The quote heading the page today on The Thinklings is, “The radicals of one generation become the pharisees of the next.” I don’t know who said it (since they don’t, and I hadn’t heard it before), but whoever it was got the matter significantly wrong. The fact is, the Pharisees were the radicals of their own generation (or at least, they were one of the radical groups—there were certainly others); it was the Sadducees who were the Establishment. This isn’t an isolated phenomenon, either, as the pharisaical spirit is far more often found among the radicals and other fringe groups of the day than it is among those who are established and in positions of authority; the Establishment rarely has the energy to be pharisaical, and it has any number of other concerns to distract it from such efforts and attitudes. Radicals, on the other hand, have both energy and reason for it, just as the original Pharisees did: if you’re trying to build a movement to change society, that’s the most efficient way to do it.Our problem in understanding the Pharisees is that we only see them through the lens of the New Testament and their reaction to Jesus, who was, in essence, one of their own outflanking them from an even more radical position. Their faults are magnified, and their approach is interpreted in terms of centuries of subsequent Christian legalism; this is understandable, but does skew our picture somewhat. As a consequence, we miss the very real energy of their reform movement, and the hope it generated for some—and thus we interpret them as stick-in-the-mud never-change reactionary old-guard Establishment conservatives, when in reality they were anything but; when in reality, their problem was that they were leading change in the wrong direction, and not far enough.
Category Archives: Quotes
Morning prayer
For the first showings of the morning light
and the emerging outline of the day
thanks be to you, O God.
For earth’s colours drawn forth by the sun
its brilliance piercing clouds of darkness
and shimmering through leaves and flowing waters
thanks be to you.
Show to me this day
amidst life’s dark streaks of wrong and suffering
the light that endures in every person.
Dispel the confusions that cling close to my soul
that I may see with eyes washed by your grace
that I may see myself and all people
with eyes cleansed by the freshness of the new day’s light.
—J. Philip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer, 40
Firefly, Tolkien, and narrative theology
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia”It has been my custom, while using my rowing machine, to watch episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, which I consider one of the two greatest television shows I’ve ever seen. (I don’t believe TV as a medium has produced much true art, or many truly great stories, but I do believe both are possible.) Lately, however, I’ve been watching other things while I row, and this week, I started in on the other greatest series I’ve ever seen: Firefly. It’s the first time I’ve watched any of the episodes since the movie came out; what Joss Whedon did with the movie hit me too hard. That’s also why I haven’t posted about being a Browncoat, or linked to fan sites like “Whoa. Good Myth.” Rather like being a Mariners fan these days, it’s just been easier not to stress about it too much.Now, this might seem like an odd and pointless thing to get worked up about—so a TV show was canceled after fourteen episodes—so what? It’s still a TV show, after all. So Fox handled it badly, gave the show no real chance, and canceled it unfairly soon; is it really that big a deal? Well, it was that big a deal for all the folks who worked on the show, for one thing. Beyond that, we all have our reasons, and I’m sure mine aren’t the same as everyone else’s; but for me, it’s the story, or rather, the stories, which were untimely cut off, and the lives of the characters in those stories. Whedon, Tim Minear, and their crew of writers had a great world and a great set of characters and stories going, both enjoyable and deep; to have that brought to an untimely end is a great loss.That’s why I rejoiced when the movie deal went forward; which meant that what Whedon did with Serenity really hit me hard. I think he put his own ideas of what is artistic ahead of what was best for his creation—not only the story and the characters, but also the communities he had created, most importantly the actors, writers, and crew, and also all of us who call ourselves Browncoats. Tolkien speaks of us as sub-creators, people who create what he calls “Secondary Worlds,” creations which are real within their own laws, to the best of our ability to make them real; we create in reflection (or, perhaps better, as refractions) of the great Creator who made us, because we were made like him. The desire to be gods ourselves may have been what led us into sin, but it was not perhaps a wholly wrong one, properly channeled—for when we create, we are in a sense small gods to our creation. If we take Tolkien’s point of view, however (as I believe we should), this has a significant implication for our creative activity: we have the responsibility to be, as best as we can, good gods to our creation. Our work has to be primarily about what is best for this thing we are making, whatever it might be, not merely about what’s best for us or what we want to do. On my read, from the things he’s said, Joss Whedon violated that with Firefly/Serenity; he was a bad god to his creation.Still, though, you might say: does this matter? Wasn’t it, after all, still just a TV show? Yes, of course it was a TV show, but no, it wasn’t just a TV show. Nothing is ever just anything—especially not people; and thus, especially not stories, to the extent that they’re true stories about people. By that I don’t necessarily mean factual; there are biographies and histories which are factual but aren’t really true, because they miss the heart of the matter, while many historical fictions, though they