" for fun, as I've never seen or read it. I'm also still working on David Sloane Wilson's "Evolution for Everyone," which advocates Darwinism as a basis for a secular religion.

Well, camping gear to clean and put away, and lovely friend Amber dropping by this afternoon, so shall go. And blog more things for Advent.

Dennis Miller is doing sports, so I'll rant for him...

2007-11-10T11:39:00.000-06:00

I understand Charles Schumer's point, in saying he'd vote for Mukasey for attorney general, that better to have an honest guy, who hates hiding and corruption, running a justice department assigned to defend torture and the suspension of basic human rights, than guys who think lying and corruption are just part of the game. But Judge Mukasey disappointed me hugely when he refused to denounce torture without footnotes and asterisks.

I suppose that richly entitles him to serve in an administration much of whose efforts for six years were devoted to saying (1) that the law did not apply to them, and now whose main goal seems to be to (2) avoid prosecution for their unswerving devotion to cause (1). But of course, (2) is just (1) continued, in a defensive rather than an offensive mode--although both are pretty offensive to law-abiding people.

Once again Chesterton is proved right. As he said in "The Man Who Was Thursday," "...the poor object to being governed badly. The rich object to being governed at all." That was hyperbole, of course--Warren Buffett is wildly wealthy and eminently law-abiding. But Chesterton was giving us a billboard-sized shout-out reminding us who the real anarchists, the real threat to an orderly society are. It is deeply disturbing to me that we have this debate going on as to whether the guys at the top really are law and order toughies or lawless gunslingers. The latter are never so dangerous as when they successfully sell themselves as the former.

I mean seriously. Does anyone not think Mr. Cheney and his chief of legal staff, and Mr. Gonzalez, *don't* have a deep contempt for the Constitution and for the law applying to them?

After all, parliamentary government was invented by the British precisely to keep rulers from starting and continuing wars that cost all the rest of us money and blood just because they have a snit with some other ruler, or just because they want to invade somebody. Hello, Runnymede? Magna Carta?

The USA was partly started because we colonials colossally resented it when the English crown treated its agents in the colonies as above the law. It has been a great accomplishment of this administration to find attorneys who do not believe that the law applies to everyone, nor to everyone equally.

Jefferson and Madison and those guys developed and hammered out our constitutional system of government not only to facilitate freedom to do what one could, but also to guarantee freedom by setting things up so that no one could amass uncheckable, extra-legal power. Including and especially the president. There is a reason George Washington, when first confronted with protocol issues after his election, chose to be called "Mr. President" rather than "Your Excellency," which was what had been suggested. From George I to George II to George III is not exactly an encouraging trajectory.

You understand that the court system was created anew as a branch of government not only to maintain general justice, but specifically to serve as the guardian of the rule of law, the national character, and the authority of our founding documents. It has been another important accomplishment of this administration and of Reagan's (and even George II's) to find self-respecting judges who do not believe that keeping faithfulness to the Constitution and the rule of law is what the courts are for.

Of course, not only do we not have the court we had in the mid-70s that put a stop to Nixon, we don't have the Congress, either. This image-obsessed, fear-consumed, petty Congress has managed to utterly fail to rise to dispute in any significant way the cavalier ignoring by this administration of our basic American principles of government. The Cheneyites should be easy targets. They clearly are unimpressed by parts at least of the Declaration of Independence ("it is incumbent to give an account..."), the Constitution, judicial review, and stare decisis, never mind Magna Carta. But the Congress does nothing uncalculated for 2008.

(And, alas, why it's so hard for me to be a Christian here: the mid-70s court that took down Nixon, and so is my hero, is also the court that helped sweep aside the public standards of what is okay which I advocate, from abortion on down the line. Sigh. Left and right politically do not in any consistent way ever align with godly / ungodly.)

It makes one wonder where law-abiding, Constitution-respecting, democracy-believing citizens can take refuge. These guys are going to make patriotic, law-and-order conservatives out of the most liberal of us...but not the way they thought they would...

It's true, of course, that there is still political accountability every 2-4 years, at elections. Some seem to say that that is enough: if you don't like them/us, elect someone else next time. In the meantime, this is our time.

Of course, the world wasn't invented yesterday. We have seen this sort of argument before. The Romans, no less, actually *elected* what they called "dictators" from time to time. Of course, to them, "dictator" didn't mean "bad guy who impales babies on spikes," it meant "one whose word is law"--as in "dictation." The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes actually argued for something like this as a standing mode of government around the time of the English settlement of North America. He said that without an authoritarian ruler, there would be chaos. It's not exactly a huge surprise that authoritarians and upper-class people in power who did not want to have to be accountable to anyone else have been strongly tempted by this Roman "ideal" and by Hobbes's justification of it ever since.

But political accountability by means of elections does not mean we don't get to have any input in between elections. They're called "representatives," right?

Moreover, political accountability is not legal accountability. It gives us Putin's Russia, not George Washington's America. As for dictatorship, even though the Romans had the sense, early on, to only elect them for six month terms, we have seen over time to what it almost always leads: maximum government and minimum law. Frank Hague, I think it was, while mayor of some place like Jersey City or Philadelphia back in the 20th century earlier, famously said "I am the law." And Louis XIV or XV said, "L'etat c'est moi"--"I am the state." But we Jeffersonians have long since chosen instead the line of maximum law and minimal government. As for Hobbes, yes, it's true that Abraham Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus. First, he was wrong, and second, he was fighting the Civil War, which threatened the country's existence and killed over a million Americans on American soil by the noteworthy method of having us shoot each other. A creepy terrorist network, might threaten our peace of mind, and this or that object, but doesn't threaten our country or way of life. As for third-rate countries, they don't threaten anything but small men's large and misdirected egos. We don't have any emergency going on: we're fighting one punitive and one colonial war with an all-volunteer military, for Pete's sake. In World War II, all the men between the ages of 18 and 38 were just gone, not here. In the Civil War, 25% of all Southerners served in Southern armies at one time or another. That's half of all males of any age. Iraq is a vanity war.

I guess Bush and them want to live in exciting times. Of course, that one might live in interesting times is supposedly a Chinese curse.

But ya know, maybe we just don't live in exciting times. What if we live in do-our-jobs, make-a-profit, pay-our-bills, raise-our-kids, work-on-the-house, keep-folks-healthy, spread-the-wealth-a-bit, educate-people times? Why would that be so bad? Because it bores privileged people with a swashbuckler fantasy?

For Mr. Cheney's fantasy, young Hispanic men are routinely dying, our world prestige is at zero, and our economy is finally coming at risk--from overspending (on nonrenewable assets like tanks), underregulating (energy utilities and mortgage bankers), fostering a sense of insecurity (a compliment nicely returned by currency speculators as a falling dollar), and rising oil prices (because of *real* threats to mideast oil supplies our bungling has caused).

We will be ten years digging out of this whole, if we elect people who like to dig.

If we had put 150,000 troops into Afghanistan instead of 20,000, and instead of putting them into Iraq, here's what would be different. Saddam Hussein would be still probably be grumping around insulting us and others. We'd have some of his oil coming out, like we do now. He would not have wmds, or any ability or wiggle room for attacking any of his neighbors, especially Israel. And 3000 Americans--about the same number as killed at 9-11--would be alive who now aren't.

What else would be different? The Taliban would be gone gone, instead of gone and back. Mullah Omar would be in jail or dead. Osama bin Laden would be dead. Violent Pashtun tribalism would be as futile as that of Sioux 125 years ago(--even if the end of that kind of tribalism might have been accomplished just as unpleasantly, and maybe in some sense as unjustly, as the liquidation of native Americans was done). Pakistan's leadership would be secure, except from their own stupidities. Al-Qaeda would be history. Al-Jazeera would be running film shorts making fun of Arab despots, instead of Osama's latest YouTube video, and airing American product ads. As a bonus, there would be a huge decline in the world heroin supply.

Instead, Afghanistan, which we had every right to formally declare war against (we didn't) and invade (we did), is a dry, mountainous, drug-ridden, violent, unstable quagmire. Iraq, in which we have few if any real national interests that can't be met other ways, and which we invaded without the thinnest shred of legality, is a dry, flat, prejudice-ridden, violent, unstable quagmire. There is no end in sight to terrorism. And creeps who pass for national leaders all over the world have loyally followed our lead and now loudly use national security and terrorism as an excuse to suppress human rights and trample human liberties.

No *conservative* American should stand for such nonsense. Electing people who will uphold the Constitution, getting a Supreme Court which will uphold it, prosecuting those, whether red necks or terrorist or rich guys, who make themselves exceptions to the law, using our powerful and professional military for actually worthwhile endeavors, and regaining our role as the paradigm of a law-abiding democracy are the first tasks I'll be thinking about as I look over candidates for 2008.

And Viva Jon Stewart.

Dennis, I've done your work for you.

Ron/Pat Paul/sen

2007-11-07T10:30:00.000-06:00

Whew. Just recovered from celebrating Guy Fawkes Day with Ron Paul...(Hunh?! he wants to blow up Congress? Queen Elizabeth II? he likes Hugo Weaving *a lot*? he needs money really really badly? what?).

Stone Soup Storytelling was good this year. About 45 parents and kids Friday, and some *very focused* kids at that. Then 50 or so adults on Saturday night, with much more in the way of personal anecdotes, although friend Jenny sent an original story, Gary had poems, and there was quite a bit of music.

Many thanks to everybody who made it happen.

I'm deeply submerged in work right now. In the social and political philosophy course I'm in the typically absurd position that instructors get into, of trying to condense an entire complex movement or world of ideas and actions into "which one article will we read on that?"

So sorry Stephen Colbert is dropping out of the race. Comedian Pat Paulsen, of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, ran in 1968, and got like 3rd place in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire. (He ran on the Straight-Talking American Government, or STAG Party, platform...) And I think Robin Williams's movie "Man of the Year" was unjustly panned; I thought the points it made about a society getting to where what gets thrown up as leadership is so shot through with venality and mediocrity that people are eager to vote for comedians. There's savage criticism of the system in that kind of desperation, of course, but it's also something only people who still earnestly wish the system were good do. You can taste the yearning on the air. The world may not be changing, as Galadriel thought, but were it possible for it to change in a different direction from what worried her, then a lot of us wish it would...

So the State Department gave $4 billion of my taxpayer dollars to unaccountable mercenaries in Iraq. Yeah, so.

2007-10-25T15:37:00.000-05:00

It's just this way. If I were forced to choose between a societal arrangement--laws and regulations and politics--that resulted in thousands, maybe tens of thousands of single, uneducated, poverty-line, young, mostly minority moms, getting hundreds and maybe thousands of dollars in benefits that they don't deserve, or, on the other hand, a societal arrangement that resulted in a few hundred, or maybe a few thousand, married (a couple times), middle-aged, educated, upper-middle-class or better, guys, mostly white, getting hundreds of thousands and maybe millions--billions--of dollars in benefits that they don't deserve, I know which injustice I'd prefer. Milking the government, to put it nicely, just is that, whether it's a welfare scam or Blackwater. But if I had to be stuck with one or the other...

Up at Sit

2007-10-20T08:45:00.000-05:00

I have been (re-)reading (some of) the Upanishads recently. I am making my way through the "classical" 13 (out of 114 or so total, depending on who's counting). Upanishad derives as something like "(the writings of those who) sit up beneath (the feet of spiritual teachers)," and translates as secret teaching, or gnostic insight, or mysteries for initiates, or something of the sort. It is the documentation, among other things, of the great transition from the more or less typical tribal polytheism of the Arya traditional religion transcribed in the Vedas, to the Vedantic philosophical mysticism and popular story-based Hinduism of today.

I suppose two things strike me immediately. One is the still-very-tactile nature of brahmin (priestly-class) life in India, the other the mysticism facilitated by parallelomania. For instance, on the first, food and hunger recur as themes repeatedly; someone who gets it spiritually is said to be someone who will eat food. Doubtless this has a spiritualized meaning, a la my bread is to do the will of my father. And doubtless too it has, as much of this material does, a specifically ascetic setting: for a person whose spiritual discipline involves frequent and heroic fasting, food must become an issue and a symbol--perhaps something along the lines of, the one who "gets it" won't need food, because he won't feel hungry (like all of us always do), because he'll be satisfied. But I have to think it also comes from a notion of the payoff of all this personal sacrifice: once you get it, you won't need to do all the fasting that enabled you to get it. Then you'll be, once again, an eater of food, this time with no remorse, no fault, and full spiritual satisfaction (which you couldn't have gotten just stuffing your face before you undertook these spiritual disciplines).

As for the parallelomania, I mean that not as a slam but as a description, even though I do think that, along with a grain of truth, it was mostly epistemologically suspect. What I am referring to is the constant pushing of analogy by phrasing it as metaphor and not simile, in the manner of communion. Jesus doesn't say this bread is like my body, he says it is. The West has had fits with this: look, it says "is," say one bunch; it's obviously literal, it means what it says--hence transubstantiation and all that. The other bunch say, oh, it's obviously a metaphor, meaning something like it's a simile but the analogy is not just accidental, or that, it's a literary figure, but it intends to mess with you at a deeper level than 'life is like a basketball game.'

So, in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (pronounced just like it sounds...), joy is fire, praise is fire, water is fire, earth is fire, death (which is hunger) is the self, death is fire, self is fire, the death-fire-self is an ascetic, he faces east (the sunrise?), so his right side is the south and his right arm the southeast (and, lest we forget, his right buttcheek, I kid you not, is the southwest)--and so on. Perhaps no more, but certainly no less, mind-numbing than some of the census materials in Numbers or the sacrifice regulations in Leviticus. Unlike them, based on seeing parallels where the less-enlightened might not.

Sacrifice here is both literal (they still talk about the royal horse sacrifice of the ancient Arya) and figurative (all their yogas, or spiritual disciplines). Loneliness, hunger, the gods are all part of the brahmin's life.

There are still brahmana-like specifications for how to conduct certain rituals--"well, then, in that circumstance you say..." kind of formulae. Right beside these, though, you get from the first the kind of 'yeah, but this is what things actually are, really' speculation that eventually leads to Shankara and advaita monism, the 'there's only The Big Divine...er, Thing' sort of philosophically mystical view many associate with intellectual Hinduism.

Along this line, and interesting from the point of view of Habermasian social philosophy that says that "I" come into existence via "us," is that what everything "really" is is Self, not my self, not God in a Western sense, but Self. And that selves come from Self, so that plurality is derived from a monism. We come from I.

As a Christian, I'm going to agree that we all come from *an* I, namely God. But I myself am not that "I," for we retain our unique identities as individual personal beings, even if we give full force to what being "in" Christ might mean. And God, in Christianity, is one but internally plural--the trinity notion--so that the One does not, as here, start out lonely or aspirational, and create or emanate other beings for that reason. The Christian God creates to enable more creatures to experience love as He does.

One sees different schools of thought vying, even in the same Upanishad. Does everything boil down to breath? Then the guys who say breath-control meditation is central come out winners. Is everything white, from eyes to semen, "really" soma, the perhaps-psychotropic drug that induced spiritually significant trances? Then maybe the priests who use it in connection with both sacrifices and meditation are right. What about followers of procedural karma, the guys who still do the Vedic sacrifices at face value? Or the ethical karmists, trying to earn their way to moksha, release from this world? Both of those, and the yogic ascetics, have their place, but the Ones Who Know (i.e., the authors of the Upanishads and their followers) know that knowing is the key to all the rest.

So everything hangs together, but instead of, as in Christianity, it all relating to and making sense in the context of a personal relationship to God in Christ, it all makes sense in terms of the way everything is everything else, or the way the one divine reality permeates everything.

Well, enough of this. Back to cleaning the yard and house for FallFest...

sticky

2007-10-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

So for me it works like this.

"Nooo. Don't bother me. I'm trying to consume delicious things bad for me while watching truly ridiculous, time-wasting television."

Okay. But I think I have a point to make.

It starts like this. If I want to figure out, say, the whole science and religion thing, how do I do that? Well, it seems to me that I can't, unless I can figure out what it's about. Perhaps it's about the nature, working, and meaning of physical stuff, in the light of the strong suspicion I have that physical ways of being aren't the only ones.

Well, then I say, all right, what about the physical? What do I as a Christian think, or how, about it? I use the various sciences to investigate it. Yes, sure. But I'm looking at all this data, how do I make sense of it? Via scientific theories. Sure, yes. But those, too, are data to me: if allopathic medicine makes sense and quantum mechanics makes sense (or something like sense) and evolutionary genetic biology makes sense and metallurgy makes sense, what do all those sense-making theories mean, taken as data points themselves?

To me they point to the orderliness and usefulness (if not purposefulness) of the physical. How does that fit with other things I already know to be true?

I start with resurrection. Resurrection says, we hope for the resurrection of our bodies. This is interesting. If you start with creation, you could always say that bodies are a trick or test to see if we'll stay spiritual, or that the physical is theater in which we enact a morality play, or a phase we must pass through. But resurrection says no, creation was about how we are meant to be. That being bodily, being physical, is inherent in human being, human existing, human nature.

If that's the case, then the physical can't be just neutral, a fact with no value that can be used for good or evil. It must be good, because it is part of the final as well as the initial intention God has for us.

If the bodily or physical is good, at least by intent, creation, and final repair and transformation, then that helps me. It helps me know that our interactions with the physical share something in common.
Our bodies, for one thing, are not prisons of the soul, or cootie-filled bags of temptation to be escaped, or limitations on our spiritual possibilities, but the mode in which we are supposed to be. So taking care of them is a fine thing to do: nutrition, wellness, exercise, diet, all acquire a more-than-pragmatic, more-than-self-centered, and more-than-Darwinian worth.
If bodies are worthwhile, and their care, nurture, and development are worthwhile, then so is their repair. Medicine acquires a foothold on meaning, beyond resistance to death.
If bodies are worthwhile, then we get a first glimmer of what we do about a correct body-image, a notion of self-image with respect to our physical form. There's lots to say here, but there is a meaning- and sense-granting place to start.
If bodies are good, then sexedness, being male or female, is not a crippling or a handicap. If sexedness is not bad, sex isn't likely to be, and sure enough, the commandment to be fruitful and multiply is given before the Fall. Repairing sex is a huge undertaking, but better start on it than not.
It's not at all clear to me that sexuality, or sexual identity, has any solid grounding in either science or Scripture. But whatever substance it has--and certainly it has a psychosocial reality that varies across time, cultures, and individuals--must be related to the notion of the worth of sexed bodily personal / relational beings.

But if the physical has any sort of inherent goodness, then nature, the environment, does. While prudential motivations to go green--let's not foul our own nest--are better than none, our role as stewards and gardeners may not be a punishment, but something deeply fulfilling. (See Nancy Pearcey's discussion of what she calls the cultural mandate, which begins with agri- and horti- culture.)

Besides the moral status of bodies, and the ontological status of sex, and the nature of nature as such, other areas of human interest connected to the physical include art and work.

To me, and maybe it's just me, all these things stick together: body image, sexuality, work, art, environmentalism. When you try to think of any of these apart from a notion of the spiritual worth of the physical world, you end up, as a Christian, in some sort of cognitive dissonance. But when you think of them together with that, then they tend to stick also to each other and get entangled theoretically, so that Gnosticisms that discount the body's spiritual or moral worth aren't over time going to have very coherent notions of the worth of work or of natural conservation and management. At the same time, it's not really possible over the long haul to believe in the resurrection and not develop a positive theology of sexed bodies or avoid some sense of creation groaning in anticipation of our redemption. It's about integrating your life and your worldview.

"Yeah yeah yeah, integration smintegration. I don't wanna think about all this; gimme my fried twinkie and Pantsoffdanceoff."

Okay. ((But I still think I've got a point.))

Stone Soup

2007-10-13T21:53:00.001-05:00

Believe it or don't, this is the fourteenth annual FallFest coming up, cosponsored by Lower Greenville Baptist Community and the Thameses. For many years now FallFest has occurred as the Stone Soup Storytelling festival. The theme for both children's and adult's nights this year is Sleeping Dreaming Waking. There will be a prize for best bedtime story, the first annual Bedtime Story Invitational.

