this one a bit higher-profile than most because it’s Sarah Palin’s church, Wasilla Bible Church; the fire is estimated to have caused $1 million in damage. There is, of course, already speculation that the arson was political in nature, but as John Hinderaker of Power Line notes, “There are many possible motives, and arsonists don’t necessarily need what would normally be regarded as a motive.” What he doesn’t say but is worth adding is that church burning has been an increasingly common crime in recent years; it’s not at all necessary to explain this arson in political terms. Indeed, even if the church was selected because Gov. Palin attends there, the motive might not have been any sort of animus against her; it might simply be that her high profile attracted the attention of someone who otherwise would have burned a different church. We’ll probably never know one way or the other unless the arsonist is caught, and for now, any speculation is unwarranted; we just need to pray for the leaders and people of Wasilla Bible Church for their recovery from this attack.
Category Archives: Culture and society
The Great Books perspective on Harry Potter
There’s an interesting article up on Touchstone by a chap named John Granger, the author of several books on Harry Potter who’s a graduate of the University of Chicago, analyzing Rowling’s books as “the ‘shared text’ of the twenty-first century.” This is a more significant statement than it might seem, coming from a former student of Allan Bloom, who argued “that ‘shared books’ are the foundation of culture, politics, and individual thinking; as such, Granger is arguing—quoting Chuck Klosterman in Esquire—that
Over time, these novels (and whatever ideas lie within them) will come to represent the mainstream ethos of our future popular culture.
Klosterman thinks that’s a bad thing, but Granger strongly disagrees:
Before meeting Allan Bloom and, through him, the Western canon, my friends and I were a sarcastic and self-absorbed, if good-hearted lot, nourished on stories that were only diversion and dissipation. I have to think my children are better prepared and more willing to embrace that tradition than I was because of their years of instruction at Hogwarts castle. . . .I struggle to think of any fictional work of the last two or three centuries that had the potential to shape the cultural and political agendas of its time as this one does. Dickens’s crusading social novels? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The Jungle? Harry Potter differs from these in that the others ignited a latent Christian conscience. The Potter novels help foster one into existence. . . .From this text, we can build a conversation about virtue and vice, and about what reading does to the right-side-up soul. From it, too, we can take an invitation to go on to even better books—ones that our grandparents’ great-grandparents had in common, and others that our children may one day write. Hasten the day!
It’s an interesting argument, and I think he may be on to something. It’s certainly worth considering seriously.
TV is for losers?
No, not exactly; but a new study reported in the New York Times has found something interesting:
Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers—but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds.That’s what unhappy people do.Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.
Very interesting. This is not, I’m sure, to say that watching TV makes you unhappy (though the news these days could have that effect); but the other activities referenced (in the article, anyway) are either communal, or require effort, or both. TV is neither—it’s a passive activity which can be isolating (though it need not be); it’s an easy pleasure, and easy pleasures get us nowhere that matters.HT: Ray Ortlund
Being inconvenient is a capital offense
Such, at least, is the logic of abortion; such is the logic of euthanasia. Such is the logic of the culture of death, which we might also call the culture of “might makes right.” And don’t let talk of “death with dignity” misdirect you; though there are certainly those who are suicidal because of illness or injury, those who advocate euthanasia have far broader concerns. As Dr. Bob of The Doctor Is In writes,
While invariably promoted as a merciful means of terminating suffering, the suffering relieved is far more that of the enabling society than of its victims. “Death with dignity” is the gleaming white shroud on the rotting corpse of societal fear, self-interest and ruthless self-preservation.
This is where we end up when our only concern is what is reasonable in our own eyes, and our only standard for reasonability is our own self-interest: with
a philosophy where the Useful is the Good, whose victims are the children whom Reason scorned.Euthanasia is the quick fix to man’s ageless struggle with suffering and disease. The Hippocratic Oath—taken in widely varying forms by most physicians at graduation—was originally administered to a minority of physicians in ancient Greece, who swore to prescribe neither euthanasia nor abortion—both common recommendations by healers of the age. The rapid and widespread acceptance of euthanasia in pre-Nazi Germany occurred because it was eminently reasonable and rational. Beaten down by war, economic hardship, and limited resources, logic dictated that those who could not contribute to the betterment of society cease being a drain on its lifeblood. Long before its application to ethnic groups and enemies of the State, it was administered to those who made us most uncomfortable: the mentally ill, the deformed, the retarded, the social misfit.