depart from the facts, are far truer because they give us real understanding of people and events. Indeed, many novels about things that never happened and people who never lived are nevertheless true stories in that they broaden our awareness of ourselves and of others, open our eyes and minds to things we have not before seen or realized, and deepen our knowledge of what it means to be human.Stories are powerful things. It’s one thing to express an opinion, or to set forth a proposition about how the world works; it’s quite another thing to bring that opinion or proposition to life in a story. People who might reject, or at least argue with, your position if it were plainly stated may find themselves influenced by it, if your story is powerful enough and sufficiently well-crafted; and those who wouldn’t understand it intellectually in a propositional form may well get it intuitively and affectively if you bring it to life in a story. That’s what stories do with our ideas: they bring them to life, incarnating them in the lives of the characters we create, making them not merely intellectual realities, but human realities.This is one reason why the greatest of all Christian theologians is not Paul, but Jesus himself. (There are others, of course, such as the fact that Jesus was original, while Paul was derivative of Jesus.) This is something too often missed, as Dr. Kenneth Bailey points out (and as Jared Wilson has also said, though his emphasis is a little different), because we tend to see Jesus as a nice moral teacher telling quaint stories; we don’t really believe that those stories can be theologically profound and powerful. In fact, though, they can, and they are; the more overtly “theological” works in the New Testament, profound as they are, are simply developments, explications, and applications in propositional form of the truths already communicated incarnationally through the parables of Jesus, and also through the broader narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and the Old Testament. God doesn’t give us a three-point outline, he gives us a story—from which to learn, and in which to live.Of course, it’s possible to take this too far; there are those who would overbalance the other way, exalting the biblical narratives to the extent of diminishing or even discounting the NT epistles (and other non-narrative portions of the Bible—but the epistles, and particularly Paul, usually seem to be the main target). That’s not right either. What we need to remember is that the epistles, though not themselves narrative texts, are nevertheless part of a narrative; their context is a story. They were written for particular reasons to particular human beings in particular situations dealing with particular things, even if we don’t know all those particularities (in some cases, we have a pretty good idea; in others, we can only speculate); and when we read them, we read them in the middle of our own story as God speaking to us in our particular situations and issues. We need to understand them accordingly—and we need to understand that that fact is the reason why they matter.Stories matter. They matter because they’re the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we’ve been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone’s.
Happy Happy birthday!
Or maybe that should be “Happy birthday, Happy!”—or . . . well, the permutations go on for a while. Anyway, it’s not quite as good as an ambush from the waiters at a fine restaurant (though it is easier on the wallet), but I wanted to take this opportunity to wish a happy birthday and a wonderful year to one of the best people I know, and one of the dearest friends I ever expect to have.“May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.”May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home,
And may the hand of a friend always be near.
May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.”
Not a tame lion
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”—Annie DillardThat quote (from Teaching a Stone to Talk) is one of my all-time favorites; I thought I’d included it in a blog post once, but when I went looking for it, I hadn’t. So, it gets its own post (since I don’t know that anything I could say could add anything to it anyway); I encourage you to take some time to think about it, if you haven’t recently.
Thoughts on the nature of Christian faith
What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
In his comments on the song inspired by this quote (video and lyrics below), Steve Taylor wrote,
The cost of discipleship—the ideal of taking up your cross everyday and following Jesus—makes it hard to believe, because Christianity demands things from us that we don’t naturally want to give. In the words of playwright Dennis Potter, “There is, in the end, no such thing as a simple faith.”
This is pure truth, at least as regards Christianity. In the broadest possible sense, believing is easy: everyone believes something, because we have to. We can’t ground our lives on reason alone, because a chain of reasoning requires a starting point; however far back you reason, that starting point recedes still further. We can’t use our reasoning to provide that starting point, because we’d end up with circular reasoning, however great the circle might be. Our reasoning has to begin from ultimate premises which we cannot prove—such as “There is a God,” or “There is no God”—but can only take as faith commitments. Once we’ve done that, we can interrogate those premises, and the conclusions we’ve drawn from them, and see if the whole thing is rationally consistent, if the beliefs we’ve developed are logically coherent with each other and accurately descriptive of the world as we know it; but we cannot remove the necessity of faith undergirding our reasoning. Indeed, even reasoning is in some sense an act of faith—faith in our ability to reason, and in the viability of reason itself. As St. Anselm put it, reason is faith seeking understanding.