Kids' Night is Friday, November 2, 2007, 5-9p, with storytelling by and for kids focused 6-8p.

Notkids' Night is Saturday, November 3, from 7p till midnight or whenever. No childcare or child activities this night. We encourage stories told in any medium, including music, whether original or just a favorite of yours you are sharing with us. Email submissions welcome from the brothers and sisters in the internet diaspora.

The festival occurs at 4723 Swiss Avenue, Dallas, TX. We live in the city; please respect our neighbors, and be conscious of protecting your valuables, when parking.

the perfect stor...er, wedding

2007-10-13T10:31:00.000-05:00

You can tell perfect weddings, because at them, (only) six things go wrong.

Two bridesmaids faint. What to do? Panic? No. Just say, Check; that's two, four more to go.

Three hours before the reception, the groom's cake slips off the backseat and coats a station wagon's floorboards. Not to worry; got one of our six out of the way, with none the wiser: no one else had seen it, so no one will know when we substitute a sheet cake from Kroger.

The special handmade unity candle has been left on someone's mantel. Problem? I don't know; does it count as something going wrong? It does? Check. Figure, well, at least that one's out of the way, as a guy does a mario andretti going to your friend's house to retrieve the candle, and the accompanist plays some more.

The Mayan calendar savants at the rehearsel dinner location *double-book* the only room that will hold your wedding party. On the spot you have to move the rehearsel to a friend's house. Hm. Maybe that counts as two.

Maybe one reason people get confused about weddings is that although they are not performances--"perfection" in execution is--in a meaningful wedding, at any rate--only slightly positively correlated with "perfect" in emotional and spiritual terms--in a real wedding, the couple are "performing" something; that is, they are accomplishing something. Philosophers even use the term "performance speech" for what goes on: namely, that when the couple says, "with this ring I thee wed," they do. Saying it makes it happen; words don't just affect, but in this case also actually effect the reality.

Another confusion comes from the mistaken notion that a (real) wedding is "just a ceremony." It is natural, I suppose, especially in a culture like ours that has few clearly meaningful public acts, that a genuine ritual would be mistaken for a mere ceremony. What I mean is, a ritual is a symbol, specifically an enacted symbol, and not just a formal protocol one "must," to meet regulations, go through. A symbol is a word, an object, or an act associated with a meaning. So symbols are inherently meaningful. Ritual is an acted symbol, so it (should be) is inherently meaningful.

Once one realizes that this is a ritual, a meaningful action, a symbol, then one sees why as long as the meaning is meant, and as long as what actually lies at the core of that meaning gets enacted one way or another, then the ritual has been a success. Given that humans aren't consistent, and can only attain procedural perfection through drilled repetition, it becomes obvious that a ritual perfect with respect to meaning, to its symbolic function, will most likely not be perfect with regards to its execution, because that's not the important part. The meaning is the important part.

So remember: (at least) six things go wrong at every perfect wedding.

Ups and Downs

2007-10-12T08:07:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure the guys in creative at the agency that got the Scion account thought the xB was yougly with a great big U, since the ad campaign was things like "pro: ugly, con: ugly," and "pro: wrong for so many; con: wrong for so many." And yet...the mobile little cube has grown on me. So the xBox leads me to today...

On the up side, Vince and Sara get married this weekend. Yay! Should be interesting, all things considered.

On the down side, Dawn has been gone for two weeks, and when she comes home tonight it will just be to work two twelve-hour shifts and turn around and leave again--to go to Louisville to bring Diane back--so gone for several more days.

On the up side, got to visit SCF at the med school and talk with a biology class about evolution this week.

On the down side, I don't know the new SCF leadership, which felt weird, and, as often, there are all sorts of uncertainties and regrets after speaking on a topic like evolution.

On the up side, I've resumed work on the study of the Christian understanding of the atonement. On the down side, I haven't got an academic article in process in philosophy right now.

On the up side, I'm in Book VII of Augustine's "City of God," and it's pretty interesting (although less fun than the Onion's article on changes to Dante's Inferno). On the downside, I couldn't finish Harry Potter's fifth (massive) installment, so that means I can't go on to VI and VII yet.

Did I mention that on the up side, Dawn's coming back tonight?

Eavesdrop on My Reading

2007-10-06T09:56:00.000-05:00

I am trying to catch up on reading. As one friend says, I look like I've done more reading than I really have (something about the dark circles around the eyes and the pasty complexion, maybe).

So I finally read two famous articles.

Luce Irigaray was (is?) a key French feminist postmodernist thinker. Her article "The Sex That Is Not One" takes Freud much more seriously than I think he deserves, but is very blunt in trying to talk about women's sex lives in a philosophical way.

Max Weber was a major German sociologist. His article "Science as a Vocation" sets him alongside Bertrand Russell as a post-Christian thinker who does not pretend that the functionally atheist, functionally functional, secular-modern view of life is anything other than emotionally, spiritually, and communally bleak.

I've also been reading sizable chunks of "God and Nature," "Science and Religion: A History," "Science and Theology: An Introduction," and a few feminist philosophers of science, on my way to taking questions in the biology department at El Centro this week on evolution. It is interesting to see the American feminists finding worthwhile things in Marx, and being very suspicious of Darwin.

In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" I'm in the chapter called "Dumbledore's Army."

El Centro is starting a Last Lecture Series (if you had one last chance to give a talk to students in your life, what would you say?). I will speak in the next few weeks. I got going on a draft last night, and was up till 2am.

Dawn is having a pretty good time in San Francisco, I think. Beth is retaking the SAT this morning.

Daniel Schorr, may his tribe increase, who is on NPR every morning at like 7am, should be required listening for every adult of sound mind in the country. Does it take having an old guy around for people in a society not to leap enthusiastically into collective amnesia? Schorr reminds us every day of the continuity of what has been happening these past seven years with personnel and issues dating from Nixon's reign, and tendencies dating to Goldwater in the 1960s. There was George I Washington, and George II Bush; should we be surprised at the ongoing assault on our constitution if the current officeholder is George III? That was the guy we revolted against in the first place, right? Boston Tea Party, no taxation without representation, the legislature to hobble the executive's ability to engage in discretionary foreign wars by cutting off funds to the military, the bill of rights--wasn't all that stuff what we realized we needed then, and always need? Schorr is our Yoda, and should be declared a national treasure.

Celebration of Discipline?

2007-10-05T11:19:00.000-05:00

I need to muse aloud about the science and religion thing. Don't take it personally, and don't take it as me making my final definitive word. But I'm not kidding, either.

It seems to me that rule one of all learning and intellectual inquiry is, don't talk yourself out of what you already know for sure is true, since almost any notion can be rationalized and made to seem plausible. Just because something can be made to look possible or reasonable doesn't necessarily at all change what you know you know. The world is as it is, not as it could be.
So, for instance, if you already know that you're a person in relationships with others, including relationships of love and care, and that you are a self with the ability to make decisions, don't let any plausible theory talk you out of that, even if you have to modify it some.
For instance, it may be important to learn that humans do not exhaust the list of possible persons, or that it's possible for you to do harm to others. But neither of these insights, if true, make you no longer a person in relationship. They might indeed force you, even against your preferences, to acknowledge that Martians or androids or angels are people; or it might force you to acknowledge that something is not right just because you do it and think you have good reasons for it. But those acknowledgements still leave you a person, and a person in relationships.
What are ruled out of court are, for instance,
A. impersonalisms, ideas that say the self isn't real, or that you are chemicals and not a soul, and so forth. (I realize that there are religious impersonalisms, especially in advaita hinduism and theravada buddhism. I'm attacking naturalistic materialisms here, and would have to say a lot more about these others.)
B. solipsisms, ideas that say that all that matters is your perspective
C. idealisms and gnosticisms that say that the world is bad or doesn't matter, that bodies are evil, and so on (more to say here, too, of course).
D. determinisms, that say it's all nature or nurture, or that the will is an illusion or a formula, or that it's all brain chemistry or pheromones or whathaveyou. (Again, panentheisms and panpsychisms--the idea that everything that exists is alive and possibly also is either part of God or has a soul--are exceptions about which there's more to say.)

Rule two is, keep an open mind, and a strong sense of your own fallibility,
because the way you know it is probably not the only way it can be known;
because while I'm the privileged narrator of my own life (nobody better than me knows how it looks from the inside of me), I'm not at all the privileged interpreter of my own life (since on the one hand I'm fabulously accomplished at self-justification and evasion and making myself look good, and on the other, I'm finite, a creature of my time and place, with little perspective on myself), and
because you can't learn anything if you already (think you) know everything.

Rule three, I suppose, is that thoughtful living in a seamlessly integrated world benefits from specialized consideration. What do I mean?
I experience one world as one self. I don't live in an abstraction. I live in "the world" that has "us" and "them" and "me" in it. So I don't experience "economics," not even when I'm at work (most people talk about their coworkers at work, not about the money moving around), I experience "the work world." But that's not even right, because I don't have to go through a transporter to go from "work world" to "family / home world" or "fun place"--I can move from one to the other, and I'm consicous of being the same me as I move. Sometimes, the same people move with me from one world to the next, and I certainly can imagine that even if it's not true at the moment. So as Searle says, there is exactly one world. And I am exactly one person in it. And I am not an uninvolved observer of this world, but also inextricably a member of and participant in it.
And yet, it helps me in my work world (and elsewhere) to study and know economics. Inherently, a map is not the world it describes: it's smaller, less detailed, and less living (even in Harry Potter). So economics is one map of the world. Political science is another. Math is (so it would seem) another (although no one can figure out how or why). So all the academic disciplines develop because it is informative and useful to abstract the one, holistic world and my one, holistic life in it, in this way and in that way, in terms of art appreciation and in terms of biology, philosophy and engineering.
The disciplines are valuable, because they are informative (true) and useful (good) about the actual world (which is why they are also often beautiful). But no discipline is the world, nor are all disciplines together. A word is not a thing, so every thing cannot be said--at least, not by us. (God's creative and providential "Word" is important here.)
Moreover, disciplines can be developed to focus on anything real, anything that exists. As Husserl says, they are "regional ontologies"--maps of one state or province, in some cases, maps of one sort of feature in another.
For example, in an atlas there are maps of Texas and England and Zambia. There are also what are called physical maps, population maps, political maps, climate maps, vegetation zone maps, and so on. In this sense, cultural geography (well, cultural cartography) is a good metaphor for all knowledge.
We want to know certain things for certain purposes and given our appreciation for certain things. If we discipline this "wanting to know" we come out with a "discipline," a Wissenschaft as the Germans call it, that focuses on it, or which abstracts from all that is to see the world in this or that way. But the world is always just what it is, and is worth what in fact it is worth. Maps don't usually change that. So there is such a thing as reality checking: maps can be more or less accurate, both with respect to what is really there, and with respect to what what is there means or how much it matters.
This means that disciplines are in relationships to each other which should, over time, be governed by what the actual relationships are in the real world of their object domains--of the things they try to study or highlight. Aristotle comes in handy here, for

Rule four is, disciplines must conform to reality over the long run. This means several things.
You must study something in the way it itself "tells you" to study it. "How much does envy weigh in kilograms?" is grammatically correct, but nonsense: you can't develop a disciplined study of envy that way, even if a writer talks metaphorically about "the weight of envy burdening him." Similarly, "what is it genes want?" is very possibly nonsense, too--not a question you can systematically ask. Strands of DNA and RNA will draw nucleotides from about 5 angstroms away, according to my lab friend, but chemicals (very probably) do not "want" anything. Understand, the reason you can't study envy by weight is not because you're limited, or someone (God, the church, the government, the science establishment) won't let you. It's because envy is not a "weight-ish" sort of thing.
Of course, this does not mean to shy off from learning. Telling someone not to study the health benefits of prayer is ideological coercion and censorship from the science establishment, just as much as telling them not to study the history of animals ever would be from the church.
It is reality that imposes the ultimate limits on disciplines.
There are other limits, I think. One is our nature. We do not, as Thomas Nagel says, and cannot understand "what it is like to be a bat," because we cannot fly and do not have sonar as a sense. A bat "sees the shape" of sounds. We not only do not, we *cannot.* When we use sonar, we may see something like what the bat sees on the screen, but we don't experience it as a sense perception as the bat does. Similarly with the detection of magnetic fields in birds, of electrical fields in sharks, and of infrared heat in pit vipers. How much else might there be that we can't sense, even through instruments? Gee, I dunno, but the current estimates on dark energy and dark matter are that they account for something like 90% of the mass and energy we need to make our current best explanations for the way the cosmos works, work.
Another limit is mystery. This is a word with a specific Christian usage. It means something we did not, and could not, know were God not to tell us. These might be things about us, about our world, or about himself and whatever, if anything, there "is" beyond this world. So it seems to Christians very clear, and something we already know before getting into disciplined study of the world, that God is real, and knows things we don't, and is capable of communicating with us in ways we can (at least partially) get, and that he does in fact do so.

So, four rules of thoughtfulness:
1. don't talk yourself out of what you already know to be true
2. be open-minded and humble about your claims to know
3. disciplined focus on parts of reality is perfectly permissible and is helpful, but never can tell us everything
4. our nature and abilities as humans, God's discretion, and the nature of reality put limits on what we can know

So, initially, on evolution:
1. whatever stance I come to take, whatever I learn about evolution, it cannot be correct if it makes me think I'm not a person, that I'm not in interpersonal relationships of love and care, that there's no God encountering me, or that I'm not in a world of some sort. I already know these things, even if there are huge oceans of things I don't know about them. Off the top of my head, though, I see no a priori reason why evolution would require me to give up any of those things. If it does, to the extent that it does, it's wrong. But it might be mostly right, or a bit right, even if there are parts I must reject.
2. Historical knowledge does not have the same epistemic standing as experience: I do not experience the past. To the extent that evolutionary theory is a theory of biological history, as distinct from a description of existing biological phenomena, it's epistemologically compromised, just like any other theory about historical reality.
That is, there being no videotapes of the beginning of all things, I need to be very careful in asserting this or that about it. God has told me some things in the Bible about it; and there are fossils. But both records are slender, and neither comments very much on itself. So the interpretation tends to be ours, and about that we should be very modest. Like...
A. It seems that there have been humanoids around for a while--tens of thousands, if not millions, of years. It is clear that our bodies, at least, are quite similar to other primates, even if there are important differences.
B. It seems that all of us who are alive today are descended from a very small group (10,000 or less; maybe 1,000 or less, according to DNA studies) who came from (east-central?) Africa.
C. It seems that all human beings should be seen as one race, from a biblical point of view, and one species, from an anthropological point of view. So dehumanizations like racism and nationalism should find no support in religion or science. (Evolution's competitiveness is a weak point here, since it can support racism and who knows what other horrors. Evolutionists know or sense this weakness, which might be why there's all these hurried attempts to evolutionarily justify altruism and care.)
D. It is clear that human life, if not natural life also, is not the way it is supposed to be. This is true, even though it is also clear that human life, just as such, is inherently good and worthwhile. We are in the image of God, but also fallen into sin.
E. It is clear that God is responsible for all that exists, including us (and, for our purposes and from our point of view, especially for us). He is "creator."
F. It seems clear that we know very little about the deep past. Once we get beyond where dendrochronology takes us (about 6000 years before the present), we increasingly are making educated guesses that are not checkable by anything more reliable than other educated guesses. We have not much beyond the foggiest notion what God creating by his word means, nor do science or philosophy have even the first sentence of a theory on why there is something rather than nothing.
What this last point means for considerations of evolution is that the historical component, macroevolution, starts off on much shakier epistemic grounds than microevolution (which is observable to some extent). This is before we start applying statistics (Dembski) or biochemistry (Behe) to the data. So assertions about macroevolution's truth should be modest, even if right (which they might not be). As for me, I'm a fairly cheerful agnostic about macroevolution factually, interested to read current discoveries and theories, but not very persuaded by any of them. On the other hand, I am mostly opposed to most of its advocates, because they appear to me to advocate it mostly because they have metaphysical and ethical agendas opposed to Christianity which they think it will help. More about this next time.
G. As creatures ourselves, it seems clear that we cannot climb outside the universe to check on God and see if he really did what he said he did, or to acquire another, clearer, vocabulary in which to explain to ourselves what what he said he did "really" means or what "really" happened. So claims about what creation could and could not mean should also be hedged about with modesty, for we know it is true, but we are on much shakier grounds when we try to say what "it" entails, precisely.

So much for knowledge, for disciplined thoughtfulness about our lives in our world, especially as it pertains to evolutionary biology. More ideological issues next time.

2007-10-04T10:28:00.000-05:00

As I listen to Jonathan and Elizabeth talk about current and future plans or dreams, it brings up long-term plans for Dawn and me as well.

I wonder what it would be like to go back to Africa really. I wonder if going as an expatriate, missionary or otherwise, is what I would want. But what would naturalization be like? Presumably you *can* naturalize anywhere, so there must be procedures for becoming Tanzanian or Zambian or South African or whatever. But of course a white middle-class American does not expect to naturalize as a dishwasher in her new country; the reverse happens here, with some comment but little outrage, of course--but what about the other direction?

Could I get a job in a philosophy department, despite the color of my skin, given the history of colonialism and apartheid there?

Would we be accepted? What becomes of homesickness in such a context? For example, German-Americans kept German-language events and newspapers into the twentieth century.

What about the critical posture toward government I take, and I think important to exist? Artificial countries, like Tanzania and Zambia, need integrative and positive voices, because they have no overweening national pride or xenophobia, because "they" were not ever a "they" historically, but were simply made into countries by the British.

What about shifting away from a hard-currency income, from euros / dollars / pounds to shillings or kwacha?

But one wouldn't want to naturalize "just to see if I could do it." So I'm just musing, at one level. But it is a helpful way to force me to think about global perspective in a more rigorous and yet more personal way.

batch, natch

2007-10-02T16:29:00.001-05:00

Dawn headed out with Diane for Louisville and parts beyond this morning. A good thing. I'll probably toy with my chili recipe while they're gone, and try to do too many--i.e., all--the things hard to do when the house is full up.

Or just read the last 2 1/2 Harry Potter books that I haven't read yet.

It's a cruel trick to make an INTJ a teacher. What is beautiful and complete in my mind, is not visible to anyone else. And when extruded, it tends to excite surprised and alarmed looks and comments like "yikes" and "ur, that's awkward." But trust me, in here, it's thrillingly clear...

reading

2007-10-01T19:42:00.000-05:00

I would die mentally and spiritually if I could not encounter God in reading. I can meditate, but I feel accompanied when I read. For me, reading Augustine's City of God is not an academic exercise, but a personal one. My mind is engaged, but I go in believing, I suppose, that God has something for me there. But it does not always feel like he is off somewhere up at the head of the class waiting for me to find Waldo; it feels like he is breathing down my neck, looking over my shoulder, peering hard at Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling or whatever it is, with me.

I think the centering effect of reading for me is not just the stabilization that happens to any INTJ when they go inside, because when I go inside myself *by myself* that is, increasingly, a bad and not innocent thing. It is when I go inside *accompanied* that good things happen. For those of you who pray, pray that I continue to have both the radar and the appetite for what is healthy and lifegiving, and that the desire in me to go "further up and further in," not by myself, but para-kletos, accompanied, will thrive.

Making Good Use of an Afternoon

2007-09-30T15:59:00.000-05:00

Musings on a Sunday afternoon...

My parents are 157 years old between the two of them, and live an hour's drive away. Dawn's mom lives with us. That's kind of amazing. What a privilege that Dawn and I are near our parents--both geographically and emotionally--at this stage of things.

What else? I am looking forward to reading a lot in the next two weeks, while Dawn and Diane are away. Maybe I will get to write as well.

I've discovered bartleby.com, which looks like a very nice resource, with primary sources, reference works, etc., all reliable without being too academic.

I'm just finishing Purgatorio in my second-in-my-life reading of the Divine Comedy. I'm trying to appreciate Dante for what he is, which I have not heretofore done.

I want to pick a skill or two to develop over the next ten years. Any suggestions? (Remember, I'm 47, so not bungee-jumping and the like, please.)