The immediate material benefits of such a policy are easy to articulate. The hidden long-term costs, material, cultural, and spiritual, are equally easy to overlook through deliberate short-sightedness, yet they are in the end far greater:
The benefits of suffering, subtle though they may be, can be discerned in many instances even by the unskilled eye. What are the chances that Dutch doctors will find a cure for the late stage cancer or early childhood disease, when they now so quickly and “compassionately” dispense of their sufferers with a lethal injection? Who will teach us patience, compassion, unselfish love, endurance, tenderness, and tolerance, if not those who provide us with the opportunity through their suffering, or mental or physical disability? These are character traits not easily learned, though enormously beneficial to society as well as individuals. How will we learn them if we liquidate our teachers?Higher moral principles position roadblocks to our behavior, warning us that grave danger lies beyond. When in our hubris and unenlightened reason we crash through them, we do so at great peril, for we do not know what evil lies beyond.
As Dr. Bob notes, the truth of that is clearly illustrated by the German history with euthanasia. Here’s hoping we will ultimately show ourselves willing to learn from their experience, rather than condemning ourselves to relive it.HT: Gerald Vanderleun, with special thanks to the Anchoress.
For all you Canadians, and non-Canadians
I was living in Canada when Molson came up with this commercial, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a reaction to an ad. I got to thinking about it the other day, for who knows what random reason, and decided to post it. Call it a memento, of sorts.
This is a strange world we live in
and every advance in technology seems to bring a new opportunity for the human race to find new ways in which to sin.Second Life affair ends in divorceHT: TMH
Sign of the times
Though I knew I wasn’t going to like the outcome, I’ve still been looking forward to having this election over with. I’ve especially been looking forward to the cessation of political ads, but I’ve been almost as glad at the thought of no more yard signs. Unfortunately, those haven’t disappeared; actually, it’s amazing how many are still up. And then, driving home from work yesterday, I saw that a new one had joined the others:
(My apologies for my shadow in the corner; I took this shot this morning, since I wanted to be sure I got the pictures before someone takes this sign down, and the lighting conditions were far from optimal.) I saw that yesterday, and I just about drove off the road, I was so surprised. But then, heading back the other way for Wednesday night stuff at the church, I saw the other side (again, my apologies for the lighting):
Now, I’m not posting these photos because I endorse their sentiment. Far from it, actually—this is the equal and opposite error to Joe Biden suggesting the DoJ should put Bush and Cheney on trial, and I have no use for the criminalization of politics, in any direction. Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid have done this country no good, I believe, but they haven’t done anything to merit impeachment (as far as is publicly known, anyway), and Barack Obama hasn’t done anything at all. (I suppose if you wanted to criminalize doing nothing in the U.S. Senate, you’d have a case, but then you’d have to indict about half the body, which wouldn’t be an improvement.)Rather, I’m posting these photos because this sign worries me. Not a lot—it is, after all, just one isolated sign in one town in northern Indiana—but as with letters to the editor, you have to figure that one person doing something like this probably speaks for a number of other folks who feel the same way; and I don’t know how many people that is, how widely held this attitude might be, or—the real concern—how it might spread if things start getting rough too soon for the new administration. This isn’t a fire conservatives should start playing with. We’ve put up with enough of this garbage directed at the Bush 43 administration, and we knew it was wrong then—we should remember it’s wrong and not be tempted to start pelting the Obama/Pelosi administration with it. Policy disagreement is a political matter, not a criminal matter, and we need to keep it that way.
Sense of place and the global economy
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Richard Florida and his book Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, but he makes an interesting argument:
It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where you live doesn’t matter: you can telecommute to your high-tech Silicon Valley job, a ski-slope in Idaho, a beach in Hawaii or a loft in Chicago; you can innovate from Shanghai or Bangalore.According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Place is not only important, it’s more important than ever.Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.
