I’m moving and thinking very slowly today, trying to steer chains of reasoning around the sharp headache that keeps flickering behind my eyes; I had a couple posts I wanted to work on today, along with sermon work and some other things, but nothing’s happening very fast.I do want to mention, though, something that amused me last night. I have to admit, I didn’t watch the debate—I already had a headache, and figured I could catch up with it later—so I was bewildered, sometime after 9:30, to get up and check my blog traffic and find it going clean through the roof. Turns out, when John McCain made his comment about Barack Obama’s overhead-projector earmarks, that hordes of people pulled up Google and went looking; and for whatever reason, when you Google Obama overhead projector or some variant of that, my post “Barack Obama as overhead-projector screen” from this past July is right there near the top. It’s just a short post that has nothing to do with the earmarks Sen. McCain was talking about—rather, it’s a brief comment on a remarkable column by the redoubtable Shelby Steele—but there you go: that one post got more hits in half an hour last night than the whole blog had gotten over the previous week, as one person after another checked it out. I do hope most of those folks kept going on down their search lists (as I did, with one of them) to find the information they wanted on Sen. Obama’s earmarks. (If so, they might also have found a link to this piece on Sarah Palin’s record on earmarks, which is much stronger.) As it is, though, I’m reminded of a complaint I’ve heard a time or two before that the problem with Internet searches is that they lack serendipity. The usual comparison is to looking a word up in the dictionary, and all the other interesting words you run across while you’re trying to find the one you want; supposedly, the precision of our Internet searches means that people don’t experience those accidental discoveries anymore (which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending). Offhand, though, I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point. My blog bears me witness.
The crux of theology
I’m up late, can’t sleep, feeling crummy, just sitting here on the couch with the laptop wandering the Web doing things that don’t need much brainpower (I could be trying to tackle Colossians 2:9-15 for this Sunday’s sermon, but I think it would take two falls out of three without breaking a sweat); but even in moments like these, God is at work, and there are grace notes. For whatever reason, his Spirit brought to mind the story of how Karl Barth, during his visit to America in 1962, was asked how he would summarize his theology; this brilliant Reformed thinker, the greatest and most important theologian of his century, this prolific mind who wrote millions and millions of words, answered, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” That really is the bottom line, isn’t it? What a comfort.
Unspectacular
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been tagged in a meme; apparently, though, Pauline over at Perennial Student tagged me a couple weeks ago, and I missed it. (I’ll admit, I tend to be a bit erratic in my reading.) This one’s pretty simple: name six unspectacular things about yourself. This offers me a wide, wide field . . .
- I’m physically utterly unspectacular—moderate height, thinning medium-brown hair, glasses. (At least my beard is reddish.)
- I sing baritone in our church choir; I do not sing solos.
- I love baseball, but my best position is bench jockey. As a hitter, I used to be pretty good at getting on base, but in the field I’m strictly a utility player—I can make errors at all nine positions.
- I love Chinese food—the real thing, not the Americanized stuff (though some of that can be pretty good, too). In fact, I’m very fond of every Asian cuisine I’ve tried (Thai, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Indian, Lebanese). That’s one of the things I really miss about living in Vancouver, BC: all the authentic ethnic food.
- I’m a diehard Seattle sports fan. So far this year, the Mariners have lost 100+ games, the Sonics have been stolen by an Oklahoma robber baron, the Seahawks are 1-3, and the Husky football team is 0-5 on the season (and 0 for their last 7). I’ve pretty much stopped reading the sports pages.
- Having grown up mostly in the Pacific Northwest, I’m a complete weather wimp, especially when it comes to heat and humidity. I can deal with the winters here in Indiana, but summer’s no fun.
For this one, you’re supposed to tag six people, but a) it’s late, and b) I never have good luck with my tags, so I’ll just throw it open: if you want to respond, consider yourself tagged.