Peace to all those who love late afternoons, from a morning lover.

flowers, with feathers

2007-09-28T16:16:00.000-05:00

Woody Allen famously misquoted Emily Dickinson by saying that hope wasn't the thing with feathers, as she had said; it was his brother, and he needed to get him to a specialist.

Well, feathery things that are hopeful and sort of nuts have been getting to me lately. The guy who helpfully pulls his girlfriend's shirt down in back when she in her lowrise jeans leans over. Women running with big dogs. An Asian man of dubious English skills working very hard to understand and be kind to a young woman who is vigorously speaking to him about something. A bus driver radiating calm as someone on the edge of freakdom jabbers away at him in the front of the bus. A kindergarten girl, unaware of feminism or sexism, sitting confidently in a princess dress playing a video game defeating bad guys.

I don't know. I've often said here that part of my job in this world is seeing signs of revival in hell. So this is all easily dismissed as sentimentality, a la the blowing plastic grocery sack in "American Beauty." I suppose it is at least partly that, and is maybe entirely that...unless something in me is right to respond to signs of uncrushed goodness. It's not like my "Life Is Beautiful"; I and almost all I know are by world and historical standards fantastically favored. But the clarity of sight for icky things that comes when you do not fog your vision with some emotional / mental anaesthetic or another, does not require you to be a Rwanda survivor in order to immerse you in cynicism and sadness. And while there is more help than this, and needs to be more, nevertheless I think it's important for me not to lose the ability to see even just the widespread presence of partial efforts at goodness by all kinds of people, sometimes right in the midst of all the gack.

It is very true at this stage of America's history that If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention. But I need to remind myself pretty regularly that it's also true that there are flowers that can grow in deserts.

Self/Ish

2007-09-27T11:11:00.000-05:00

The Hebrew word for "man" is *ish.* So I'll call the study of the male self's self-concept as male "Self-Ish-Ology."

If we rule out what can't be essentially male, we're left with an interesting question.

It can't be essentially male to prefer pants to skirts--kilts.

It can't be essentially male to avoid cosmetics and facial decoration--Maoris, Aztec rulers.

It can't be essentially male to dislike Judy Garland--Frank Sinatra.

Contra Fight Club, it's perfectly permissible for a male to know the meaning of the word "duvet"--see Louis XIV, XV, and Versailles Palace.

It doesn't belong to maleness to be macho, since on the whole I think pride / honor / reputation / insult fixations are adolescent, and it is not required of adult males that they be essentially adolescent.

It doesn't belong to maleness to be sex-driven, since the most guy guys around are driven not by sex or even money but, as Galadriel says, by power. (Napoleon, for all I know, really loved Josephine, but...Henry VIII was a comprehensive womanizer so far as I can tell, but that wasn't what made him a powerful Tudor king. And so on.

Fighting isn't essential to maleness; see under macho--it's an adolescent and unimaginative response to frustration, finitude, etc. I'm not speaking of actual individual or group self-defense here, but then that is a rare need in a civilized country, even if half-romantically we (think we!) wish it weren't.

Competitiveness? Women seem to be trainable to it enough, and maybe that's because there's not a difference in the aptitude for or inclination to it, but just in the mode of its expression (Devil Wears Prada, Dangerous Liaisons). Men seen as leaders, from quarterbacks to conquerors to religious holy men, enlist enormous cooperation, even if they put *that* cooperation in the service of competition with something or someone else.

Male preference for the friendship company of other men is pretty anthropologically universal, but then this kind of "same-sex preference" (unconnected, except rarely, with anything sexual) is a trait shared with women, who prefer the friendship company of other women. But on the other hand, companionate marriage and egalitarian civil society are maybe showing that it does not eviscerate the maleness of men to enjoy or even prefer the friendship company of women, and vice-versa.

And so...what? Masculinity and femininity are distinguishable from maleness and femaleness, maybe. That's to be pursued. However that turns out, though, what is common humanity? to be commonly human, but male? to be Self/Ish?

taking exception to exceptionalism

2007-09-26T09:57:00.000-05:00

When we make exceptions, we ought mostly to make them for other people, not for ourselves.

Trivial example: you expect other people to be nice and not rude in small, everyday ways around house and office. And you demand this of yourself; the fact that you have your period or had a crappy day at the office is no justification for wailing on the innocent, unsuspecting party at home: the kid, the friend, the spouse. You should put your own stuff in perspective and rise above that. And we expect this of others, generally. But we do, and I think should, make exceptions sometimes: oh, she didn't mean anything by that, she's worried about her dad; I know he was rude, but he's under this huge deadline. So while of course I'm not arguing to only be nice to other people and beat up on yourself, I am saying, given our tendency to make excuses for ourselves, blame others, avoid accountability, whine, and so on, the general presumption ought to be to make an exception (not a rule, of course) for the behavior and attitude of others, but not for your own.

We know this. By the end of high school or one's first job, one hopes.

But the current administration, the only one even remotely likely to be one I could even sort of support on a whole host of ethical issues, has treated 9-11 and our superpower status and our heritage as the Good Guy on the Right Side and the "fact that we're at war" (which we're not: Iraq is not a war, it's a diversion, a party favor for a rich country that can send some guys to fight small countries with one hand, while basically we're just watching tv) as carte blanche to create an exception for us (really, for our government) for *everything*.
Everyone else has to play by the rules, but not us. Everyone else has to have transparent, public trials of those they find threatening to their regime, but we don't. It's wrong for other people to detain people without trial or contact; but not us. It's a sign of their evilness for them to not tell their people the truth, but it's a sign of our special responsibility as protectors of our people that we do not do so. They shouldn't engage in assassinations, but we can. It's bad of them to beat people and not observe the Geneva Conventions, but we're not bound by them.

And what is happening? The creeps of the world have caught on. They may be evil, but they aren't all stupid. First Putin and then every other lowlife in the world now uses Bush-Rove-Rumsfeld-Cheney (BRRC) logic to justify their disregard for the international order, their contempt for due process, their snubbing of world opinion, their rudeness to one another, and their sweeping away of democratic rights and liberties. This is of course because they recognize that exceptionalism, when made the rule for one country, is a general denial of law and rights, which are based on the idea that no one is exception except very exceptionally, i.e., very rarely, briefly, and limitedly.

But the BRRC group were fundamentally anarchists: they denied that they were accountable to anyone or that any law applied to them except the ones they made to justify what they were going to do anyway. It is not only lawless, it is deeply contemptuous of the rule of law, and utterly dismissive of the basic mindset of constitutionalism. More than a little ironic from people who use the rhetoric of strict constructionism. They mean it in another sense: I will construct the laws I want, and they will constitute justice for everyone else. But this is the argument of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic, and Machiavelli, and every dictator literate enough to bother justifying his actions in history. This is not just a reversal of Clinton; or the revenge of 60s conservatives who resented being outshouted on Vietnam, although it is those things. It is a reversal of Franklin Roosevelt, and indeed of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, of the whole 20th century *except* insofar as US military and economic power compared to other nations gave us, they thought, a belated chance to have a 19th-century-like global empire. But it's more; it's monarchism, and of a Stuart or even Plantagenet sort. Check out the Brit's site on the Magna Carta. There's stuff Alito, Scalia, Roberts, and Thomas want to do, in keeping with Gonzalez and Cheney, that the barons at Runnymede wouldn't have put up with.

As an evangelical Christian deeply disturbed by, even if not always sure what to do about, abortion on demand, gayism and sexual / relational chaos generally, the warehousing of the elderly, online porn, the exclusion of religion from public life and schooling, the intellectual hegemony of naturalistic secularism, and many other developments which have, more and less, as much appeal to me as to anyone in this generation of vapors, I've got to say, these BRRC radicals, who used Bush as an all too willing front, and now as fall guy, really deeply scare me. It feels like Rome in the first century BC, as guys like Cicero and Cato feel the republic slipping away from beneath them.

We need leaders who unequivocally accept Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, stare decisis (starting with the rulings of Marshall and Jay), the Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter--and, oh, say, the Ten Commandments while we're at it. Why do we even have to say this sort of thing at this late date? And evangelicals were duped into helping engineer this coup de regime.

Sigh

2007-09-25T09:25:00.000-05:00

Heard some disturbing things this morning.

One was President Bush's speech before the UN. The rhetorical strategy of tying everything he said to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was perfectly appropriate, even if his administration-long ignoring of and opposition to both civil and human rights makes it all ring a bit hollow. But the constant "the UN musts" are bound to fall on deaf ears when his administration has been contemptuously dismissive of not just the UN (hello, John Bolton), but any and every multilateral effort throughout his terms. Even as he is saying this, he is refusing to participate in the world discussion on global warming, and having his own, pretend-international, pretend-conference, on pretend-global-warming. That the UN must intervene here or there rings hollow coming from someone who has been supremely arrogantly unconcerned about international opinion, international cooperation (except in the form of "agreeing with me"), and multilateral operations. How can a statement that we need to do it "for the kids," as he argued at several points, be heard as anything but patently hypocritical coming in the very week in which he vetoes universal children's health care in his own country? And the "we're all in this together against terrorists" is just sad coming from someone who *had* everyone together against terrorists in the fall of 2001 and the invasion of Afghanistan (against which we did well, except that we should have declared proper war), and squandered and squashed that good will in a political and economic rich-guys-club lark-cum-obsession in Iraq. He is a divider at home; "we" is not a word in his vocabulary that has extensional content.

Which leads to point two.

Why is the only guy who's likely to even appreciate, let alone do anything about, anything even remotely close to my own quirky views on reasonable censorship (like .xxx for porn sites), abortion (parental notification (not, probably, consent) for minors, first trimester only, mandatory abortion / pregnancy support counseling, strengthened paternity laws), assisted suicide (that would be a no), and strengthening marriage laws (like Louisiana's experiment with covenant marriage), also the guy who has
1. taken a country with a surplus and a roaring economy and created a monster deficit; created huge new bureaucracies; and priming the economy for recession and relative global decline;
2. taken a country with huge bureaucracies at least in theory concerned with helping people or defending their rights, and slashed those bureaucracies (student loans and grants, children's health insurance, legal aid for the poor, indigent health care), and created instead monster bureaucracies (homeland security) concerned with managing (not eliminating) fear, invading privacy, and denying basic civil rights;
3. taken a united country fighting over the right to claim the middle ground and, following up on Newt and company, who started this social disease, turned it into a country which is psychologically sharply divided, doesn't believe in the persuasive power of reason, sees compromise as pointless and treacherous, is contemptuous of other views, denies any kind of accountability, and is essentially lawless in its faux "law and order" stance;
4. taken the world's best military, wasted it totally in Iraq, and employed mercenaries for the first time in any significant numbers since, oh, the British employed the Hessians--oh, yeah; the British weren't on our side then; so, since ever;
5. appointed justices who might well hem in roe vs. wade, but who also, and for Cheney and Rove et al, much more importantly, support invasion of privacy, denial of basic human, never mind guaranteed civil, rights, the imperial presidency, and big business uber alles;
6. taken a country everyone wanted to come to and so acted as to give credence and plausibility to people offering other options, some of them having to do with 'we also can deny people's rights in our own way'--Putin and China and Chavez--and others on out towards nutcake (hamas's victory, al-qaeda, ayatollic Iran);
5. taken his vaunted I'm the decider role seriously enough that he has been no thinker, no listener, no persuader, no consensus-builder, no converser, no learner, but just a decider, and thus a divider par excellance.

Which, alas, brings up point three, the Ahmadinejad talk at Columbia. That leftists or intellectual conservatives or academics sought to maintain their cred (as...what? tough guys? "patriots"?) by insulting Ahmadinejad just shows how thoroughly Rove / de Lay have won. As Jon Stewart pointed out recently in a piece called The Scorn Supremacy, to learn nothing from the Bush debacle but how to be as contemptuous of him and his as he and his are of absolutely everyone else is not to have learned very much, or much very helpful. The only way out is through respect for one another, however undeserved, not contempt, which is so easy.

So...pray for *all* those--very much including Bush--in any kind of authority.

an ounce of more is worth a pound of fooling

2007-09-23T12:32:00.000-05:00

Hello. Thought I was gone? Not so lucky. Back again. and doubtless to be linked to my Facebook page. Nonsense all, on one level, but communicative nonsense, so worthwhile, then.

I'm teaching 5 sections of 4 courses for 6 sections' credit. Everyone clear?

I'm at El Centro College in downtown Dallas (a block from the Kennedy assassination site) full-time for the second year in a row now. This fall I have a double section of world religions, one of ethics, and two of introduction to philosophy. Most funly, I am doing a social and political philosophy course for the first time, and for the first time at this college in perhaps 15 years. I'm also supervising two (soon to be 3 or 4) adjuncts, teaching more philosophy and religion. Plus a philosophy club and college, and soon (hopefully) one at Beth's high school. I'm trying out in intro the anthology I put together this summer, called "Sophie's Reader," so it's fun to see how people react to that.

The arc of this narrative is that I get evaluated for permanent hire, the community college (not-quite-) equivalent of tenure, this upcoming spring. And I'm trying to work as much as humanly possible to get Dawn some relief and to start paying down on our debts.

Otherwise, I hang out at the med school still, though less than I want to. I love Angela and Curran living behind us. I'll officiate at Vince and Sarah's wedding in a few weeks. And I taught at LGBC just this past Saturday. I miss many people, starting with Jonathan, but look forward to FallFest (the 14th annual) and Christmas.

So much for updating.

mark

For the Day

2007-01-25T09:25:00.000-06:00

There's a new-to-me cartoon called Diesel Sweeties. The last several days a 'girl' (unspecified 15-25-year-old) alien has been talking to the boy (same) main character. Today he asked her how they "separate the men from the boys" on her home planet. Her response: "ideally, with a centrifuge."

Learning Curves

2007-01-21T17:08:00.000-06:00

I'm cramming reading in for sanity's sake. I've finished one and am halfway through another short but important philosophical texts. I took notes on Berkeley's Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, and am forcing myself through Hume's Enquiry into the Principles of Human Understanding. Berkeley is hard to follow everywhere he goes; Hume is an extremely pleasingly written disaster. It's amazing how true the blood runs: AngloAmerican analytic philosophy is still running in so many of these assumptions and techniques. I see Quine and Wittgenstein and Austin and Ryle in this phrase and that.

On the other end of life, I'm trying to learn how to introduce adult cats to one another. Both our Alora and Mom's Ippi (for Mississippi) were street cats, strays taken in and thus fighters and survivors. I just really can imagine a lot of disastrous scenarios. Neither is an indoor cat, but Mom's is new and may leave or go out and get killed (our neighborhood is a good deal rougher, petwise, than Mom's was), which would devastate Mom; and ours can no longer keep the area toms at bay and was getting badly mauled, so we brought her, much against her will, in, only a few months ago. And of course Dixie, all hundred pounds of her, is indoors at least at night. Soooo...we'll see, I guess.

The Evangelical Critique of Rove-Cheneyism as Practiced by the President

2007-01-20T07:41:00.000-06:00

I've said bits and pieces of this before, but let me clear, and concise if I can, about the miserable political situation I see in our country. Jim Wallis has done this better, in "God's Politics: Why the Right Is Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It." But shy of reading that, here's this. Now, once I start, the end will seem predictable. I don't think it is; I am more nuanced than my initial comments might indicate: indeed, I feel heartsick and conflicted about so much of this. I will respond to comments, but otherwise hope to leave this subject alone for quite a while. It's important, but not very edifying. But if you have the stomach for this sort of thing at all, listen in as I think my way through this in one go.

The big picture is that at the peak of its power and world influence, America has been led primarily by mediocrities. Particularly in foreign affairs, since Truman, only Kennedy has shown some glimmer of real vision for a world led by America in a new and better direction, and only he had to deal with a real threat to the US (the Cuban missile standoff with Russia); Reagan just happened to be president when Communism and apartheid were collapsing of their own accord. (H.W. got to host the end-of-an-era party.) Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, H.W. (Bush the First, who at least had the virtue of thinking of himself as a president, not a king), and Clinton were all...so-so. Okay on this, bad on that, mostly middling. They couldn't do too awfully, because they were running the most powerful ship on the seas, but they hardly maximized what we could have done for good (and our good) in the world. The exceptions were Johnson and W. (Bush II, whose handlers like to position him as king, but who thinks of himself as a fraternity president), both Texans, for whom the overriding approach to relations with strangers was to engage in Operation Manhood. Both embroiled us hopelessly, for purely their own psychological reasons, in pointless bloodletting which ruined our reputation as a beacon of democracy and fairness, wasted our mostly earnest and well-meaning military, was doomed from the start strategically, and which, while a major war in the lives and region of the soldiers and of the places we were fighting (Vietnam, Iraq), were not really wars for us at all, but diversions. Nixon, finally, was a would-be autocrat, a real threat to the constitution while he was coherent, Caligula-like in his delusions at the end if Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig are to be believed.

Which brings us to the big picture right now. Generationally speaking, the boomers who were the fighters in Vietnam are now the policymakers in Washington. The divisions in our country right now are boomer divisions. And this administration is driven by those who were young conservatives in the 1960s and early 70s and their proteges, who are very intentionally replaying the Nixon administration, trying to reverse all its lessons. Cheney and Rumsfeld, Gingrich and DeLay, on down the list. It goes something like this.

1. Nixon was only impeached for political advantage for the Democrats, not because he routinely and explicitly instructed White House staff to violate the law, used the FBI for personal political revenge, had a completely unAmerican concept called "executive privilege" which supposedly made his doings above the law, and did not want to abide by constitutional restrictions on his power in general. So, solution: impeach Clinton only for political advantage.

2. We lost Vietnam because we weren't savage enough and didn't frankly take over the country, nineteenth-century-imperial-power-style. Solution: take over Iraq, and do it as savagely (Abu Graib) as it takes.

3. It was unpatriotic for people to differ with the government (mainly here meaning Nixon, not Johnson) over Vietnam--read: those of us who went to Vietnam earnestly believing that we were doing the right thing were not wrong to trust our government, and we were not bad people for being good soldiers. (Of course, all of the principals in our current political debacle are *not* veterans, having, like W., gotten out of it at the time; the actual veterans, like Murtha and Kerry and McCain, have very different views from both the simple proIraq and antiIraq people.) It is hard not to be sympathetic with this driving dynamic. I agree with Jonson and Wilde that patriotism is both the last and the first refuge, rhetorically speaking, of scoundrels trying to distract the public from paying attention to how wrong they (the scoundrels) are. More importantly, though, I think patriotism at the *national* level is passe; we need a global patriotism instead, now. But I certainly respect young men and women who served without irony in Vietnam; it is not to be expected that young adults would have all the issues sorted out that their elders are dealing with, and followers have to follow leaders sometime or other with a minimum of fuss, or nothing ever gets done. All I'm saying is don't underplay the "good kid" syndrome: those who were proud of what they (they would say "we") did in Vietnam, and resent how the war and its participants have been treated ever since, are motivated participants in this administration's attempt to rewrite history.

3. We were right in Vietnam, not wrong. This is a natural but unhelpful feeling. It dates back originally to when there was a huge reaction against Carter's willingness to say that we were wrong, that we needed to repent and do things differently, etc. Reagan partly rode to power in 1980 on the anger of people tired of apologizing. Since 1994, the Repubs have used this gut sense as a powerful appeal, using it to eliminate nuanced consideration of issues. We are doing the right thing here, because we are the ones who do right things, because we are right, because we are the good guys, because we, after all, are us. Of course, as I said yesterday, in a fallen world, sometimes the good guys are wrong, badly wrong--there are African Americans named Thames in eastern Mississippi, and I don't think it's because ex-slaves moved there and admired us so much. But it is a hard lesson to absorb.