Intuitively, this makes sense to me, because (as Florida puts it in the first chapter of his book, excerpted here)
The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. People are not equally happy everywhere, and some places do a better job of providing a high quality of life than others. Some places offer us more vibrant labor markets, better career prospects, higher real estate appreciation, and stronger investment and earnings opportunities. Some places offer more promising mating markets. Others are better environments for raising children.
Even if the sense of place our ancestors had is indeed fading away, Florida’s right that place matters, in and of itself; that’s the reason sense of place developed to begin with, and the reason that even as we become more moble and mix ourselves up more and more, different places still have different identities and characters and subcultures (and sub-subcultures). Given that, and given our need to belong, and our need for self-definition, I suspect that while our sense of place may evolve somewhat and weaken with the mobility of our society, it may look different in our children and grandchildren, but it will never really disappear. Who knows—add in the tendency of each generation to react against the generation before, we may even see a resurgence, and an intentional effort to recreate an older, more settled form of community. It would be nice.HT: Chris Forbes
1 Timothy and the misdirected conscience of the West (repost)
(I have in general decided against reposting old material, which is why I’ve started doing the “retrospective” links posts; but I’ve been thinking this week about this post from June of last year, and it seemed sufficiently apropos that it made more sense to me to repost it, lightly edited, than merely to link back to it with a comment.)I preached through 1 Timothy last summer, and when I hit 1:12-20, it started me thinking about the whole concept of conscience, and how so many in the American church abuse it. The word “conscience,” if you take it apart etymologically, means “to know together with”; it refers to the things we know together with God about the way the world is supposed to be and the way we’re supposed to live. It’s the awareness God has placed within us of his character and will. We might almost call it a sixth sense, as it gives us the ability to perceive reality in its moral aspect. The problem is, it’s only valuable as far as it accurately reports reality—in this case, moral reality, what is right and wrong in the eyes of God—but that’s not how we want to use the idea of conscience; rather than recognizing it as something objective relating to real right and wrong and actual guilt, we want to take conscience as subjective, reflecting how we feel about something, whether we feel we’ve done right or not. We strive to unhook our conscience from God’s character and will, so that far from challenging our own preferred standards of right and wrong, our sense of conscience merely reflects them.As I was thinking about why this is, and reflecting on Paul’s paean to the mercy of God, it hit me for the first time that at some level, we don’t want the conscience God gave us because we really don’t want what God is offering—we don’t want his solution, and we don’t even want to believe what he’s telling us about the problem. The word of God tells us we are sinners, rotten at the core, who need to accept his mercy, to be saved by his grace, through none of our own doing and none of our own merit, and we just don’t want to hear that. We want to believe we’re basically OK—and if we run up against something we can’t get around, that everyone agrees is bad behavior, we want to redefine it as a disease; that way, we’re not bad, we’re just sick.When the Bible tells us that we do bad things just because we like to do bad things, and that the purpose of our conscience is to convict us of our sin, not to justify our behavior, we resist. As much as we call the gospel good news, it often doesn’t come to us as good news. We don’t consider it good news that we’re sinners saved—despite the fact that we do not and will not ever deserve it—solely by the loving grace of God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That kind of thinking is for losers, and we all want to think we’re winners, if there’s any way we possibly can; we want to believe that God saved us because we’re such all-fired wonderful people that we just had it coming. And the truth is, we aren’t, and we didn’t. The truth is, Christianity is for losers—and that means us. Even the best of us.That’s one reason 1 Timothy is so important for us. Paul was far more of a winner than most of us could ever hope to be, a man who would tower over the church of our day just as much as he did in his own time, and yet he gave all the credit for all his success to the power of God; for himself, he said this: “It is a true statement and worthy of acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the foremost.” He understood what folks like the Covenant Network don’t, or at least don’t seem to (any more than bad drivers in Dallas), that the good news of the gospel has nothing to do with lessening our sin and our guilt. Instead, it has everything to do with the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace of God, this spectacular gift we have been given, which overwhelms our sin and guilt, washing it all away through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. The good news of the gospel is that yes, we are sinners, yes, there really is a problem with us, and that God has fixed that problem, because Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.