Random thought re: M. Night Shyamalan
The latest issue of Touchstone arrived today; I’m currently partway through Russell Moore’s excellent article “The Gospel’s Bigger Idea: You Can’t Tell the Story of Jesus Without Jesus,” which I would link to if it were only available online. (I may very well post on it later anyway.)At the moment, though, my brain is off on a tangent. Dean Moore notes in his piece that he’s never seen the movie The Sixth Sense, in part because a friend told him about the “twist” ending, which he assumes means the movie is now ruined for him.
If I saw the movie now, I would see the same film everyone else saw at its release, but I would be seeing it with the mystery decoded. I would see where the story was going.
This is true, but I don’t think it ruins the movie. I watch very few films, but I have seen that one, at the urging of a couple good friends of ours; I watched the whole thing, appreciating some aspects of it and very much not appreciating others, and waiting for the twist ending—and when it came, was very surprised to find myself not surprised, because the “twist” was something I had understood from the beginning of the movie. I was interested to be told afterward (was it in the extras on the DVD? I don’t recall) that M. Night Shyamalan had actually not expected it to be a twist for the audience—it was a revelation for the protagonist, of course, but he assumed the audience would understand the situation. His indirect exposition at the beginning proved to be rather too indirect for most people to catch, however, and so the film ended up a different experience for audiences than he had expected.This is, I think, unfortunate, for two reasons. One is that people watched the movie less as a character study—which was the aspect that I really liked; Bruce Willis did a terrific job with a fascinating role—and more as a horror thriller. That probably helped Shyamalan at the box office, but I think it weakened the effect of his work. To put it in terms of this post, this focused people more on the mystery in the story (“What’s the twist going to be?”) and less on the mystery of the story: who are these two characters, what are they about, and what is the real meaning of what’s going on?The other is that it established Shyamalan as a sort of O. Henry of the theater, with a hefty dollop of Poe or Lovecraft: a guy who made creepily atmospheric films that set you up for a great twist ending. Again, that was great for him in the short run, and most people agree that Unbreakable was a major accomplishment as well; but trying to live up to that has been an increasing burden on him, and one that seems to be ruining him as a writer and director. His greatest break, the jolt of surprise that (with an assist from The Blair Witch Project) made a megahit of The Sixth Sense, may ironically be the thing that breaks him. It’s too bad; he’s a gifted storyteller, if he’d just stuck to telling real stories instead of artificial ones.
No half measures
HT: U.S.S. MarinerIn bringing the 777 to production, Boeing took the pursuit of perfection to its logical extreme: to make sure the wings were as strong, and as capable of enduring severe weather, as the design team wanted them to be, the company built an entire airplane (just the structure, not the interior equipment) just to break it, and then they took that plane and bent the wings until they snapped. The hope was that the wing would withstand at least 150% of the stress it would ever have to endure in the air; it did, breaking at 154%.There is, I think, a lesson here for the church—and no, it’s not “stress your volunteers until they break,” which too many churches already do. Boeing didn’t break people, they broke stuff; the church should always be able to tell the difference (which means, among other things, that we really shouldn’t get into the world’s habit of referring to people as “resources” and “assets,” because those are stuff words). Specifically, Boeing put the mission ahead of the stuff, and if they needed to break stuff to get the mission done right—to be sure they’d built a plane that was at least as good as they wanted it to be—they went ahead and broke the stuff. Indeed, they built it for the express purpose of being broken, just so they could be sure.The American church, I think, could stand to profit from their example. We have our mission statement direct from the mouth of God:
Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
We need to make sure that that mission—which is completely antithetical, be it noted, to using up and burning out the people we already have in an effort to attract more people—is the driving motivation behind everything we do, to the point that nothing else is allowed to hold us back. If concern for those outside the church means that some of our stuff gets broken, then so be it. (Indeed, if concern for those inside the church means that we focus more on feeding and discipling them than on prodding them to contribute to the building fund, then praise God.) Certainly, we should be good stewards of the things we have; we should invest the time and money to take care of whatever buildings we own or use, and to do everything to the best of our ability to the glory of God. But we don’t exist to have an attractive building—or, for that matter, a large building—or to have great music, or to have a well-produced worship service, or to have lots of programs. We exist to make disciples of Jesus Christ, including each other, and all those other things exist to support that mission. If that means allowing some disorder and some breakage, we need to be willing to let that happen; if it means not having the big building and the big budget, we need to embrace that. We can’t be about the stuff; we need to be about making disciples—all about making disciples, nothing held back—and let the stuff fall where it will.