4. Nixon was right, not wrong. Presidents are good guys, we are not fools for trusting them, we should do what they say, and you should shut up. Clinton slyly--for he did much of what he did slyly--brought back the concept of executive privilege, a royalist doctrine that intentionally confuses the secrecy of spy work and the confidentiality of routine personnel matters with the desire of imperialistic presidents to operate without any review or transparency, because they do not want to be accountable to anyone.
Why would anyone besides the president himself be in favor of this? My guess is this: in Chesterton's fantastic novel, "The Man Who Was Thursday," an anarchist explains to a naive police investigator why big business ceo's would bankroll anarchists. He says, don't you understand? The poor object to being governed badly; the rich object to being governed at all. And I think maybe that's it here; in the era when major businesses have had government oversight reduced or eliminated, when taxes on the middle class have gone up and taxes on the rich have gone down, when corporate leaders' pay has risen from 20-40 times as much as the average employee to 300-400 times as much as the average employee, the rich and the aspiring rich want a role model of someone who, because they are "us," doesn't have to follow any of the rules. The factory worker or service shlub will gripe about taxes and appreciate a holiday from governance every so often--in the middle ages, that's where april fool's day came from, when the followers got to lead--but they *want* someone steering the ship, keeping them from hurting each other, but mostly keeping the rich from exploiting them without recourse.
But for the already privileged we have Alberto Gonzalez and Cheney's legal team. We suspend habeas corpus, we define certain classes of people out of the protection of the laws, we say that government or presidential or CIA activities are immune to review by congress or the courts. Do you *hear* this? This is how an American dictatorship would start. We wouldn't all suddenly vote to be communist or fascist. An American loss of freedom would have to come incrementally via someone talking us into giving up our freedoms voluntarily, in ways that "made sense" to us. Hence the Karl Rove fear card, the completely spurious "we're at war, so all rules are off" "argument," the kangaroo courts that should embarrass the military officers told to serve on them; hence Guantanamo and CIA prisons in eastern Europe and *Syria*(!) and 'you elected me to lead'. All said, if you listen closely, with a serpent's hiss.
Hello, people? Magna Carta and all that? This comes out in Bush's well, they can cut funding for the war but I'm still going to do whatever I want. Guys, that's where the English parliament came from, where democracy came from: the people getting together to keep the king from bankrupting the country by going out and waging wars of interest to no one but him personally.

And why do we think this administration likes war so much? Because in theory, at least, the army has to do what you tell it to without any discussion. These people profoundly do not believe in democracy, let alone freedom. Because democracy involves endless conversations and decisions that don't quite fully please anyone; necessarily this is so, because *good*, informed, responsible people do *not* all agree. When congress was utterly supine, the administration didn't mind telling it what to do. But there is no interest in talking substantively with anyone who does not immediately say yessuh massuh. So that rules out any meaningful domestic politics. It also rules out any meaningful or constructive foreign policy. Because the only lesson we are teaching people around the world in Iraq is, damnit when we get a bunch of really nasty military hardware, we'll make our guys go blow someone else up, and we won't explain or apologize or have to have any good reasons--just like the Americans; and, hey, no need to discuss or agree with anyone, just posture and bluff, like Bush did. It is Bush who has taught Ahmadinejad and Chavez how to behave--and, most frighteningly, has given Putin permission to act overtly like the ex-KGB man he is. There were no "weapons of mass destruction," nor did Cheney et al. care whether there were. Nation-building? Bush could not care less whether Iraq is a democracy or not, since he doesn't like democracy all that much here; and God help us, the most recent excuse, Iran's got to be resisted, is the last playing card from the boomer's experience of the 70s: let's replay and undo the Iran hostage crisis. If they take us to war there, then we really could end up in a *war*. It will take years to recover from the debacles they've talked us into already.

A word more on the other reason the administration likes war. It creates a "special situation" where regular rules don't apply. This is for domestic political purposes, mainly, not so we can win a foreign fight. We're supposed to unite behind the president, and trust him, since he knows more about the situation than we do--which is convenient, since the intense belief in secrecy and nonaccountability guarantees that no one else will have an informed opinion. It makes traitors out of people who disagree or "help the enemy"--and the Bushite official who criticized lawyers for agreeing to represent al-Qaeda and Iraqi prisoners is precisely on message for this administration. Differing from me is treason, we don't have to follow the laws, we're good guys and they're bad guys, so *we* can do anything to *them* we want, and no one can know about or ask anything or say anything about it. Guys, this is horrific: this is totalitarianism in the womb. And even if I ought to give you the benefit of the doubt on foreign affairs, it's no reason at all for me to agree with you to renew or make permanent yet another round of tax breaks for the rich or regarding excusing corporations from environmental regulations. Those have nothing to do with your war.

4. Besides, it's all just a game to them. This is the Tom DeLay / W. / Trent Lott / Karl Rove approach. Gerrymander electoral districts in the offseason, espouse racism in safe quarters, never admit you were wrong or sincerely utter an apology, lie big and repeatedly with a straight face. And when called on all this, say, hey, it's just a game, it's not that big a deal, I'm going back to a cushy private life as a wealthy person anyway, it's just politics, that's how it's played, it was fun for a while, government is just a game and doesn't really matter.

Words should fail me at this attitude of extremely cavalier privilege. So just one point. These guys are really cavalier in their attitude. How cavalier are they?

The "war on terror" is not a war. It is a nasty police action, so nasty that it requires spies and military units. But it is not a war. Osama was not trying to overthrow the US, although he wouldn't shed any tears for us. He was trying to overthrow the House of Saud. Saddam wasn't in league with bin Laden; those two hate each other. We did Osama a favor by overthrowing and killing Saddam. The war on terror is a minor outrigger of a giant four way civil war in the Muslim world between Shia and Sunni and between modernizers and medievalizers. Destroying the Taliban was reasonable as a response to 9-11, and no one, even in the muslim world, has criticized us much for that. As for the rest, it's not our deal. We have no dog in that fight. We probably should prefer the modernizers win; but we have no particular reason to prefer Shia to Sunni or vice-versa. The British and French had the good sense, in worldly terms, to watch our civil war from the sidelines, talking to both sides and financing and arming both sides. If we'd sort out nuclear energy, or spend Exxon's trillions in profit on developing hydrogen fuel cells or electric cars, or build a real transit system, we wouldn't care squat about oil, and that cynical argument about our foreign policy would just fall away. Don't tell me we can't replace oil. It's a matter of will.
But why mention our prior experience or our actual self-interest as a nation? This administration thinks that history begins with them, and that their self-interest equates to the national self-interest.

The main thing here is that the war in Iraq is not a war, not for us. For them it is, but not for us. Here's some ways to tell.
No draft.
No impact on consumer spending or availability of consumer products.
Young men are still around in the States.
World War II was a war: 10% of the US population was in the military--we'd have 30 million people in the military if that were true right now. There were no 17-34 year old men in the US for those five years. Production of civilian cars, tires, and other products was stopped. Food supplies were regulated, so that you were issued coupons for things like sugar. Women's dresses were shortened in order to save fabric (or so they said; maybe that one wasn't entirely driven by war materiel needs) and pantyhose eliminated. Americans today will only even consider supporting a war if it is one that the administration can guarantee will have no impacts on them whatsoever. It is a boutique war, like the Spanish Civil War was a dry run for World War II; a place that doesn't bother or interest us, that no sizable number of us is from, that can't possibly threaten our national security (even though that's our official rationale), where we can try out tactics and technology without having to care about outcomes very much. Something we can do with one arm tied behind our back, our attention elsewhere, and the other arm on a videogame joystick.

So it's a war with "no costs" to us, an exercise, something to do. But why do that?

War is the term used, and Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Bush got us in a war that would last indefinitely because they wanted an indefinite excuse for rule by secrecy and fiat, uncontested and where they could plausibly always accuse their opponents of being unpatriotic. It's more nuanced than that, I think, but not much.

Now, having said all this and been, I think, pretty clear about where I stand, here's the surprising part.

I'm happy about a few things. Bush's hegemony has broken the more aggressive and unpleasant factions in the culture wars. Now, more helpfully, it is marriage, about which a legitimate discussion is possible, not some general right to unrestricted sex with whomever whenever, which is being debated now, a different tone than during Clinton's era. Abortion rights are being restricted without, so far as I can tell, being really threatened. And Christians can out themselves in business, entertainment, and public affairs (although not yet in science) without immediately destroying their careers. These are, to me, generally positive moves that might well have occurred in healthier ways, but did, let me grant, occur under the Bush umbrella. I'm not sorry that I can voice my views without ducking.

Even there, though, this adminstration is a huge problem. For, by its blatantly and obviously Machiavellian use of religion (I can think of no significant policy evangelical Christians are in favor of that has been passed at the federal level or even seriously been considered), and the equation that has been firmly fixed in educated nonchristians' minds between Bushism and real Christianity, that I fear that nothing has so set evangelism back in decades as these people. To be associated with Christ is to be associated with them: with ugly, rude mean-spirited conflict; with an utter lack of interest in conversation, discussion, persuasion, finding common ground, or genuine appeals; and with a gloating, hardline chanting of a party line. This is horrible, and devastating to meaningful witness. Of all the numerous domestic and foreign disasters which we will finally attribute to this administration, the utter loss of credibility for Christ among nonbelievers will be one of the worst.

And yet, and yet...all is not lost, not by a long shot. My complaints, like Cheney's and Rove's machinations, are only possible because of the spoiled situation in which we find ourselves. It is such a wealthy and powerful and free and well-regulated country that it will take many an ar-Pharazon the Golden--er, Bush--to thoroughly wreck it. Americans are 60 times wealthier than Chinese, to give some perspective. Also, there are millions of believers here, some of them thoughtful and many of them caring. They cannot be led wrong forever--think Lincoln's can't fool all the people all the time. The strong and definite stands of this unnuanced administration at least give us clear examples of what to do or not do. The globalization of the world means that no one country can either fix or ruin everything. And none of this takes grace and the work of the Spirit into account. So I leave you with what came to me as I was wondering whether to even share these thoughts aloud: as Galadriel said of Samwise, Hope still lives, while the Company is true--not thoughtlessly obedient, not open-minded, not tough on crime, not unwilling to judge others: while it is *true*.

Aut Blogi Aut Mori

2007-01-19T21:55:00.000-06:00

I've been surfing through the amazing world of mom blogs, and I ran across this motto under a clip-art-style graphic of an old-fashioned revolver, pointed out at the viewer. It's Latin, and means, Either Blog or Die. On a mommy blog. Wow.

So what's this about?

A couple of observations so far.

One is, momblogging is the current equivalent of 90s MOPS groups or 80s Sesame Street watching: intelligent, educated women, staying home at least part time, doing what they need to do to keep from going stir-crazy babbling with the precious delicate flower with all its lovely, poo-forward qualities.

The second is, this is the reasonable postmodernizing of mother discussions. For the thing prized in this world above all appears to me to be honesty, authenticity. One way to define the postmodernizing culture is to spot contexts where people value authenticity over expertise, genuineness over qualifications. There are problems with this approach--in the 70s and 80s the onset of this lifeview turned educated Californians into New Agers, which percolated out into the rest of the society in the 90s and is now just part of the operating system. But on the other hand, it has the laudable effect of enshrining the taking of personal responsibility as a virtue. It also is a salutary reminder that children are not a product to be optimized. More to the point, what else would actual contemporary women sound like, if left to their own devices and given a technology that gives them a voice?

So props to dooce and alphamom and all the rest, as unedifying as some of that reading is. The point for a guy like me is not to critique them: I'm not doing any momming right now.

Of course, I'm glad I'm married to Dawn and got to raise kids with her when I did (although even there, we would rather have raised them in Lusaka). But if there is any wisdom or godliness we've acquired in that, we won't get it to these women by shooting them down, identifying them as the enemy (which the New Testament forbids us doing in any case), or presenting ourselves as experts.

The question for me insofar as I am a Christian parent is, how do I authentically and genuinely share whatever combination of wisdom and honest failings that I have to these people? The question for me insofar as I am an evangelical Christian is, not are there problems there and things to object to in these blogs, but how do you imagine that these people would look and sound seven months from now if we injected Jesus into that conversation in a way that was winsome and compelling?

In any case, surely we could agree that flaming their posts with critical comments will not very likely get them any closer to the Spirit's fire.

How about this instead?

Ecce Agne Dei, qui tollit peccata mundi--behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world...

Here's Lookin' at You, Kid

2007-01-17T07:50:00.000-06:00

I awoke at 6:30 to the dean calling to say that school is cancelled today. Yay!

Classes started yesterday, and went fine, although I have to remember various voice-saving strategies to get through the Tuesday-Thursday long days when I have four and a half hours of classes straight.

Dawn's mom moves in today...unless the weather catches Dawn and her in Texarkana somewhere.

I suppose this is true of many and increasingly more situations in today's culture, but one reason I like my college is that even mere visual diversity is inescapable. I think that that is incredibly healthy. Now the diversity that counts is the invisible kind: the different values, worldviews, sensibilities and sensitivities that people have. But the visual stands for that. God has so made the world that it all always tries to be meaningful, and such that meaning is always looking for a physical outlet or embodiment. What that means is that I know in my head that people have enormously different outlooks on life and things that they care about, but that I am much more likely to realize it fully, to have it come home to me, if I can see it "impersonated," in some person whose clothes, skin, hair, physiognomy, carriage, something, conveys that to my senses.

So I suppose most adults have at least heard the word Hinduism and associate it with India and religion, but having Nepalese students in my classes drives it home that this is a reality.

One would prefer that the visual diversity weren't so important. I'd like that part to just be cool. Like the time when Dawn and I were looking for churches in Louisville, Kentucky (a great city: move there if you can), and visited this one where--I have described this before--the music minister was earnestly dressed in brown polyester, the choir was happy and in robes, a silver fox in bad plaid led old gospel tunes from memory, a high school band soldiered on, clones of Eric Clapton and Moby led a worship band off to one side, the pastor was a white Zambian (well: Rhodesian, as they say), the people sitting behind us were ancient old ladies, and the woman in front of us was a black-garbed, purple-haired cosmetologist.

This is only a big deal because segregation continues to prevail at 11am on Sundays. If our sin wasn't manifested visibily, it wouldn't be so important to manifest goodness visibly. In South Africa in the 80s one church even concluded, for this very reason, that it was a sin *not* to worship in a visibly cross-racial congregation. I just observe that the Spirit is conforming us *all* to the image of Jesus ("his dear son"), and, since that obviously doesn't entail us all starting to look like Jewish guys, it must mean that the image of Jesus looks a good deal more like all of us put together than like any one of us alone. So the more of us, and the more kinds of us, we get together in Christ, the more Christlike it looks.

Transitions

2007-01-11T18:59:00.000-06:00

Dawn is in Kentucky helping her mom pack up. I fly up tomorrow (thanks, Maggie, for the airport shuttle) to load the moving van and drive it back. Having her mom move in with us may either tank or drastically increase the need for my blogging, so we'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, pick up Neil Howe and Bill Strauss's books, either The Fourth Turning or Generations: A History of the United States from 1584-2069. Creepily insightful, a la the way Meiers-Briggs can't possibly be that neat and clean, and yet, and yet...their manuals sound like someone's been reading my secret diary, along with my stuffed bear and other things nobody knows anything about me. So yeah, the generational talk gets tedious, but this is the nontedious horse's mouth, so to speak, where the legitimate aspects of it come from.

The subtitle of the Roman philosopher Seneca's book On the Shortness of Life is, "Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It," in which he usefully distinguishes between addiction, obsessions such as workaholism or shopaholism, and boredom on the one hand, from appreciating and understanding your life as you live it, intentionally but not desperately, on the other. If it were only as easy to do as to say.

Yellow-Bellied Sapsuckers

2007-01-07T11:51:00.000-06:00

Thanks to many for the greatness which was the second annual Nearly New Year's Masquerade Party. Kudos to Maggie for costume subject to the most number of interpretations, and to Ted and Paul for sound system techiness. Thirtyfive people in masks. Has to be fun.

Dawn and I went as Abelard and Heloise, the medieval philosophical couple. Since they suffered hugely for their love life together, we decided to go as A & H, The Early Years, before the...you know...icky parts. And I think we did Early rather well.

The ability of some people to make every single judgment call wrong is truly amazing to me. One thing some of our current leaders suffer from leaderomania. I am sensitive to this because it afflicts the emerging church movement mightily, and I myself am tempted, even when in no position to give in. There's a lot to observe about the obsession with leaders and heroes, but here's one tidbit that gets me.

It is that leadership matters enormously, in the sense of the overall tone and direction. People get that, whereas they get lost in details and operational stuff. But it doesn't matter in the sense of indispensability in order for a system to function. So, e.g., the world will continue to turn just fine regardless of who the US president is. Moreover, the general functioning of the US system not only does not depend on any one person, no one person stands more than the tiniest sliver of a chance of having any significant impact on the system. I don't mean did the stock market or mortgage rates go up or down. I mean, are we capitalist? Can the economy produce or acquire what its people require? Big systemic things like that, which contextualize all the more detailed stuff. Even the individual people who do have some impact--Bill Gates, for instance--depended on timing and luck enormously to get where they are.

On the other hand, leadership matters hugely in iconic terms. The current US president gets this, although his choice of icons and his sense of what is needed is unerringly, uncannily wrong. In today's paper, the reports of CIA use of security services such as Syria's, for Pete's sake, never mind prisons in Bulgaria or whatever, is just the sort of we-are-above-the-law-because-we-are-the-good-guys-because-we-are-us milieu that Cheney and Rumsfeld's team created and which Bush has reveled in. As I've said before, Bush's reasons for liking this modus operandi seem to me to be personal and psychological: I have yet to hear a single genuinely strategic or structural comment from him, let alone statesmanship. So I think his motives are personal. But Cheney and Rumsfeld's motives are, so far as I can see, derived from Vietnam and Watergate, and the point of this whole 8 year exercise in antidemocratic rule is to reverse the legacies of modesty and accountability learned in those two difficult experiences. Hence the massive expansion of presidential power, the elimination of safeguards for civil liberties, and all the rest mentioned by the oh-so-conservative Dallas Morning News as problems needing to be dealt with.

The upshot is, if you have a leader who sees a bigger vision that turns enemies into friends and envisions win-win scenarios and who thinks transparency is fine because his ideas are the right ones and so they will win any fair fight in the marketplace of ideas, then you get people who obey the laws, look for solutions, talk to others, etc. If you have a leader whose most immediate reactions are who's on our side and who's the bad guy, who's to blame, who's the enemy, and who thinks rules are for little people, and who thinks the mass of people can't be trusted, then you get CIA prisons, the suspension of habeas corpus, snuck-in alterations to legal language always in the direction of saying that only the president can decide whether or not the president and the executive branch have gone too far, and so on. I have probably said this before, but I think the final outcome of the Reagan-Bush II years will be that we will have to spend much of the next ten years re-creating all the open government, anticorruption, antimonopoly, antiexploitation legislation of the 1890-1970 period.

You can't say everything every time, so it's tempting to say a general summary every time, or to not say anything without killing it with qualifications, so as to not have to debunk outraged criticisms and bewildered misunderstandings of whatever small percent of what you think overall that you decide to say at this or that time. But as along as everyone realizes that I realize that a single post like this is not all there is to say, then I think I'll go ahead.

As an evangelical Christian, I conclude by noting that according to Scripture, the Lord sits on the margins of the heavens and scoffs at the pretentions of the nations, and holds their rulers and their vanity in derision. I'm not God; I don't get to take that attitude simpliciter; but for those who claim some facet of a God-perspective on human affairs, I think a jaundiced view of politicians who claim to enact "our" agenda for "our" good is a necessary component of any publicly aware Christian's outlook.

A Stab at a Sonnet

2007-01-02T19:20:00.000-06:00

Here's a poem on trying to do it all. Copyright moi, please.

Let Me Just Once Essay

Let me, just once, essay the hard, brave thing,
Then stick to plan, endure, and keep to task;
And not evade, but, as the questions cling,
Try my best to answer what I ask.
Yet, who am I to live three lives at once?
Demand my heart and mind to bear the strain
Of study, work, and family life, all fronts?
To be both one and three is, they say, much too vain.
Yet master, mate, and mission all have claims:
They give me meaning, love, and purpose--
For strikes the target best who closest aims;
He alone thrives who prays, commits, and does.
So, who would not attempt the divine dare:
To live and love and work with equal care?
Mark Thames (c) 2007.