That said, while believing something is easy, believing in Christ isn’t. Far from it, in fact. And this isn’t for the reasons atheists and others want to advance, about the problem of evil and the problem of miracles and suchlike; “scientific” objections like the latter are ultimately just assertions (no, science hasn’t disproved miracles, you just want to believe it has), while philosophical and existential objections ultimately tell against atheists just as much as Christians. (If you think evil is a problem for Christians, just stop and consider the problem it poses for atheists. It’s a different kind of problem, but no less real for all that.) I’ve known people whose decision to believe in Christ rested on logical argument, but very few; and I’ve never known anyone who was actually driven to atheism by reason. (Thus the philosopher Edward Tingley, comparing modern atheists unfavorably to Pascal, writes, “Agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is.”) Rather, in my experience, the main reason people choose not to believe in Christ is because they don’t want to. As Chesterton wryly observed,
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
The reason for this is that the Christian faith isn’t designed to meet our “felt needs”; it isn’t, as so many atheists smugly assume, just a matter of believing what we want to believe. As Flannery O’Connor put it, it isn’t a big warm electric blanket, it’s the cross—and we don’t particularly want the cross. We don’t particularly want a God who calls us to deny ourselves and take up our cross (which, you remember, was an implement designed to torture people to death) and then has the gall to say, “My yoke is well-fitted and my burden is light.” We can’t get to the point where we want that until we realize that our needs go much, much deeper than what we feel on the surface; we can’t get to that point until we realize that the burden of taking up our cross is in fact light compared to the burden of our sin, and that Jesus’ yoke is indeed well-fitted, not to doing what we want to do, but to doing what we need to do. Getting there, however, isn’t easy; it’s far easier to turn aside and believe something else instead.
And before you start to object that the behavior of many Christians is another major reason why people turn away from faith, let me say that that’s just another example of the same problem: many of us in the church don’t want the cross either. Even for many within the church, it’s harder to believe than not to, and so it’s all too easy for us to choose not to. Instead, we find something else to believe in—a structure of behavioral rules, a set of political commitments, a system of how-tos for “the life you’ve always wanted”—and call that Christianity instead. The thing is, that kind of belief can build organizations, even big ones, and it can attract followers, even committed ones, and it can do a lot of things that impress this world—but what it can’t do is raise Christians. It takes a church to raise a Christian, and specifically, it takes a church that’s trying to be the church; and churches that take those kinds of approaches are trying to be something else. They are, essentially, counterfeit churches practicing counterfeit Christianity—and, in the process, stifling people who should be trading in slavery to sin for freedom in Christ, so that they wind up escaping one mold merely to be squeezed into another. Follow that out too far and you wind up with the kind of thing Taylor satirized when he wrote,
So now I see the whole design;
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there—I’m feeling fine!
I want to be a clone!
You also wind up with the kind of church, and the kind of church member, that turns people away from Christianity, without those people ever realizing that it isn’t really Christianity they’re rejecting.
The bottom line here is that true Christian faith is not just intellectual assent to a series of propositions, nor is it a commitment to pursue what we consider to be good and helpful behaviors (though in some sense, both of those are involved): true Christian faith is a belief in a Person, and a commitment to follow that Person wherever he might lead us. To borrow from the old story about the Great Blondin, it’s not just a matter of agreeing that if we get in the wheelbarrow, he’ll be able to push us safely across his tightrope over Niagara Falls—it’s a matter of actually getting in the wheelbarrow and hanging on. It’s a whole-life commitment, giving everything we have to follow Jesus.
The great offense of the Christian life to us is that it’s not about us at all—it’s not about our goals, our desires, our felt needs, and how to get what we consider to be “our best life now”; it’s not about making us better able to go out and be our best selves, so that we can take the credit for what wonderful people we are. Rather, it’s about setting all that aside and casting ourselves on Jesus, living lives of radical abandonment to the grace of God, letting him have all the glory for what he does in and through us—and letting him decide what exactly that will be, and where, and when, and how. This is the only way to real life, but it isn’t easy; in fact, O’Connor and Taylor are right: it’s harder to believe than not to.
Harder to Believe than Not to
Nothing is colder than the winds of change
Where the chill numbs the dreamer till a shadow remains;
Among the ruins lies your tortured soul—
Was it lost there, or did your will surrender control?Chorus:
Shivering with doubts that were left unattended,
So you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.
Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few?
It’s harder to believe than not to—
Harder to believe than not to.It was a confidence that got you by,
When you knew you believed it, but you didn’t know why.
No one imagines it will come to this,
But it gets so hard when people don’t want to listen.Chorus
Some stay paralyzed until they succumb;
Others do what they feel, but their senses are numb.
Some get trampled by the pious throng—
Still, they limp along.Are you sturdy enough to move to the front?
Is it nods of approval or the truth that you want?
And if they call it a crutch, then you walk with pride;
Your accusers have always been afraid to go outside.They shiver with doubts that were left unattended,
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended.
You know by now why the chosen are few:
It’s harder to believe than not to.I believe.
Words and music: Steve Taylor
© 1987 Soylent Tunes
From the album I Predict 1990, by Steve Taylor
Thoughts on the idolatry of relevance
Never have Christians pursued relevance more strenuously;
never have Christians been more irrelevant.—Os Guinness
It’s an important belief of those who believe in and make use of contemporary worship forms that the church must be aware of the world in its public worship; from this belief, they argue that worship must be “contemporary” and “relevant.” Unfortunately, these two words misfocus our discussions of worship. If we aim to be contemporary, we end by elevating the new above all else merely because it’s new; our interaction with the world around us grows shallow and unanchored, for we can offer little more than a Jesus-colored version of the existing culture. While this may well make people comfortable with us, it doesn’t give them any sense of the difference between worshiping in the presence of God and being one of the folks in the culture at large. Similarly, if our goal is to be relevant in our worship (which includes the sermon), then we will focus on what people want to hear and feel and meeting those desires rather than on reaching to their central need, which is for God.
This is not to say that the church shouldn’t be aware of the world, or try to understand the world, as if somehow striving to be irrelevant would be better; clearly, that isn’t the case. Rather, the problem is the assumption that “relevance” means being relevant to the world on its own terms, and that if our worship is to connect with the world, it must do so on the world’s terms. This is essentially an assumption that in the relationship between the church and the world, the world is the senior partner, and that we must defer to the culture around us as the arbiter of what works and why. This tends to produce a plastic, results-oriented view of worship, in which worship is to be judged by numbers and approval ratings—by outward signs, rather than by inward realities—and thus in which we understand our worship primarily in technical terms, as a human act which is primarily designed to meet measurable goals.
This would be well enough, if worship were in fact a human act about human realities, for then the details of our worship would be negotiable with the various voices of our culture. This view of worship rests on the assumption that worship is something which we initiate for our own purposes, which may include but are not limited to the desire to please God, and thus is something which we have both right and reason to manipulate as we please in order to achieve our own purposes.
The problem is, this assumption is false.
Worship isn’t something we initiate, it’s something to which God calls us out from our own purposes and activities, and which exists wholly apart from them; in the words of the Baptist pastor the Rev. Dr. Bruce Milne, “worship doesn’t begin with us at all, it begins with God.” Properly speaking, it also ends with God, and is about him at every point in between. That’s why, in the classical Christian understanding, worship always begins with Scripture, “because God takes the initiative and we respond.”
As already noted, this doesn’t mean that the church should conduct its worship in ignorance of the world, or without taking the world and its conditions into account; rather, it’s the reason why we need to be aware of the world, and the proper frame for that awareness. As the Catholic priest Fr. M. Francis Mannion, president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, put it in a remarkable article in First Things, “The Church is—or should be—never more intensely aware of the city than when at worship. In liturgy, the Church is opened out to the world, and the world in all its dimensions is drawn into the act of worship.” Indeed, Fr. Mannion goes further, arguing that “The task of the liturgy is to symbolize and sacramentalize the liturgy of the heavenly city in the midst of the earthly city. . . . The public worship of the Christian community gathers up the liturgy of the human city, [and] gives expression to the religious yearnings of the human city.”
This is a viewpoint rooted in the ancient image of the two cities, the city of God and the city of this world, and the idea that the church is called to unite the two, bringing the heavenly city to earth and lifting the earthly city up to heaven. It’s on the basis of this understanding that the late Yale professor Fr. Aidan Kavanagh wrote, “What the liturgical assembly of Christian orthodoxy does is the world. Where the liturgical assembly does this is the public forum of the world’s radical business . . . When the liturgical assembly does this is the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age.” This is an astonishing vision for the worship of the church; rather than casting the task of the worship planner and worship leader as tinkering up a version of Christian truth which those outside the church will find familiar and comfortable so that they can come in and be at ease, this sees that task as something far greater and far more challenging.
The church is to be aware of the world in its worship, not to seek to match its style or to attempt to be relevant to the world on its own terms, but in order to offer its true relevance: to show and tell the world those things with which it is not comfortable, because it has forgotten them. Rather than being a public echo of the world’s familiar business, we’re called to be “the public forum of the world’s radical business,” the place where the world is called back to the root of every matter, the source of every existence, to confront the God who made it; our worship, insofar as it meets needs, should be meeting needs which the culture does not see. Insofar as it’s about us at all, which is only secondarily, it should be building us up as the people of God to go out to serve him in the human city as agents of the city of God, and not for any other purpose.