Death Warmed Up

2006-12-30T12:25:00.000-06:00

So Hussein has been executed; hanged, no less. I dare not check YouTube lest something ghastly show up. My granddad told me that he saw as a boy (just before World War I?) (one of) the last hanging(s) in Columbia, Missouri. I don't wish to outmaneuver him technologically.

Hussein, of course, earns zero sympathy or regret. In his case, moreover, if one is going to have capital punishment at all, he is a fine candidate, and there is no concern about having "gotten the wrong guy."

In my view, Christian scripture isn't concerned to legislate government legislation directly. But if one looks at Scripture, it never forbids capital punishment. On the other hand, it doesn't legitimate, let alone mandate, it, either. Romans 13, which is the stuff about government wielding the sword for good, might be a passage which gives not capital, but only corporal, punishment, explicitly to government. (Even there, it is given only to "God-instituted" governments, and not to "beastly" governments: as the pastor and theologian Bonhoeffer said, Christians are never free from making the judgment as to whether a given government under which they live as free believers is a Romans 13 government, to be obeyed wherever possible, or a Revelation 13 government, to be opposed at all costs. He cooperated in a plot to assassinate Hitler.)

If one shifts from bible study to dogmatics, Christian theology says that this world is not our home, and that these are not our final bodies. A corollary of this is that continued physical existence in this world is not the highest value. Yes, we have a decided bias in favor of life, but not mere physical life, not at any price. I seem to remember Jesus saying something about the pointlessness of gaining the whole material world and losing one's soul, and Paul of not grieving like the heathen do when a believer dies.

The force of this point is that Christianity need not oppose all capital punishment on certain theological grounds, namely, on some notion of the absolute value or "sanctity" of (physical, this-worldly) life. (One can, I think, consistently do so, but one would, I would say, be hard pressed to prove that it was a necessary stance for Christians to take.) Jesus says to fear God, who can kill soul as well as body, rather than men, who can only kill the body. So killing the body doesn't damn the soul, or save it, and so killing or preserving it has to be a secondary issue for Christians, at least compared to the issue of saving or damning.

There are tantalizing scriptural conundra that impinge on this discussion. What in the world could Paul have possibly meant about 'turning someone over to Satan' and destroying his body in order to save his soul? Surely this is hyperbole, along the lines of Jesus's cutting off your right hand if it leads you into temptation, but the Mormons used it, apparently, to justify an attack by the main body on a breakaway faction, back in the bad ole Brigham Young days. Lest Mormons or their sympathizers get unduly sensitive at this point, it has also been so used by others in a number of the church's more miserable historical chapters, if memory serves.

At the opposite end of the interpretive range, while there is, I think, no Christian doctrine of ahimsa, or utter nonviolence to any living (animal, not plant) entity, there is, surely uncontroversially, an awful lot of turn-the-other-cheek stuff in the New Testament. Are we to say that this, too, is hyperbole, indicating a direction to go in but not actually constituting a commandment? Ironically, the vast majority of biblical literalists would say so, would say that the Bible is not literal when it tells us not to strike back at those who strike us--and yet, there are the Amish (even if one dismisses the Quakers as too out there) among us still, and practicing literally what they preach, just this fall in Pennsylvania.

Again, 'vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord' might seem to exclude any attempt at this-worldly punishment or retributive justice--although it challenges us contemporary people more regarding God's own moral character. (I am leaving the Old Testament smiting passages out of this discussion entirely.) God certainly seems to claim a life-and-death right over human beings, by virtue of creation as well as of his holiness and our sinfulness, but this runs into all sorts of problems. The first, creational or parental right, sounds to us creepily like Roman paterfamiliatas, iron-faced, despotic men exposing unwanted female babies, etc. It is a right that does not seem right to us. The other right, for a holy being to destroy unholy ones, which we moderns interpret in juridical, rather than its original spiritual-metaphysical terms, seems okay as a (legal) right to us, but to many people seems the wrong right, as it were, for our God to have. How can a loving guy render capital judgments? If forgiveness and judgment are equally at his (gracious?) discretion, doesn't that make him capricious?
Regardless of how we sort out the morality of God's actions, though, this still is another situation where it seems that the literal interpretation is the "liberal" one: don't engage in retributive justice. Of course, one can always claim that one is merely the instrument through which God exercises his own claimed retribution. But that's a self-designation that can be all too easily criticized as self-serving.

It relates more generally to the problems generated by anyone claiming to be God's prosecutor, let alone His hired executioner of Bad Guys. The church has a terrible record, when engaged in corporal and capital punishment of heretics and pagans and so on, of finding, upon careful examination, that God's enemies, the Bad Guys, turn out to be, surprise, surprise, People We Don't Like. Now I know that the CounterReformation, the Thirty Years' War, and the Iberian conquest of Latin America were all a long time ago, but we are still throwing around "axis of evil" language today, and leaving some axially evil people off the list, for various reasons, in the world of politics, and in the church world we are directly violating scripture when we treat brothers and sisters in Christ as if they are not.

After all, Lewis claims that Satan was God's prosecutor, and fell because he was mad that God was merciful to humans, and thus sought to arrogate to himself the (already filled) position of judge. (Cf. the harsh messages of Jesus about the day laborers, where he concludes by saying, 'Or are you envious because I am generous?', or the prodigal son, which is really not about the father's grace to the prodigal but about the older brother's grim and petulant anger that someone (the "wrong" person) had been saved.)

In no way am I suggesting that Christians should back off from a prolife stance, or cease to speak clearly about bioethical issues and other death-related topics. Rather, I do support, in general, the sort of "completely prolife" views of people like Ron Sider, and I do think we are wise to follow the sort of distanced perspective on our current politics and government of someone like Jim Wallis.

As for the former, anything we do to reduce genetic modification, abortion, suicide, euthanasia, poverty, malnutrition, infectious diseases, lack of education, capital punishment, prison populations, environmental degradation, and wars is good.

As for the latter, maybe we need to look at it this way. Any situation where killing people in war or for capital crimes is considered conservative, and suicide and euthanasia considered liberal, is at least questionable (if not absurd). It is certainly at least driving around in absurdity's neighborhood for Christians to take sides in a schema wherein conservatives, who are antitax but prowar and capital punishment, don't trust the government with their money but do trust it with people's lives, whereas welfare liberals trust the government to regulate the economy but not to regulate killing.

Anyone who thinks that to be prolife is exhausted by being antikilling thinks biblical peace is merely the cessation of hostilities, and not the creation of healthy, whole community. And anyone who too casually thinks that a few bad apples can be executed for the good of the community has never cast himself in the role of someone's bad apple. But those who too cavalierly talk about community-building and rehabilitation need to spend time volunteering in victims' recovery programs.

As far as my own experience in these matters, I'm a mass of contradictions. I've never engaged in violence as an adult, but am not a conscientious objector and am proud of my father's Marine service in World War II. I might well physically fight to defend my family or someone else, though I've not done so, or nor did I have to the one time we were broken into while we were home and sleeping. I am an educated white male in the richest and most powerful society in world history: I don't know from victimization or suffering, despite my well-honed ability to gripe and moan. Many kinds of crime make my blood boil, and I feel earn certain kinds of poetic justice or just retribution. But I have been taking my "there but for the grace of God go I" sense to the gym for some time now, and it has gotten robust. I'm pretty sure that I will disappoint, and might disillusion, some of those who know me, at some point, and so I emphatically do not pretend to be a sinless stone-thrower...

...and yet...Jesus did tell the woman that she was sinning and that she had to stop...

...and yet...we, in the ugly petty functionalism which we call realism, want to say, well yeah, but what would he have done to her if she didn't stop adulterating?

What's the upshot? Ugly as it is, I think justice was done in the case of Hussein (even though I think we had no business getting into this this particular decade's entertainment, the Iraq war, in the first place). But I also think that justice is not something we are infallibly capable of, and so we should be cautious in its deployment--Gandalf telling Frodo, do not be too quick to deal out death and judgment, since some live who should have died, but some die who should have lived. Since we cannot give life at all, perhaps we should not give death too liberally. In any case, justice is just not, on the Christian view, all we are looking for, either in this life or beyond. The merciful world of God's love we hope for will be just, and that too is something to have faith in and to hope for.

Happy Birthday

2006-12-29T10:21:00.000-06:00

Connie and Ted and Haakon and Judit (spelling??) arrived from England yesterday, and brought badly needed rain with them.

Today is Beth's last day of her Christmas holiday job at the pet spa, which I'm very proud of her for taking (since, as our resident leisure consultant, Beth really likes to have a holiday when she has a holiday).

It's also my Dad's 81st birthday. One of his Chinese exchange students said not too long ago, when he found out Dad's age, that Dad was "a living legend." I do not think of him as amazingly old, partly because he is so vigorous both physically and mentally. But of course it is actually getting amazing. He was 4 years old when Hitler came to power in Germany, 16 when Pearl Harbor happened. Now on my mom's side this would not be as big a deal; the Missouri farmers, especially the women, seem to be descended from Rasputin and all live into their 90s or at least 80s. But although I've not checked with the family genealogy specialist, I would guess Dad now is the longest-lived Thames man ever, period. We didn't exactly win the genetic lottery artery-clogging-wise, and so tend to die in our 60s. But Dad hasn't smoked or drunk alcohol, and has always been physically active despite 40 years as a university professor.
I had no consciousness of being "influenced" by anyone or anything when I went to college; I very much thought of myself as my own person. That my ideas were mine because I had thought them through and they made sense to me. But one of the first things that my discipler my freshman year, Zane, said to me was, your dad sure is important to you, isn't he? Well, of course, my mom is, too. But yes, he is.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

Happy Teeth

2006-12-28T14:26:00.000-06:00

For a fun time go to royal.gov.uk, and get the scoop on the Queen from her very own podcast.

We're working on our Christmas letter, which we send based on stuff that happens during Christmas, not which we send out so people will have it for Christmas. Alas, not that organized.

This post's title courtesy of all the goodies we're eating this break, with apologies to penguins everywhere.

More blogging tomorrow, but almost everyday for several days now, so I look forward to more communication in the new year.

Partridges. Pear Trees.

2006-12-27T13:24:00.000-06:00

Well, we cleaned up in a minimally embarrassing way on Christmas. Since then we've been napping and cleaning and watching movies, except for Beth, who's also been working 6 hours a day.

In the process, I finally saw "Devil Wears Prada," which was full of fantastic throwaway lines, but was relevant to me and my work because if there's anything deeper to it than lines like "I'm just one stomach flu away from my perfect weight", it's that most people don't start out evil minions of the Man, they talk themselves into it. Evangelical first year med students aren't suddenly informed of scientific information that they didn't have before and so then they abruptly stop being Christians; they very very gradually (frog in the kettle syndrome) talk themselves out of faith. Well, I don't have to...do whatever: Bible study, read devotionally, pray with other people, be involved in a faith community...for..however long, for whatever reason: just til this test is past, til this rotation is over, just during third year. And of course, mutatis mutandis, for any other identity-competing entity in your life: law school, becoming a mom, movin' to the groovitude uptown, or whatever it might be. So the movie said, a bit, that it's on balance good not to cease being who you really are just for a goal or a job or a career or whatever. And that's an all right message. Plus the of-course amazing Meryl Streep, whom we've watched ever since God was a boy, and props to Ann Hathaway for standing on the same stage as her and not getting blown off it.

We also saw "The Good German," a less heavy World War II / Holocaust meditation than "Sophie's Choice" or "Schindler's List" or "Life Is Beautiful," but again, a message on how it's impossible for something so huge not to affect everyone it t0uches, and how it's very hard for such a monstrosity not to pervert and twist most of those it touches. Cate Blanchett was amazing. "Casablanca" it's not, and the last scene is an intentionally revisionist take on Bogey's last moments in that greatest of movies, but, overall, well done, and I'm still glad Soderbergh, whom I don't particularly like, did it in as close to a forties-ish way as he could.

I rounded out my viewing (Dawn and Beth have crammed in a couple more I didn't see) with "Happy Feet," which, despite some visual and in-script sex references one wouldn't expect in G land, and a soundtrack that made no sense, was fun. Rubbing a bit of dust in the joy was my feeling that just once, I'd like to see the kid who is different and misunderstood by his dad be a boy who has gone all thoughtful conservative and whose PC mom doesn't approve, instead of it always being the sensitive son or the ambitious daughter oppressed by mean ole conservative ly religious daddums.

Presentwise, I got historian Lane Fox's "The Classical World," was indulged in my LOTR weakness by getting Argonath bookends (q.v. Google), scored mui clothings, and other fun things. Dawn got a new backpacking stove, Jonathan and Beth got clothes and gift cards and other assorted hooha. And I think we enjoyed my family on Christmas Eve, and each other throughout. This is a happy thing for someone in my situation, and by no means to be taken for granted.

We're packing dearly beloveds in like sardines this week. Connie and Ted and entourage arrive today through the 6th; Amber and friend (but then who isn't, or doesn't at least aspire to be, Amber's friend, really?) arrive Friday; Steve and Sarah Allen come in tomorrow I think, and Lauren Ahkiam on Saturday (big props to Danny for staying with the ailing feline). Hopefully we will share the love as well as the bathrooms.

And as a closing remark on the unjust aspects of contemporary economic orthodoxy, and on the jerky-person-producing effects of workaholism reflected in Ben Affleck's wonderful line, "how can you be anal retentive without an anus?", I would just like once again to assume the voice of Jacob Marley in this holiday season. I realize I've quoted this this very fall. But like the preacher who kept preaching the same message every week, I won't apologize for repeating myself til people hear it and start changing (starting with me):

"Business? Business!? Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"

Thanksgiving?

2006-12-23T09:38:00.000-06:00

Some quietly celebratory stuff, which will be repeated, doubtless, in whatever Christmas / New Year's letter we eventually get out.

Elizabeth got her first job, at Wuf Pet Resort and Spa, as a dog care specialist. Started two days ago. Very cool and good for her. She's looking at summer possibilities, getting tons of college flyers and making a visit list, and starting to think about senior thesis.

Jonathan came home from his first quarter at University of Washington, doing very well, spending time with us, and making summer plans for study of southeast Asian languages--maybe Thai, maybe in Thailand.

Dawn and I are very fortunate people, is all I'll say, to know such fun, sensible, cool people who have no time for our shenanigans and yet still hang out with us.

We've finished stripping and refinishing the stairs, removed the upstairs partition wall, enlarging the landing, finished repainting the exterior of the house, repainted the kitchen, repainted Jonathan's old room (now Beth's), and redone the floors in our room and Beth's old room (now the family office / guest bedroom). We hope to be ready for Dawn's mom to move in with us in mid-January.

I finished my first full-time semester at El Centro College, and I'm fairly happy with the results. I think I figured out how to do the ethics and religion courses, so hopefully those will run more smoothly this next term. And I've begun to get to know other faculty at El Centro and other philosophers around town. A long way to go on those fronts. I still have pending other bidness, including technical philosophical writing, alternachurch and postmodern Christianity stuff, and spending as much time with my folks, who are not at this stage to be taken for granted at all, coming into the spring semester. Lastly, I've seen some success, in the sense of slightly trimmer girlish figure and somewhat improved wind and stamina, with Ten Thousand Steps, which is a hokey name for a get-off-yer-duff-and-exercise deal: have pedometer, will walk--that I've been doing for six or eight weeks.

Lower Greenville meets at our house this evening for a texts and carols candlelight service. Wish all yall could be here.

Return to the Thames

2006-12-22T12:30:00.000-06:00

Wow. A three month blogfast. Sorry, my few loyal readers.

I got prepped for getting back in by reading some mom-blogs, in particular some guerrilla nursers (not to be confused with gorilla nursers). Wow. Very impressive, and not a little scary, if in mostly a good way. But more on that another time.

Today's post might not be what you would expect as a getter-backer-inner. But there you go. One writes what one must.

As it turns out, I must write about "The Queen," the movie with Helen Mirren, which we all (Jonathan is home from UW) just saw.

Hey, my surname is Thames. There are destinies one cannot escape.

I'll doubtless ruin the movie for those who haven't seen it, plan to, and hate to have the plot "given away." But I would guess most people are not going to see it nor do they plan to, so I'll proceed. You, I assume, know your own needs in this sort of thing.

It's about the royal family's reaction to Princess Diana's death. But it's more about their reaction to the British public's and the world's reaction to her death. And, in a way, it's just as much about Tony Blair's coming to understand the royals, and to value monarchy.
It is an incredibly fair and kind movie. Everyone's foibles are shown for what they are, but it loves its characters, and basically, as Elizabeth (Thames, not Windsor) said, everyone is trying to do the right thing from their own point of view. It's not sappy, though. The dramatic tension doesn't have to be manufactured; after all, it's built in to the material, for the whole point of the movie in one sense is that Diana's death brought out--whether it was the sort of thing that should have done so or not--all sorts of viewpoints in British life that are not easily comprehensible to each other, and (a separate issue, but confused with the other) are to some extent in conflict with one another.
Mirren is amazing as Queen Elizabeth. Even when she feels most despairing, she will not resign or abdicate, because of the horror in general British aristocrats and royals felt at the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 over his marriage to an American. She thinks what people want--for what she wants to do is be the people's monarch--is for her to not express her own emotions, but be dignified in public. This is what she has trained herself to do. But Diana, whom Blair's speech writer dubs "the people's princess," senses (rather than knows) that what the people want is for her to show her inner life and share it with them. To the royals, this smacks of celebrity, a term of extreme distaste and abuse among them. But of course, in many ways, that's exactly what, in the eyes of the public, the royals are. Prince Charles is presented, interestingly, as a son fearful of and dominated by his mother, but actually somewhat insightful about the changes in the world outside and in the relative royal position as a result. Not that Diana fully gets it: she dies partly because she resents and flees the papparazzi who inevitably accompany all celebrities. And Charles is only halfway there.
One issue where this becomes clear is in marriage and romantic relationships. The immediate fascination of the celebrity press is with Diana's love interests post-Charles. Her dalliances and affairs conducted in the glare of camera lights in jetsetting locales is a source of disbelief and disdain from all the royals, although it is of course the norm for celebrities. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Prince Philip, the Prince Consort (Queen Elizabeth's husband), who articulates well why they despise that sort of "making a spectacle of oneself," but also, in an off-handed, it's-just-obvious tone, says, in commenting on Charles's problems (Diana of course being one of them, in his view), that he, Charles, could neither leave his affair (with Camilla Parker-Bowles) behind when he married, in the modern fashion, nor "control his wife"--i.e., force her to accept that royal men just do have affairs, mistresses, harems, and she should deal with it, given the privileges accruing to her as legitimate wife--in the old style. His harumph indicates that he clearly thinks the old style was better, earning a scathing look from the Queen, but the larger point, of course, is not only that the upper class does and always has gotten away with marital and romantic arrangements that the rest of us could not, but that there is and always has been a market in the public for following such amazingly non-normal-person behavior, as the Enquirer and People and so on show. Edward VII, whom Prince Philip doubtless has in mind, was notorious for his affairs, but of course Edward VIII's problems were due to a different marital problem that only royals have (why can't I just marry a commoner, a foreigner, who's been divorced, if I want to?). And Charles's mistress and Diana's flings were just a modernized installment of the same, eternal phenomenon. (The movie implies, incidentally, that Philip has been (largely?) faithful to Elizabeth, such monogamy another "modern" approach.)
The attitudes of the public constantly come into play in the movie, at least for Blair's team and for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles. (The other royals, having truly no jobs and nothing that they have to do in life, are more or less what their critics say, some incredibly out of touch, incredibly privileged people.) Prince Charles correctly sees that, as he says, the public's image of Princess Diana and the royal family's day-to-day experience of living with her have, need have, and it's no surprise that they don't have, anything much whatsoever to do with each other. And since the royals just are, by virtue of who and what they are, public figures even when they would rather not be--just like any other celebrities--they have to take the public's perception into account when they act. Queen Elizabeth sees this, eventually, and delivers a televised speech and appears in public in ways which do damage control and renew the contract between the royal family and the people.