The reason for this is that just as our worship is not primarily of or about ourselves, neither is it primarily of or about our present time; rather, in our worship we act by faith as theological time-travelers, bringing the eschatological future of Jesus’ return into the present age. In our worship, we stand before God in “the moment of the world’s rebirth—the eighth day of creation, the first day of the last and newest age,” participating in that moment in faith even as we continue to live in creation’s unfinished seventh day; our worship is the point at which that future and our present collide, in which the heavenly city is enacted in the midst of the earthly city.
To be “relevant” as the world understands relevance is to collapse that, to seek to worship only in the present time; it is thus to fail to worship in the sure and certain hope of the world’s rebirth, the time when Christ will return and the Alpha and Omega will make all things new at last. That’s why “relevant” churches tend to be all about this-worldly concerns like your paycheck, your sex life, and your golf game, seeking to help you do better what you’re already doing—they’ve lost the vision for anything greater, because they’re only worshiping in this world.
The church is called to be active in this world, yes, but in a very real sense, we’re called to worship in the next. As someone has said, we’re supposed to worship with bifocal vision, seeing both the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ—simultaneously. It’s only if we seek to do this that we’ll have the vision we need to have as the worshiping people of God; and at the same time, it’s only if we seek to do this, rather than to give the world a vision which it’s already prepared to accept, that we’ll be able to show it what it really needs to see.
Morning prayer
In the beginning, O God,
when the firm earth emerged from the waters of life
you saw that it was good.
The fertile ground was moist
the seed was strong
and earth’s profusion of colour and scent was born.
Awaken my senses this day
to the goodness that still stems from Eden.
Awaken my senses
to the goodness that can still spring forth
in me and in all that has life.
—J. Phillip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer, 26.
The importance of beauty in Christian ministry
Frederica Mathewes-Green has a blog post up on that subject titled “A Golden Bell and a Pomegranate: Beauty and Apologetics,” which I think deserves careful reading and reflection. A lot of it is on the specific importance of beauty in worship; she has a distinct Orthodox slant to this, which is only to be expected, but I think her basic point is right.
In worship, it’s about God, and all signs must point in His direction. An atmosphere of beauty teaches wordlessly about the nature of God. It teaches that He is not just a concept to be endlessly discussed; that at some point our capacity to grasp him intellectually fails, and we fall before him in worship. Beyond all we know and cannot know about God, he reigns in beauty. Beauty opens our hearts, and stirs us to hunger for more, to hunger for the piercing sweetness of the presence of God.
As she notes, however, this applies beyond just Christians to the ability of non-Christian visitors to perceive the reality of our worship, and thus to be drawn by it; as such, she argues (rightly, I think) that beauty is actually important in evangelism as well:
What does it take to be a missionary? You need to know your stuff, and you need to have a tender heart toward the people you are trying to reach. But there is one more thing that Orthodox Christianity would contribute to the ministry of evangelism: beauty.
Again, I don’t think this is purely an Orthodox contribution; I’ll grant, though, that they’ve continued to make beauty, according to their particular approach, a priority where too much of the Western church no longer does. As such, I do think those of us in Protestant churches, especially, could stand to learn from Orthodoxy in this respect. After all, the poet had a point when he wrote,“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”—John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”If we don’t show forth the beauty of God, we aren’t being faithful to his truth.
Why lawyers shouldn’t teach history
“I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk
not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did,
and Truman did.”—Sen. Barack Obama, 5/6/08I’ve been meaning to get around to commenting on this ridiculous case of historical malpractice. This might just be the single most wrongheaded political statement I’ve heard during this campaign (which, given this campaign, is saying something). I can’t think of a single enemy with whom either Roosevelt (either Roosevelt, come to that, though I presume he’s referring to the Democrat) or Truman had diplomatic conversations except the one with whom we were allied; as for JFK, it was talking to our enemies that got him into trouble. If he’d stood up to the shoe-pounder to begin with, we would all have been better off. (Then, of course, the Kennedy Administration’s misbehaviors in Vietnam are surely nothing Sen. Obama wants to hold up as a model.)RealClearPolitics’ Jack Kelly, in his helpful survey of the senator’s historical ridiculosity, suggests Neville Chamberlain as a better historical analogue, noting that Chamberlain’s declaration of peace “didn’t work out so well.” I might add that among American Presidents, the real appeasers are folks like Carter—or, if we want to include internal enemies, James Buchanan. I presume Sen. Obama wouldn’t have been in favor of continuing to negotiate with domestic slaveowners?