The way this happens is told, in some detail, as the story of how the royals' staff officials and the prime minister come to understand one another to some extent, at least enough to help the royal family through--and in the process, open Blair's eyes as to why it's important that they do so. But it is also portrayed, beautifully and hauntingly, by an allegory.
The assumption of the older royals is that Charles and Diana's kids, the princes, should be shielded from all media reporting on their mom's death. So (in another typical, old-fashioned move) the assumption is that they'll be better off "getting their minds off things" by getting outdoors for vigorous exercise, in this case, stalking a huge stag on the grounds of the royal retreat at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. The dramatic climax comes when Blair phones the Queen and says that she must come to London and lead the people in expressing grief over Diana's loss. She hops in a LandRover to go get the princes (Philip, Charles, and the boys) from the far reaches of the estate. The truck breaks down crossing a stream; she calls (cell phones are ubiquitous and uncommented on in the movie, itself a remark on "modernization") some of her Scottish groundskeepers (whose accents, I'm sure, were ameliorated to keep from having to put subtitles in for American audiences) to come get her. As she waits for them, sitting on a rock above the stream, she wordlessly starts crying. She clearly is a feeling person. Then the stag the men are hunting comes up silently near her. The stag causes her to smile. When she hears rifle reports, she tries to shoo the stag away so that it won't be killed. However, a little later, back at Balmoral, as everyone is getting ready to leave for London, she hears from a groundskeeper that a great stag has been killed, having wandered onto the next estate, belonging to a duke or something. She drives over, and asks one of the staff there if she can see the stag. He takes her into a hanging room for game meat. There is the stag, suspended from hind legs, decapitated. The head is on a counter to the side. The Queen notices that the stag was wounded before being killed.
That's it for that scene, then it's off to London. But here's what I think is going on. Deer hunting is not thought of in England as it sometimes is considered in the US, a lowbrow sport for good old boys. It is an aristocratic privilege. The stag is connected somehow with nobility, if not with royalty. (Of course, surely the filmmaker must know the allied reference to the white stag in last Christmas's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.) So part of what is going on is that the Queen is perceiving the threat to the monarchy--the stag is shot by an investment banker from London who paid for the privilege. "Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown," from Shakespeare's Henry V is the opening quote of the movie. The forces of modernity are a threat to monarchy: the privileges which accrued to royalty by history and right can now be purchased by anyone with sufficient resources to do so. But it becomes a more personal image. For Diana, like the stag, was hunted. And the stag, like Diana, is killed, at least indirectly, precisely for the reputation it has and by those who admire it. The Queen simply says to the gamekeeper, "let's hope it didn't suffer too much," which might be a first opening expression of sympathy and regret for Diana, in addition to a mourning for the loss of so much in royal history and British culture. (The Queen is well-educated historically and is fluent, I understand, at least in Latin and French.)
Meanwhile, the Queen's chief of staff and Charles and his staff realize that the royals must make a public move to respond to the people's outpouring of grief. For part of the intensity of that grief is not for Diana personally, of course, for of her as a person the crowd knows little. But she is--as befits a royal--a symbol, and the grief is partly driven by the sense of loss the people have over the monarchy, that it isn't what they do genuinely want it to be. They don't want to get rid of it; they want it to be more admirable but also more approachable and human than it is. (And openness and approachability is part of what they admire now, whereas for all we know Elizabeth may be right that in an earlier era the people admired other traits.) Blair sees this too, although his staff, closet or open republicans, do not. He sees that people all over the world value the British monarchy precisely because it is one of the few instititutions left in the world capable of symbolically enacting the people's feelings about whatever. So yes, part of the ceremonial is just Mardi Gras, which can be superficial and annoying, both to the royals who must act out the part and to serious critics. But part of it is valuable to people who are ritual-starved in their lives, who sense in their gut that spiritual and psychic meaning should take physical expression, but see nowhere and no way to do that in their lives. And the monarchy should be kept, should be there to enact public meaning, regardless of the royals' own personal private feelings.
Which is why Blair is impervious to his wife's criticism of the Queen, that, during her television address, she is acting and doesn't mean a word of it. Blair is like, well, of course. Public figures have to do that, they have to act in order to enact what the public expects of them and needs them for. "Faking it" for the common good, Blair sees, is her way of saving the monarchy by doing what the people want a monarch to do. So in a sense, as occurs to Blair when he blows up at the cynical comments of his own staff, Elizabeth is perfectly correct, in one way, that people do want her to suppress her own feelings. Which he respects her for. They do not want to know or hear about how much she detests Diana. But they do want her to express some feelings, namely, theirs. Is this because the crowd is basically selfish? Maybe. But it isn't because they want to humiliate the royals, it's that that's what they sense the royals are for, what only they can do, and why therefore they need them.
The Queen is hurt, humiliated, and angered by the insulting notes (why don't you care, she deserved better than them, etc) that people leave with their teddy bears and flowers outside Balmoral, and tells Blair this, that she has never been so hated before (outside her family, of course; the bad blood within it is why the family can't be a more confident force in public life). Of course his face shows that, as a politician, having people hate you is just part of it, it's a constant. Although the Queen is technically not, constitutionally, any longer a political figure in Britain, de facto at times she is, for in fact she is the voice of the nation at certain times, and this was one of those times, as the people themselves loudly indicated. And as for republicanism, what more does one want than a government whose officials can set aside their personal opinions and feelings for the sake of the public good as defined by the people themselves? That's why Blair goes to bat for her, and why she does what is necessary despite her feelings.
Part of the reason that all of this is so difficult to figure out (to "sort," as the Brits say) is that Britain nowadays truly is diverse. But that means that one part is not more "British" or "authentic" than another part. If that diversity truism is true, though, then the royals' estate at Balmoral, ancient privileges (which are constitutionally harmless), gorgeous (literally: gorge-filled) natural scenery, wildlife, class life (which can be genuinely relational and kind enough despite the hierarchy involved, as repeated scenes of the Queen with pages, ladies in waiting, and gameskeepers shows), and wool tweeds are just as (if no more) British than the Americanophiles around Blair or the "modernized" world of London investment bankers and tabloids. (Not to mention cell phones, mobiles, which everyone in the movie uses with no sense of irony.) But one part of genuine Britain has trouble seeing other parts as also authentically Britain; it is not a matter of old-fashioned and new, but of different and also valid. That multicultural-sounding and politically correct-sounding message may seem itself extremely trite and postmodernly loaded, but its handling here is not stereotypical, since the force of the movie is not to convince aristocrats that they need to change (though it, at a bit of arm's length, seems to endorse both Charles's and Diana's sense of this), but that "new Englanders" need to see the value of other forms of Britishness which (happen to be older but) also have their good points, and whose loss is or would be a genuine loss.
The last part of this is that God is part of British diversity now, which is difficult both for those who had assumed that God always was and would be part of Britain, and for those for whom God never comes into the picture and is something of an embarrassment. The Queen's advisor is talking with the prime minister, explaining to him that she really thinks that God has given her her job. Blair, in a rare frosty moment in the movie, says to leave God out of this. But of course that, too, is part of Britain's diversity. For, on a walk with her mom, the Queen Mother Elizabeth, we see that the Queen clearly takes her vow before God to be the people's monarch for her whole life quite literally and quite seriously. (I am told that Queen Elizabeth is one of the more genuinely Christian people to be monarch in British history, perhaps as much of one as the first Elizabeth.) Everyone has their motives: hers really does involve God, so that never mind the niceties of the British constitution, which establishes the Church of England and makes the Queen its titular head, religion and state, faith and politics just are very much intertwined for at least some people who are as authentically British as the atheist majority.
That has to be part of the message to American audiences. Another subtextual shoutout to America, I think, though, is even more political sciencey. And that is that it is very useful to be able to separate the head of government from the head of state. In the British system, Tony Blair is head of government. But Queen Elizabeth is head of state. The difference is that the head of government has practical power, but the head of state serves as the symbol of the unity and of the continuity of the country regardless of the comings and going of particular exercises of power. It is easy and obvious in Britain to see how one can be a patriot while criticizing the government, since one can be loyal to the Queen, that is to the country, instead of to the current administration. In the US system, the president is both head of state and head of government, and that makes it harder to see how one can criticize the president patriotically. Unscrupulous politicians, like Nixon and the current president's staff, use this to buffalo opponents and to cow them into silence and acquienscence. We even sense this need, for people's "allegiance" to the flag is not understandable except as a symbol of the country, the way loyal subjection to the person of the monarch (curtseys and bows, standing and removing hats, etc.) is in Britain. And our fierce loyalty to the constitution is not because we are, in fact, any more constitutional than Britain, which has a customary rather than a written constitution, but because some of the patriotism directed to the monarch there is directed to the constitution here. Moreover, even criticizing the country (as in the British people's criticism of the Queen) is not a desire to destroy the country, but to improve it, and make it what they want it to be.
In the movie, this takes the form of the flap over the flag. To the royals, who know the history and to whom it's still existentially meaningful (it elicits a very emotional response from Prince Philip, for instance), the royal standard is the only flag flown over a royal palace, and the royal standard is only flown there when the monarch is in fact in residence in that palace. The rest of the time, when the monarch is somewhere else, there is no flag over a palace at all. And a royal standard is never flown at half mast, because there is never a dead sovereign. When a king dies, the notification of that is "the king is dead; long live the king"--i.e., the new king, who automatically and instantly becomes king at the moment when the previous king dies. There is never not a living monarch, and so the standard of the monarch is always that of a living one, therefore it is never flown at half mast. (Historically, if I remember correctly, Elizabeth found out that she was queen when her father died suddenly in England while she was on a trip in Kenya, at the time still a British colony, and someone woke her to tell her by saying not "your highness," but "your majesty." She was 25.)
But to the people at large today, who do not know about and have forgotten almost everything of what they ever had known about ritual, one of the few public rites still generally known is that flags at official places are flown at halfmast when someone important dies or something tragic happens. In the movie, Prince Charles makes sure his flag is flown at Highgrove, his seat, even though he isn't there, and that it's flown at halfstaff. Eventually the Queen capitulates to Blair and does the same at Buckingham Palace.
Of course, to the historically informed, one of the points here is that all of these historic rituals came from somewhere, had their own occasion in which they became institutionalized. And as averse to it and incompetent at it as we are today, we still do it. The Vietnam Memorial set the ritual of inscribing names of victims on monuments, ostensibly at least making them monuments to the people who made sacrifices, not to the cause for which they sacrificed (about which our generations are much less agreed and much less confident). Diana's death set the ritual of bringing flowers, bears, and crosses to everywhere from Ground Zero in New York to bad corners on interstates where people have died or to public places people can get to.
People need ritual. We are bodily creatures, physical spirits. We need and expect our artists and our public figures to be able to enact in physical and visible ways what we all feel. As any artist or symbolically-aware politician knows, any physical word, object, or act may serve as a vehicle for people's sense of feeling and meaning. And philosophers and psychologists know that people's feelings and meanings search ever for concrete embodiment and expression. The royal family of the United Kingdom has been an important part of that for many people for a very long time--over a thousand years, as Prince Philip reminds at one point. And they can continue to do so, if they continue to listen to the people and accept their responsibilities as important public figures.
What a movie. And I hope Helen Mirren gets an Oscar nod, at least. That the Queen looks a bit like my mom, and is my father's age, I'm sure plays in to my interest here. In any case, to anyone who has actually persisted in reading through the longest post ever in the history of Blogger, my congratulations and humble thanks. Go see a good movie this break. I didn't want to, but was glad I did.

Be an attitude...or something

2006-09-24T15:04:00.000-05:00

The Beatitudes start out rather interestingly. They repay word study more than most texts.

The word for blessed is specific and peculiar. In general, the (vain male) Greeks thought you were blessed if people spoke well of you in public, and the two main words mean that (to "speak well" of someone and to "talk them up"). The Hebrew term is from a root meaning to kneel, which is part literal, part metaphorical, part euphemistic. It means, euphemistically, to 'give someone the knee' as a sexual phrase, implying fertility and (re)productivity, from an ignorant and sexist era when the man's implantation of his "seed" was deemed to be the effective reproductive action. From this is the idea that to bless is to give material increase to. But it also literally means taking a child on your knee, or accepting the kneeling of a subordinate (a "child" to you), and giving them something of benefit. As a leftover of the sexual imagery, the idea was that once a blessing went out from you, it was gone, that was it, and we see this in the story of Esau and Isaac. Metaphorically (and, I would say likely at an early point, magically) to bless thus means to transfer some of one's fertility (of mind, heart, body, fortune, future, whatever) to another. That's the Hebrew. In English, the word bless is a nominalization of a third person singular verb, "he bloods," as in, the priest or whoever is making a sacrifice puts some of the animal's blood on a stick or branch or something and flings it on everybody standing around to include them in the efficacy of the sacrifice. To bless, in English, meant to throw (sacrificial) blood on someone. Which obviously worked nicely when Christians were first evangelizing the English and explaining what Jesus had done for us.

But the word in the beatitudes for blessed is entirely different. It's a word, makarios, meaning "got it good like the gods." It means, characteristic of the gods' life. So blessed here means, "You've got it good like God does when..." And of course since the beatitudes are a reversal teaching (blessed are the poor, the sad, etc., all those that people don't think are blessed), they're to be understood as telling us what God is like, and to be seen ultimately christologically, i.e., in terms of how what Jesus's life was like tells us what God is like.

The word for poor, as in blessed are the poor in spirit, is ptochoi, which comes from a root meaning to cringe, to act in a way that invites the contempt of others, to have no self-respect. It's the root of the word for rabbit, which was not thought of as cute but as a pest, and as worthless one at that. Not "scaredy-cat" but "scaredy-rabbit" was the idiom. I wonder if there is an onomatopoetic reference to spitting in this word as well.

So blessed are the poor in spirit is something like, you've got it good like God does when you are and are treated as being contemptible, especially spiritually.

In blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted, both mourn and comfort are interesting. Comfort here is just the verb form of "the Comforter," as in John's term for the Holy Spirit. So it doesn't mean "for they shall receive comfy pillows," it means for they will be accompanied by those (the one) who sympathize with them. The word for "mourn" comes from a root meaning to be the passive recipient of something, to have something done to you. In macho male Greek culture, this was offensive, bad, pathetic, depending on your stance towards whatever was being done to you--it had connotations from military to sexual to religious. In fact as far as the religious implications go, the word for "passover" in Greek also comes from this. Our term would be "victim." So blessed are those who are sad because they have been forced to passively receive the active intentions of others, who have had misfortune happen to them, who have been victimized. So blessed...for...comes to: you've got it good like God does when you're sad because of what has been done to you, especially unjustly and religiously.

So I find that there stuff sehr interessantlich.

And you?

Homeward Bound

2006-09-16T16:35:00.000-05:00

People moving, homes moving, people moving home, people moving new places which will be home...

Dawn went back to Louisville with Jonathan to see her mom. She (her mom) will come here to stay in January.

Steven is in England now.

Jonathan leaves for Seattle at half-past early on Thursday.

Dawn announces that the theme for FallFest this year will be Moves That Move You--your own moves, stories about refugees, displaced peoples, new houses, new homes, exile, coming home, etc. There'll be two nights so that kids get their own night.

Lauren and Danny came through (yay!) which was very fun and spent tons of time with us, going to San Luis Obispo from Los Angeles via Dallas...just as you would expect.

Amber is in Niger, sweating out the frustratingly high mortality rate at the mission hospital there. Pray for her and anyone else willing to do that work.

Did I mention that Jonathan is off to the University of Washington this week? It will require him to move to Seattle, we understand.

Still and all: it's good to be home.

Silly Putty...or Pate`?

2006-09-07T21:26:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the delay.

Updating...

I have my new job, which means I have my new office. Dawn observed that every single surface in it is putty colored--the walls, desktop, drawers, lateral files, bookshelves, carpet, ceiling, computer tower, hutch, chair. Amazing and sustained effort to avoid any sense of interior design at all. Oh, and windowless. But biggish, with prompt IT attention to my computing needs, prompt facilities attention to putting in coathooks and nameplates. Being pretty much a hobbit any way, working in a cave is not so bad for me.

Not so my faculty colleagues. I'm at the end of a long hall, off which are the offices of the fashion design, studio art (visual and sculptural), art history, architecture, and interior design people. And then there's me. So far I've worn ties that matched. That must count for something. How people with actual color sense and aesthetic taste survive in the punishingly 1970s institutional setting (see, no windows, so we can air condition all the time!) is beyond me. How to build bridges to them?

I have three sections of introductory philosophy, which I teach by means of Sophie's World. Then I have an ethics course and a survey of world religions. Sounds like a lot--university instructors normally have 3 sections to teach per term. But then, their class sizes are often larger; interestingly, community college classes cap at 30--originally on the theory that the students there needed more faculty attention?? But it's nice; I'm teaching less than half as many students as the senior lecturer I TAed for at UTD. I'll start a philosophy club in the next few weeks. And I'm already on committees. Sigh.

Year 517 at the med school commences. I think one group will be a being-a-Christian-in-a-pluralistic-world group, and the other will be bioethics--which I must write something in. I'll speak to the SCF large group (the Christian student umbrella group on campus) throughout September.

And then Blue Door, me and Dawn's code word for That Thing We Want to Do. Maybe this fall; I think so.

And in other news--namely, The News.
So the does CIA have off-shore interrogation prisons, just like those mean ole Europeans said. And turns out the Guantanamo never-never land (not a prisoner of war, not a criminal) has no legal standing, as the UN and everyone else has said all along. Perhaps someone will now also shoot down the misnamed signing statements in which an executive in effect says he doesn't have to execute any laws passed which politically he can't afford to veto but which he doesn't like. Yes, and Iraq had no WMDs, and while Saddam was a creep, he was no threat to us. And he had nothing whatever to do with Islamic terrorism, since Islamic terrorists' number one target is (or was) not us but other Muslims, especially dictators like him. And we've harmed large, easily-identifiable terrorist groups like al Qaeda, just...leaving hard-to-find, uncoordinated ones all over the place, courtesy of our successful recruitment campaign, Please Hate America Now.

And what is frustrating and sad is that so far as I can tell Bush himself personally intended and intends no harm, has no megalomaniacal ambitions (he might want to prove himself to Dad and get one up on Jeb, but he has no Napoleonic dreams of being world ruler), and is some sort of actual Christian, with at least some decent gut instincts and a well-duh-we-should-be-moral attitude towards several moral-political issues on which I thoroughly agree with him.

Talk about ill-served and much-misused by one's advisers. He's got some real gems: monarchists like Cheney's legal adviser and the current attorney general, American imperialists like Wolfowitz and company, the let's-give-the-wealthy-a-chance demolition of all the twentieth century's regulatory environment that kept companies otherwise nailed to the bottom line from extorting communities, exploiting workers, wrecking the environment, and bamboozling consumers, not to mention paying their fair share. And then there's Cheney and Rove, standing at the head of all those who resented Reagan's pragmatism, George H W Bush's international cooperation, Clinton's success at coopting Republican issues like welfare reform, and ultimately, Nixon's abdication. These are people who talk about "permanent majorities," which is, if you think about it, not actually a democratic thought; who think Nixonian nonsense like executive privilege counts as wise government, and wrapping dead minorities--see how many of the names are Hispanic?--up in a flag counts as patriotism. They're mad--that Reagan didn't take out Iran in 1980, that Bush the First didn't take out Saddam in 1990, that America founded the United Nations, that we can't just make everybody do what we want, that we need to build coalitions and consensus and work with allies and do all that long, tedious, complex work. They want it to be easy, and obvious, and clear that the good guys are us, and that we will and should win because we're the good guys, and that we don't need anybody else, and that people should just sit up straight and realize that and fly right, and and and. And that it shouldn't matter that we're spending ourselves way through the ground, past China, out into the debt depths of intergalactic space. Because according to this fantasy rich countries, like rich people, never have to pay and never have to answer to anybody else and never go broke.

In Chesterton's spy novel The Man Who Was Thursday, about the anarchist terrorism around the year 1900, one guy observes, poor people object to being governed badly. Rich people object to being governed at all. The great victory of the post 1994 era has been tricking the poor--well, the middle class--people into thinking that if the rich aren't governed at all, no one will have anything to object to. That is a lie. And when Democrats stupidly and arrogantly decided that normal people weren't necessary to the success of a great political party with justice and right and mercy on its side, and they ditched all personal morality and those who stood for it, then the Roves and Delays of the world found easy pickings in the politically-naive, easily-led, obviously offended, and newly energetic and well off evangelical community. Which now marches in lockstep behind the "American exceptionalists" in the (vain) hope that an abortion law will get tightened here or intelligent design given a chance there.

All this makes my Christian witness ever so much more difficult, since while on things like abortion--about which, by the way, not very much has actually been done--I hopelessly agree with Bush, on almost everything else--where his administration has put all its effort, namely into favoring the rich and starting wars--I disagree with this oh-so-overtly "evangelical" administration so much. Sigh and alas.

And I am critiqueable too, of course.

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream, that every knee should bow, and every tongue confess, Jesus Christ as Lord.

On Why I Write Such Angry Lyrics

2006-08-20T09:54:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Joshua and Kristen on Killian's arrival. Almost 10 pounds?! Go, mom!
(Remember that line: it's the only important one in this post, I expect.)

Currently reading: Diarmid MacCullogh's The Reformation, which is amazingly readable while being huge and inexhaustibly exhaustive--i.e., it covers everything, and Plato's Protagoras, which is so engagingly written character-wise. May this blog aspire to well-writtenness some more!

Mostly though, having survived ProfessorKamp (no t-shirts given!--sob), I'm flailing around wildly trying to get 5 classes ready to teach come August 28. Three preps (three different subjects to prepare for, since three of the classes are in one subject), which isn't bad at all, and Fridays clear for research (or repairing sinks, whichever comes first). Much indoctrination into the local college culture, which--the indoctrination effort--is something I respect even not all of the many aspects of it--the local college culture--don't (yet) grab me. So that's cool. The chance to do philosophy clubs there and at Beth's school, and keep med school groups going, and maybe add a Great Booksish sort of thing, all while having more time to write, makes the fall look very fun to me.

Now that you're screaming in pain thinking of all the reading, sitting, lecturing, and discussing that the above sketch implies, remember, the reason that there are a lot of people in the world is so that none of us has to do everything, and in particular so that not very many people have to do what I do. Be happy I'm happy doing it, and go on your merry way doing normal-people stuff.

On to the main topic of the day, my inadequate efforts at righteous indignation. When not busily popping out monster babies (I mean, large ones), K. says my rants are insufficiently ranty. I keep trying to do better, I really do. It's not that there aren't enough things out there that hack me off. This current decade of damage to US prestige, our moral leadership in the world, the credibility of the rule of law and international cooperation, the budget, the devastation wrought on duh-obvious prevent-the-growth-of-a-violent-underclass programs like HeadStart and college grants and loans is tragic and consequential. The totally unnecessary and utterly wasteful repealing of that part of the regulatory environment that is actually helpful, namely, the part that keeps corporations and government from riding roughshod over the people, is bring-out-the-bracelets time, cuz we're either going to have handcuffs or fisticuffs over this one. And all this cmon-let's-give-the-wealthy-a-chance and let's-show-the-world-who's-boss macho-ness has been elected and reelected by the cynical manipulation of all-too-willing social conservatives, including many conservative evangelicals of whom I am one, done by dragging Jesus's name and a handful of sensible stands (like religious people shouldn't be excluded from public programs, kids should be able to have prayer and Bible groups on campus (or prayer and Quran groups, whatever)) down with acts and values Jesus would have had, at the nicest, caustic things to say about...well, all that and more of the same is enough for me to rear back and flame somebody.

But even so, when I get to my cozy little blogger posting frame, with its soothing and oh-so-aesthetic blue-and-orange-and-putty (at least on my screen) colorscheme, I just can't rant, at least not effectively. Years of seeing Zambian Christians say in print (letters, in their case) what they would never, ever say in public or in the presence of the one addressed or spoke of (nor should they), really made me want to not use (semi-) permanent media for my wailing on something or other. What I really need, apparently, would be, for instance, a blatant despoiler of our precious natural heritage, or a gratuitously condescending elminative materialist to cut me off on Central Expressway--then I could really vent. I know you know the feeling.

It all goes back to a misspent youth...

After years in the late 1970s and very early 80s resisting the arrogant incoherence of the leftists' cavalier and pompous dismissal of intellectual tradition, spirituality in any form, and substantive cultural values, I got used to decrying the religious totalitarianism of neoDarwinism, the explanatory thinness of scientism, and the moral sterility of secularism. I liked that role. Now in the 90s and the "aughts," the stupidity and arrogance of the neocons trying to go back to 19th century nationalism and imperialism as models of international intervention, and of the Repubs' strategy of domestic factionalism and divisiveness and opposition-breeding in order to recover their personal political fortunes, makes me find myself in an odd position for me: as peacemaking wimpy guy, suggesting that getting along and cooperating and saying how you feel before bouncing the big medicine ball to the next person in the group would be good to try. Ick and alas.

Anyway, don't get me wrong. Just because I can't manage ferocious on here doesn't mean I'm A. a nice guy or B. without my rages. Pretty soon I'll come out with fangs blazing and guns bared. Or something like that. You've been warned.

And oh, yeah: welcome to our world, Killian. We're really glad you're here. :)

Sticky

2006-08-10T11:06:00.000-05:00

We're having some Houston weather, a jillion degrees and ninety per cent humidity. Mmm, deelishus.

Adam and Sarah get married this weekend, one way or another (yay!). So Beth and I fly down tomorrow. Weddings and births share the "well, maybe there's some hope after all" kind of feel to them. And plus, usually not that many things go wrong with them. So it'll be fun. Plus, those guys are great and it'll be happy just to see them happy.

As soon as I get back, though, it's off to Professor Kamp. I'm packing my water balloons and short-sheet set. The "visioneering" in such thing is usually something to sit politely through, the learning styles and "pedagogical technologies" stuff sometimes annoying and sometimes very interesting. The team-building stuff is, to an INTJ like me, usually anathema. But we'll see how they do; their rep for this sort of thing is high and minimally obnoxious. So who knows? It could be okay, plus I'll definitely meet new colleagues, which will be good.

Not as good in the fun way is that my mom is having a pacemaker installed on Monday. A routine procedure these days, and Mom's so healthy she's like not had a hospital stay or surgical procedure to speak of in...ever: like, 75 years. So the progs are all good--I told Dad he should have been honest with the doc when he said the battery would last at least 5 years and told him that Mom would need like 4 new batteries minimum, given the life expectancy of, oh, 95 or so, of the women in her family. Still, it's a medical procedure, and everyone gets a case of the nerbs sooner or later about stuff like that.

Lastly, after talking to Friend Kristen the other day, who got wailed on for what she was wearing while like 9 1/2 months pregnant, let me not in turn slap such wailers upside the head, as they deserve, but rather, on behalf of people who will never be pregnant; will never have people gawk, objectify, critique, or indeed notice our figure or clothes; do not have bodies that would help sell any useful products; and are outside the target zone of fashion makers, I'd just like to say that, while I do think that women should be genuine and thoughtful about how they dress (men, too, in a different mode, for that matter), it's not very many other people's business (a few close girlfriends, your mom, maybe a husband). It's not that anything goes; for all I know whatever someone wears they may well have to answer for, but if so or if not, in any case it won't be to me. If you and God are good about something as unbelievably cultural-relative as dress, then fine. Dawn came from a buttoned-up holiness tradition (for which there were reasons); on the other hand, we visited areas in Zambia where public toplessness by married women was no big deal (hey, it's hot, and they're working hard all the time, and usually nursing something or other at the same time.) I mean look, I've got my own stuff to worry about without having, let alone expressing, opinions about other people's adiaphora ("stuff that doesn't matter"--great word). And that's the truth, as Edith Ann used to say.

You Have Not Because You Ask Not

2006-08-06T16:30:00.000-05:00

Blogoprayers duely answered. It's raining. Peace on those who are far, and peace and moisture on those who are near.

When You're Happy and You Know It

2006-08-06T13:34:00.000-05:00

Just got back from Victoria, British Columbia, where I ostensibly was attending the North American Society for Social (and Political) Philosophy conference, but mostly was being amazed by 74 degrees, sunny, light breezes, and open water in August. Victoria is gorgeous, fun, and odd: drive on the right, but with generally British signage, road markers, and styles of road layout; stoplights, but also roundabouts; functional stucco-and-concrete everywhere, but even houses made of that stuff are set in little English cottage garden-type yards...which in turn are incongruously but beautifully lined by 100 + foot tall spruces and firs: a shire in the redwoods, on an island.

The conference was fine. The old guys (a Brit and an American) who heard my paper pretty much said to start over, which is pretty much what they say to younger guys (I count as such, for a few more months anyway). But it was nice to be at a laid-back gathering of a hundred or so (the APA meetings are a thousand and up, and lots of competitiveness and tension), where most of the interaction was questions ("so where'd you find that?" "which thinker/argument helps you with that issue?" "could I have a copy of your paper?"), and even the criticisms were constructive ("if you're going to try to do that, then you're going to need to protect yourself from this sort of attack" "nice idea, but you can't just assert that, you'll have to argue for it" and that sort of thing). Ya just hafta keep pickin yerself up and doin it again.

This is Civil Peace week: I'm going north, and I'm going south. North, to Oklahoma, where the various and sundry Loyds took leave of their senses and invited me up to yak at their resident group. Then South, to the Valley, for Adam and Sarah's wedding (yay!). After that, professor camp, and then report for duty.

Praying types might pray for rain--here, very soon--for all the plants and animals that are suffering, not to mention the crabby mood the humans all get in when it goes on day after day with no relief in sight. (A break in the temps would also do, but is even more asking for a miracle, and doesn't actually help as much as water would.) Also for Steven's impending move to England to prep for college, that all the logistical hooha will get sorted, as the British say. And for roommates for Jonathan that are not from hell, or heck, or even purgatory.

Finally!

2006-07-27T21:38:00.000-05:00

Okay. I have a job. Woo! I am now O-fishally a visiting scholar in philosophy and religion at El Centro College for the next two years, starting this August. Yay! Consider me supported, and with a solid platform for the other stuff I want to do. Adequate salary means Jonathan probably won't get kicked out of school for nonpayment of tuition, we get to stay in the BabySwiss house, and Dawn hopefully won't have to work so much.

These are good things.

Ya wanna learn fee-losophy, ethics, or world religions? I'm your guy. Call me, El Centro is cheap.

Nuff of that.

We also had the coolest vacation, the classic that nobody gets any more, two weeks on the road out west. Saw the Great Salt Lake valley, surreal place; the alarmingly beautiful highway 1 along the coast of California; the expanding Rudd family in San Francisco (52 degrees Fahrenheit on like July 16); Hollywood, now known locally as ThaiTown; Lauren and Danny's wedding; Mt. Rainier from three sides at a distance of forty miles all around, amazing; Redwood National Park, and Arches National Park. Plus Seattle, and Jonathan's future home at the University of Washington. Like I tell people about honeymoons (take one, the biggest, funnest you can), so I say to you, gentle reader, about big vacations: once a decade, take a monster, some place really cool, and without regrets.

Finally, a bunch of things came together, happily. We are--I am, quite blessed. Don't me forget it.

Waiting. Around. Some more.

2006-06-27T21:08:00.000-05:00

Time creeps by when you have announcements to make and vacations to take and can't yet make the one nor take the other. Hence, my waiting...to post, and to everything else. Oh, we've managed to find a way to while away the hours, what with moving all our furniture under the covered patio, since we're stripping the bedroom floors to refinish them (what goofhead paints hundred-year-old yellow pine floors white?). I'm teaching intro to philosophy in summer term, which is busy pretty much every day.

Meanwhile, we have ended up with a missionary family lifestyle after all: last week, Beth was in North Carolina on a summer mission trip, Jonathan was in Seattle for freshman orientation, and Dawn was in Boston for a nursing conference. I should have gone to San Diego just to make our geographic dispersion complete.

And still I'm waiting...

What Dawn Did, pt. 2: Community Ministry

2006-06-02T08:44:00.000-05:00

Way way back, in the 1990s...

Dawn tried to figure out how to start a community ministry out of Lower Greenville. Her model, to the extent that she had one, was Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C. She had first gotten into a program in spiritual direction with Tilden Edwards in Maryland. The only people to supervise or offer her camaraderie in this locally were Ben Beltzer at Interfaith Housing and a guy named Howard Hovdee (sp?) down at HEB grocery store's Christian retreat center in the Hill Country called Laity Lodge. So this was hard to do long distance. The idea came to her of focusing instead on using her medical training in some local ministry outside of her labor and delivery job.

She investigated what was already going on in east Dallas, so that we could either join something already in progress or at least not duplicate services. She found that there was a need for a safe house for meds. That is, people would be discharged from hospitals with medications prescribed for them that required taking on a rigorous schedule, or refrigeration, or needle injection. Among the homeless or minimally housed, however, all three of these were problems (the last because of theft and sharing pressure).

So she set about trying to get a house where some of us could live, providing secure storage for perishable meds and street-valuable drugs and needles; maybe some transition beds; and on-site medical competence. Several things kept this from becoming a reality. First and foremost I was not terribly cooperative, let alone genuinely supportive. I wanted it to happen, but for it not to impact us (I meant me) very much. I did not want to move in, for instance. Second, we could not get funding and organizational issues up and running. Third, it looked like regulatory problems were going to arise--zoning, medical licenses, and so forth. These are what I remember, although I could be mistaken about some of it.

Yet some very good things came out of it. Several people have told us that being in the working group with Dawn on that community (ministry) house was transformative for them. For one in particular, a guy named Paul, whom I'll just call "Paul" here, it was important. His wife was a Christian but he was not. He was getting all he could handle in apologetics from Vince and others in Lower Greenville, but it was when he got involved in the ministry house group that things came together. One evening after the group finished meeting, he got up and came over to Dawn and me and said, hey, I think this is cool, something I really want to be part of. But if I'm going to be part of a Christian thing, shouldn't I be a Christian? How does that work? And we stepped into the meditation room, where Paul got together with Jesus.

Dawn has supported my ministry, our ministry, and the ministry of others. Much good has come from it. Imagine what would happen if she were supporting--and I and others were supporting--her own ministry...

What Dawn Did, pt. 1: Africa, Lower Greenville Baptist Community, and kids

2006-05-29T13:45:00.000-05:00

I want to be clear here, and have some things on the international electronic record, about how Dawn Thames fits into the emerging church story, and how the Lower Greenville Baptist Community story is so much hers.

To start with, we had no intention of being involved in the emerging church in the First world. For one thing, our adult lives predate, by ten years or so, the emerging church in America. We spent [those] ten years prepping to go to Africa, to be involved with the churches emerging there. On the way, Dawn got an African studies degree, edited the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky's adult education material for their partnership with a diocese in Ghana, learned how to make west African symbols on fabric (or walls), hemmed the pants of an important Nigerian (nothing untoward, there), and cohosted a Bible study with a French woman chemist, a gorgeous Afrikaaner couple, and a professional couple from Uganda.

Yet, though we indicated to God in no uncertain terms that we loved it in Africa in general, and Zambia in particular, we were not able to stay. And so we came here.

As for Lower Greenville Baptist Community, it was a mutual effort between Dawn and myself from before the beginning. It was our discussions about our shock at the dechurchification of our college Christian friends that led us to start asking people like Dr. Russell Ware for help with a different kind of church for people turned off by what was on offer. That investigation in turn led us to Dr. Bob Williams, who put the LGBC project together. It was Dawn's college roommate Cindy who put us on to Generation X and The Utne Reader, two absolutely essential resources right from the start and throughout the succeeding decade. She also pointed us to various new age and neopagan resources, in particular Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon.

We joined the Lower Greenville Utne Salon together, and it was Dawn who caught the imagination and affection of that group. (One of the perennial jests among this group, all of whom were either not Christian at all or pretty far from evangelicaldom, was that the two topics the group needed to cover that it had not yet were "trips to take with Dawn" and "what it's like being Dawn." Those of you who know her road warrior reputation and remarkable transparency will not be surprised by these. In fact, she's on the road today.)

Dawn came up with the slogan "keeping body and soul together," still a worthy goal for any spiritual community, still relevant to young emerging leaders we know.

Dawn came up with the idea for FallFest, which began as a singer-songwriter event and morphed into StoneSoupStorytelling, which is now coming up on its fifteenth year.

My imbibing tastes are fairly catholic, but I'm a coffee guy, so be it known that it was Dawn who started inviting people over at all hours for tea, to which people responded by A. coming over at all hours to have tea, and B. bringing amazing amounts of amazing teas and tea paraphernalia, leading eventually to the Richmond House Tea Shrine.

It was also Dawn who instinctively knew how to incorporate kids into a witnessing, missionary lifestyle, even in this benighted land of age- and class- segregation and a zillion rules about who and what are supposed to be where when. (Kristen Rudd was to inherit this situation the first time she took daughter Judah to one of her standard hangouts, only to be banned because the place served alcohol and couldn't have minors. Of course, the only liquid Judah was on at the time was breastmilk...but you get the point:) Dawn went through challenges to an integrated life like this one, and christian women are still dealing with it. It was Dawn's obvious care for her kids, but lack of fear for them, that so charmed so many who were fully ready to be mistrusted by Dawn since they had been mistrusted by so many other (Christian) parents: a Wiccan, persons identifying themselves by their homosexuality, even just single guys. It was obvious to them that it was not that Dawn did not care about her kids, nor that she was naive about the world; rather, it was that she was seeking to build, among other things, a safer place for her kids by deploying the rarely-used technique of trusting other people, which in turn challenged them to prove trustworthy.

Now, soon after the Baptists brought us to Dallas, it became apparent that the salary we had, which was generous enough given the utterly experimental nature of what we were about to do, would not be enough to let Dawn work at home. So, to support the ministry (not "mine," for it was very much ours), she went to nursing school and became a labor and delivery nurse, one of the most transportable jobs in the world. It was highly unfortunate at the time that I did not insist either that the Baptists pay her as they were paying me if they were expecting her to provide leadership in this work, or that, if two salaries were too much for a foray into r & d, that they split mine and give her half.

This failure on my part had many negative consequences down the road. Money is not the point--of anything, let alone ministry, nor are titles, and we were living in that reality, which is the real reality we want and need to live in, even now. But in the world of perception, which is real, but is not that real reality, attention follows money, and respect follows titles. This is mere worldliness, but it is almost as true in the church as in the world. Now we wanted to live in reality, and, to their great credit, our handlers in the Baptist world did, too. As you might imagine, however, even, alas, I did not keep up the complete mutuality with which Dawn and I began this work, and latent and inadvertent sexisms and biases against the informal and unofficial and unfunded crept in, giving a sour subtaste to many otherwise good things.

Now why am I telling you all of this? Galadriel said that some things that should not have been forgotten were lost, and much evil and sorrow came of that lapse of responsibility. My memory for stuff like this, things about Dawn that should not be forgotten, is pretty lousy. You can ask me Spinoza's birth year or what the doctrines of the presocratic philosopher Gorgias were, and I'm your guy; but ask me what Dawn and I talked about, or how an event went, in the past--oh, say, a couple of weeks ago--and the fog of memory begins to be overcome by the foglights of tasteful literary fictionalizing. I tend to remember what should have happened...

But I want to accept the elven queen's gifts with a good grace and some energetic effort. In this case, her gift is a free blog with which I can try to carve in functionally-everlasting bits and bytes some truth about the history of Lower Greenville Baptist Community and Dawn Thames's role in it.

[For this reason, by the way, those of you who wish to comment or link to your own correct(ed) memories of what Dawn did for the Kingdom by what she did for those outside it, are cordially invited to do so, as a sort of rolling electronic birthday present.]

So: Peace and joy to you, and to Dawn, on this the 44th anniversary of her physical birth.

This ends part one. You may turn your computer over and continue.

The Emerging Church

2006-05-27T16:33:00.000-05:00

Since I've lived through this, a word about names and labels.

Part of being in your early twenties is the overpowering desire to get your noun, to find a thing you can say, yeah, yay, I'm this, we're loud we're proud, etc. College sports feeds off of this, so does the gay public relations juggernaut, so do lots of things that want to build identity among groups of unrelated people. Inherently there isn't anything wrong with this. But it has its problems, as zillions of stories about the verkrampfte attitudes in small, tightly-knit but also tightly circumscribed, communities testify. Moreover, there are at least two circumstances where birds-of-a-feather-flock-together is problematic in a bigger sense than when it just happens to be misused. The first is times of transition, when the old categories are breaking down and reshuffling. The other is when eclecticism or cosmopolitanism--that is, the sampling of many cultures, many labeled entities--becomes a way of living.
Right now, in my view, in the postmodernizing transformation currently going on, both of these things are true, and so our heretofore reasonably useful crop of nouns...isn't particularly...useful any more. Liberal and conservative are almost worthless as terms. The British prime minister Disraeli supposedly said he was a conservative when it came to keep ing everything that should be kept, and a radical when it came to changing everything that should be changed. That's just about as useful as 'conservative' and 'liberal' are today. (If you don't believe me, ask yourself three or four times what belief in tax breaks for the rich has in common with opposition to gay marriage.)
Most "emerging church" leaders have felt the agony of the nouns. When Dawn and I started in 1993 doing what eventually led to, among other outcomes, Lower Greenville Baptist Community, the Baptists who were sponsoring us were in the midst of a bureaucratic struggle over whether people who, like us, were starting to do "different" things around the country should be called "non-traditional" or "innovative." Nontraditional was perfectly correct, of course, although I saw the complaint against "non" names; innovative--well, we might be, but it seemed inappropriate to call yourself that. Anyway, this battle of the dictionaries came to a head in 1994. Nontraditional was felt to be negative, and innovative was business lingo, so it won. But we did not call ourselves either of those things. We often called ourselves an urban alternative Christian community, which we felt was exactly descriptive, but our handlers--well, not them, they were cool, but their bosses--thought alternative meant gay and urban meant black...
By 1995 we were starting to talk about postmodernism. But at that time "generation x" talk was peaking, and we were told we were that. This was even though we specifically made a point that, unlike some other outreaches and new churches, we were going to be intentionally intergenerational--that ours was not a generational work. By the late 90s "extreme" was big in youth / young twenties church work, but we also insisted that we were not a stage-of-life or age-cohort ministry. Postmodern seemed quite fine, since we were working in that part of the culture which was leaving modern assumptions behind--in its New Ageiness, had already done so big time.
But the church planting and denominational worlds can leave no trend unconsumed. By the early 2000s, "emerging," a term I first heard used in art studios in Soho in Manhattan in 1998, was starting to appear. "Emergent," a term from science with cachet in some New Age circles, was intentionally picked--at a meeting of a group of leaders Dawn and I had decided not to get involved with, although we knew a lot of them from their days in Texas / days with Young Leader Network--as a term that was kind of nifty in its meaning, digestible and relevant to our cultures, and pretty innocuous, or so it was thought, in the modern culture of most existing churches--whereas postmodern was already coming to be a whipping boy of evangelicals who to me seem to have been clearer on their French poststructuralism than in their missiological anthropology.
In 2003, although Lower Greenville still used 'postmodern'--and alternative, and various other terms--some of us got involved with Emerging Church Network, which seemed fair to be just exactly what it said it was, with the proviso that the focus was on churches emerging in the emerging culture, not churches emerging in the existing culture (which, of course, many are).
Since then there has been a strong attack by Don Carson, among others, on the emerging church, partly because of his being disturbed by Brian McLaren, who is someone I had not heard of and did not meet until the late 90s or early 2000s. In any case, the whole business makes one not want to use any nouns at all, or to do what Lower Greenville did during its organizing push. People were so gunshy of terminology that we used the word "potatoes" rather than "members"--a classic piece of taboo deformation, like using gosh darn or something. I'm tempted to replace all ecclesiastical nouns with verb clauses and adverbial phrases: not a church, but a Jesus-oriented spiritual community, not evangelism but living witnessly (which is close enought to witlessly to be amusing).

Well, enough in my blow on behalf of the Lexicographical Liberation Front, and whatever the LLF can do for the emerging church. As John Searle says, when I talk to you, I have to use words, but don't, as Wittgenstein said, let the terminology bewitch you: it's the thing we're talking about that's real and worthwhile or not, and while there are such things, I think, as useful disputations about words--i am a philosopher, after all--vain disputations about words are just that.

Peace and joy to those who struggle to speak out there

Dennis and Me

2006-05-25T08:35:00.000-05:00

One of my weaknesses for which I will doubtless be held accountable is my fondness for Dennis Miller's "rants." In pale imitation of my hero, forthwith...

Having put up most of my life with those whose social ethics I generally agreed with but whose personal ethics I disagreed with, I find myself unbelievably frustrated at having now to put up with those whose personal ethics I agree with, but whose social ethics I don't.
For instance: I suspect that I agree with W. and with Rick Perry on parental notification laws. How to set them up, and how the social work people should, on the ground, deal with things allows for much experimentation. But in general, I think it is a bad plan to eviscerate the concept of a minor at law--we do not keep our kids kids long enough as it is--and parental notification (for abortion, permanent tatoos, marriage licenses, whatever) seem an appropriate part of that to me. Similarly, I find school prohibitions on Christian groups using school grounds for gatherings inexcusable if the schools allow any groups to do so--and I think they should. Why have an empty building every weekend, each evening, all summer, which could be used for community events and groups?
On the other hand, I bet I generally agreed with Clinton administration officials on historic preservation and cultural management regulations, antipollution laws, national health insurance, and increasing public transportation (mainly here I mean trains).
But I was so frustrated that the gay rhetoric that makes sex a social ethical issue rather than a personal ethical issue was so dominant then; I couldn't stand the aiding and abetting given to doctrinnaire Darwinians seeking to stifle Christian input. And on and on.
And, similarly, on the other hand, boondoggles like Perry's giant highway contracts (when what's needed is a bullet train), legalized criminality like Bush's exempting corporations from reporting requirements (there's no reason to do that unless something inappropriate is going on), the constant giving of tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the middle class--every single thing they do seems to be wrong, and seems to mock my common ground with them on faith issues. Sigh.

It's the morning, and I feel calm. When I'm angrier in an afternoon post sometime, I'll return to this subject in ways guaranteed to garner hits...

As Keith Green used to sing, come away, come away, come away with me, my love, come away from this mess...

Beautiful things

2006-05-25T08:13:00.000-05:00

Due entirely to Dawn's verdant opposable digits, most of our perennials and some of our annuals came back this year. The front yard isn't bad these days, and I can say that because I'm bragging on her rock gardens, not my yard, which is an indifferent bermuda triangle between the garden, the sidewalk, and the driveway.
So, just going with ones I know:
African daisies and lavender draw little white butterflies in droves. In Zambia rural highways would be paved for hundreds of feet with flocks of white butterflies, which would rise in a brilliant foggy cloud around you as you drove through them. I hadn't seen them here til Dawn put in her rock gardens.
I still don't know how to prune my Confederate rose, but it has come back for the third year now, when hibiscus relatives like it are barely hardy this far north and inland.
Despite the drought, the roses are huge this year. Not so many blooms, but the canes are long and robust. We've finally started a pergola on the west side to hold the big rose by our bedroom window up off the sidewalk and driveway. And up the lamppost on that side of the house a squash that volunteered from the compost we used to fertilize the flower bed has sent up its huge leaves and tendrils.
Nonfloral beautiful things:
Habib and Cynthia's son Ali and Mark and Mandy's son Andrew are the happiest, most contented babies I've ever seen. It's amazing how unfussy they are, and how unpicky about who holds them how.
Our Beth is the least jealous, most appreciative little sister of a big brother ever. She took all the hooha over his graduation and college search and acceptance with great good grace. A very nice thing to see, when other reactions would have been unfortunate but perfectly understandable.
We were at a patio restaurant in town called Ozona's the other day, and an elementary school teacher, the would-be farmer who runs the school's 'outdoor classroom', spotted us and came over and talked for a long time. It was very gratifying.
We may well sell this house before long, still. Things are so uncertain. And Texas summers are sufficiently miserable that I have really really really grown tired of them in advance, especially in this two-year-long drought we're in. But God granted us a remarkably cool early part of May, and there was day after day after day of cool, beautiful mornings and breezy, clear evenings, and it was, it should be said (fair dues, the British say), beautiful.
The last item in this post is a bit different. When Dawn and I came here, we said we wanted two things from our sponsors. One was no "core group" as it's called, no seed group of established christians with which most church plants begin. We wanted to start from scratch, because we wanted to make a church for nonchurch people, not for church people. The other was that we wanted monthly prayer, accountability, and strategic assistance and ministry advice from wise counselors from our sponsor churches. And I have gone to a monthly oversight meeting every month since November of 1993 as a result. Now it is cool beyond belief that the sponsors have gone along with this. Many many emerging churches suffer because of lousy relations with sponsor churches. But the really beautiful bit is this: I was at the meeting yesterday. I had my things to say, was asked questions, and so forth. But that was not the real game; I wasn't the headlining band, I was the warm-up. To whom did the ecclesiastics from our sponsors pay most attention? To a young woman in our Community with a vision for assisting disadvantaged people in a crappy neighborhood here in town; to the Poes, who have moved with such grace into the pastoral role Dawn and I had for so long; and to reports about things going on with a mission God is drawing together in Denton. And to most of this I was an observer, neither sidelined nor kowtowed to, neither feeling bad that I was excluded nor any need to run the show. Watching in slow motion a handoff taking place in football can be an amazing thing: how the fullback and quarterback fake it, and the ball actually goes to the halfback, and the fluid dance of the quarterback pivoting and extending and retracting his arm, and the backs closing their whole forearms over the ball--for a fan, it can be very cool to see the execution of this done with such precision, like Buckingham Palace guards or something. What I have been seeing for some time with Lower Greenville, and saw again in a great way yesterday, was a handoff. And the gracious way everyone involved, sponsors, Poes, Heather, Mandy, handled it, was beautiful.

Personals column

2006-05-25T07:56:00.000-05:00

This'll be in the personal update department.

Reading: Carl Becker's just amazingly well-written The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, which is all the more amazing for 1. being sparklingly written by the dullest single looking academic in the last hundred years or so, and for 2. being astoundingly frank about the reality and costs of expelling God from the academy--a not-yet-common admission in spirituality-friendly, self-analysis-obsessed postmodern times, let alone in the 50s or whenever this book was written. I guess his theme demanded it: the book is about the era when the intelligentsia departed Christianity...i.e., during the run-up to the American Revolution.

Still reading Randall Collins's gigantic The Sociology of Philosophies, which is a portrayal of how ideas evolve in complex relationship with the evolution of the societies around them. My kinda theory.

Have sent out 7,412 job applications this past ten days. What a soul-sucking endeavor that is. Props to anyone who keeps from self-destructive behavior or socialistic sympathies during a bout of unemployment, because they both come quite, quite naturally.

A certain female daughter in my household pointed out that we did not seem to believe in taking a break. Point well taken. When my kids get up today...I'll try to take them any cool free place I can think of. Regrettably, Dawn's pulling an overtime shift, upon which we are counting financially, but not part of her long-term plan for the use of her days off.

We are slowly but surely having the house painted, appliances repaired, attic floored, foundation shored up, etc. Will have to get an electrician who needs money in here to do a lot of tedious minor things. We're doing some of this ourselves, more than we can in the time allotted, really, but only hiring out what we must; to hire out at all is weird--Dawn and I have never "employed" contractors in this way before.
It reminds me of Zambia, where the other expatriate women got mad at Dawn because, when the serf that came with the house moved back to her rural village, we didn't get (another) maid. Our response was, do we look like amputees? I think we can do our own dishes. 'But you can do so much more (sc. for God) if you have a yard man and a maid and a nurse (i.e., a governness for the kids). Perhaps. But we certainly have found in Dallas that parenting in full view of others is working (sometimes pretty hard) for God, too.

Next post: beautiful things.

Yay, Jonathan!

2006-05-20T07:27:00.000-05:00

Jonathan graduated last night from TAG, Newsweek's number one public high school in America. It was great: my mom and dad and younger sister were there, along with Miss Maggie and the MattMan and Kent and...Gail--who was at his birth...which is so very cool, that whole lifetime friends thing. Party at LGBC tonight.

I am doing job applications, which is a life-enhancing, self-esteem-building exercise if ever there were one. We'll see.

Reading Don Carson's Becoming Conversant with Emergent. He sort of is. I'll say more soon about this, but the whole web phenom right now about it is I think as much as anything an object lesson in the problems that come when something that is not even yet fully a subject becomes an object. What I mean is, when you are in transition and under construction and undefined, for people to come in and analyze you as though you were coming with your A game in a well-understood competition where we know what counts as success and what's a warning sign and so forth, leads to all kinds of misunderstandings and unfortunate reactions. If we don't know what it is yet, one shouldn't judge it on what it is or isn't. Becoming maybe has different criteria of evaluation than being.

But you know, none of that, no matter how incredibly important it is, however much it may have leapt off the page and really grabbed you emotionally right where you live, none of it is as important to me as the fact that Jonathan got real recognition for what he has really been and become and done already in his life. And that's cool. Congratulations, Jonathan.

New Testament Geek

2006-05-12T14:29:00.000-05:00

I suppose that's as good a title for me, and a fairly fitting description of the Christian side of Lower Greenville's work, as any.

Finished Da Vinci Code. Surprised it was such a traditional "international spy thriller" kind of book--a decent page-turner, in the Crichton / Clancy / Grisham sort of way. Depthless, and not even very interested in its ostensible subject matter. Most of the objectionable religious nonsense is in maybe three or four chapters. It isn't any better than, or much different from, Gary Kleier's The Last...uh, whatever. The latter was a Y2K thriller, also with murky stuff about Jesus's female descendants and the Catholic church and...As a matter of fact, DVC sounds like something Brown started on in the 90s, but didn't get ready in time for the 2000 market, and so had to rework it. But not a lot; a bunch of this stuff is in such highbrow films as Dogma and Dracula 2000. It was all done vastly better by someone actually into and knowledgeable about the stuff, namely the Italian semiological philosopher Umberto Eco (he of Name of the Rose) fame, in Foucault's Pendulum. Both XFiles and Alias are better as conspiracy theory books--Brown ends up letting the Masons, the main Catholic church, the supposedly sinister 'priory of Sion,' and even--good grief, of all the people who don't need a break--Opus Dei, off the hook. They're all misunderstood by others or are themselves victims of bad information, overzealousness, etc. The only bad guys are--give me a break!--a fat, wealthy, British cripple, and his greasy French butler! Talk about stereotypes.

Now maybe Brown is like the Wachowski brothers, who made a lesbian detective movie first in order to score cash and cred before making the Matrix series. Maybe there's a lot more to the guy, and other stuff of his is coming out. But my impression was, what a lightweight. Doesn't know anything about the Dead Sea Scrolls (the Catholic hierarchy had nothing to do with the academic turf wars that kept a lot of the less important texts in limbo for decades, and in any case the Qumraners who made them were Essene-like, not gnostic in any way), next to nothing about the gnostic literature (that you know that there is a Nag Hammadi library or can quote (once) the Gospel of Phillip means, pretty much, zero. I have the library, and have read almost all of it (in English). In any case the Gospel of Thomas is much more important--at least the Jesus Seminar got that right. But Brown...), and is apparently unaware of the large Patristic literature, including Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History of the 330s, that pertains to the time period when he allegedly alleges shenanigans took place.

Just a bit more. I'll bet my granddad's ax he can't read any of the languages or make any but plot advancement and marketing sense out of any actual data he managed to get himself into--don't get me started. Not to mention the sexist notion that Mary Magdalene is only of, or is most, interesting if she's married to some important guy, and the "gamist" notion that Jesus must have been married and had biological descendants. He doesn't know anything about early church history or Greco-Roman religions, either, beyond maybe a National Geographic article or two level.

Well, that's enough. Not a serious engagement with anything, the way Last Temptation tried to be, and an extremely transparent publicity and income ploy. No surprises there, no mysteries to unravel in this mystery.

In happier news, Beth and I are watching Kingdom of Heaven. I should have known Ridley Scott would be thoughtful. What else are we to make of a movie about the Crusades than that it is a commentary on the Iraq war? As far as i know he's got the broad history right: Baldwin or one of the other Crusader rulers of Jerusalem was a leper king, and he or one of the others had a respectful relationship with Saladin, his opposite number among the Muslims. What a contrast to the preening we're-right-because-we're-us, God's-on-our-side-whether-we're-on-his-or-not jingoism of Guy de whatever (in the movie), or the rough unilateralism of Chantillon, who is disgraced and dismissed by the leader of the unified European occupation force. Not to mention the depiction of the good guy as one who, with his men, builds irrigation channels for his Arab subjects' benefit...

And in happier news still, this is Jonathan's last day of classes. Graduation is a week from today: might as well start the congratulations now.

We're Baa-aack

2006-05-11T00:01:00.000-05:00

Hey. No real news tonight, just trying to clutter your rss feeds.

We did four days in the Texas Hill Country (yes, there are hills here...well, there). Camped three nights, rained on every time. Glad my Scout troop forced us to learn what a dry pitch looks like and how to guy out a taut tent fly. We stayed nice and xeric in our little nylon abode.

Congratulations to the off-kilter folks who run the Welfare Cafe in the most unlikely-named Welfare, Texas. Talk about killer, upscale Hill Country food. Wow. Chicken in peach-jalapeno-white-wine sauce, and pork tenderloin in cherries and molasses. Yeah, mama.

My final final tomorrow. Finally broke down and am reading Da Vinci Code, since I get like 12 questions a day about it. Mary Magdalene wasn't a prostitute, okay?

If you get a chance, listen to Archbishop Tutu's reading of "African Prayers" on cd or cassette. Well worth it.

Learn It Live It Love It

2006-05-04T23:00:00.000-05:00

We'll be out of blog for a bit. Dawn and I are doing some anniversary vacating--23 years' worth, no less. I think the traditional gift for 23 is credit...

Finishing up the semester. I like to teach. Just let me. Okay?

Jonathan and Beth took 40 or so APs between them. I never heard of APs til after high school.

Finished Mitchell Aboulafia's The Cosmopolitan Self, which is not about egoistic decolletage-obsessed New York women, and am working through Annette Baier's Moral Prejudices. I'm writing my August paper on the Aboulafia book. I want to write another article based on Baier.

I'm also enjoying R. C. Sproul in a very different mood than I usually think of for him. His The Consequences of Ideas turns out to be an idiosyncratic, very personal tour through what seem to him to be the high points of Western philosophical history. That he highlights the intersections with Christian theology, and the value or challenge to the latter (i.e., the apologetic situation), is no surprise. But I was fairly stunned to read him musing over, of all people, Parmenides, saying that his (Sproul's) youthful dismissiveness of heavyweight metaphysics (such as Parmenides's) was incorrect, and that he takes Parmenides's struggles with being very seriously now. Wow. A, a nice admission, and B, what a monster thinker to decide to take on at 65 or whatever age Sproul is. (Parmenides was one of the bigger philosophers who lived before Socrates.)

By the way, my gentle readers, you doubtless are the sort to already know this, so I shan't detain you long, but surely you do know that Sproul is, so far as I know (and perhaps unbeknownst to himself? I would love to find that out...), the only major American evangelical theologian to be quoted in a Hollywood film by a lesbian vampire? (She is alarmingly and well played by Annabella Sciora. This most unlikely event occurs in Abel Ferrara's amazing The Addiction.) And that kind of credentialing has got to totally rock a resume otherwise impenetrably clogged with impedimenta such as papers presented, books published, awards received, and similar tedium.

I pray for more such tedium in my life daily...

And a happy conclusion: props to Mandy the Magnificent for emitting boyful new child Andrew. Yay. Saw the small poo factory this afternoon, and got to chum it up with older and somewhat jealouser sister Ruby. News on NPR mostly bad--babies good. Time spent with checkbook baaad--time spent with babies, gooood. Mark and Mandy: Happy Andrew to you!