Educational Alzheimer’s
When individuals lose their memory to Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia, we universally recognize this as a tragedy, and so we pour large amounts of money into research to identify the causes and work toward developing a cure. But when the nation loses its collective memory? As any lover of history knows, that’s what’s happening year by year. The great historian David McCullough put it this way thirteen years ago in his National Book Award acceptance speech:
We, in our time, are raising a new generation of Americans who, to an alarming degree, are historically illiterate.The situation is serious and sad. And it is quite real, let there be no mistake. It has been coming on for a long time, like a creeping disease, eating away at the national memory. While the clamorous popular culture races on, the American past is slipping away, out of site and out of mind. We are losing our story, forgetting who we are and what it’s taken to come this far. . . .The decided majority, some 60 percent, of the nation’s high school seniors haven’t even the most basic understanding of American history. . . .On a winter morning on the campus of one of our finest colleges, in a lively Ivy League setting with the snow falling outside the window, I sat with a seminar of some twenty-five students, all seniors majoring in history, all honors students—the cream of the crop. “How many of you know who George Marshall was?” I asked. None. Not one.At a large university in the Midwest, a young woman told me how glad she was to have attended my lecture, because until then, she explained, she had never realized that the original thirteen colonies were all on the eastern seaboard.
As Brian Ward of Fraters Libertas notes, the situation hasn’t improved in thirteen years, either.
The liberal news site MinnPost celebrates this glimpse into the state of public education in Minneapolis:When asked what historical figure they’d most like to study this year, an astounding 22 of the 35 students in Ms. Ellingham’s eighth-grade history class at Susan B. Anthony middle school in Minneapolis answered, “Yoko Ono” and/or “John Lennon.”I weep for the future. The great historian David McCullough was on C-SPAN this past week, looking like a beaten man while describing the crushing level of historical ignorance among America’s youth. He summed up with the warning that one can never love a country one doesn’t know. It sounded like an epitaph.
A lot of people will look at this and blame it on history being boring—a perception which I’ve never understood, since history is the human story, the summation of all the interesting (and not-so-interesting) things that have ever happened; sure, it’s boring if badly taught, but so is anything else. The real problem, I think, is ideological: the teaching of history, and especially American history, just isn’t valued by the elites who controle public education, because too many among them don’t especially value the country which that history has produced. Like Barack Obama, their chosen candidate, their conception of the good of America is primarily forward-looking—it’s about the changes they want to make and the good they believe they can create; they don’t want to learn from history, they want to be free of it. Thus John Hinderaker writes,
My youngest daughter started middle school this year. After around a month of classes, as far as I can tell the curriculum consists largely of propaganda about recycling. My high school age daughter told me tonight that in Spanish class she has been taught to say “global warming,” “acid rain” and “greenhouse effect” in Spanish. . . .The schools can teach anything if they care about it. The problem is that they don’t care about teaching history, least of all American history. Public education is agenda-driven, and American history—the facts of American history—is not on the agenda.
The problem is, we cannot get free of history—not as long as human beings are still sinful; the attempt to do so only leaves us blind to what others may do. The study of history is in large part a way of learning from the mistakes (and the insights!) of others so that we don’t have to reinvent them all ourselves. This is why the philosopher George Santayana was right to declare that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it’s also why progressives who try to evade this truth by dismissing it as a truism are self-defeating, because any true progress requires escaping the historical loop, which requires learning the lessons of history and taking them seriously. True progress must be founded on a chastened realism about human behavior, not on utopian optimism about human potential.The nub of the matter here is that the command of the Delphic oracle is still essential to any human wisdom: “Know thyself”—and our ability to do so rests on our memory, because to a great extent, as I’ve said before, memory is identity. We cannot know ourselves if we’ve forgotten who we are, what we’ve done and why we’ve done it and whom we did it for (or to, or against)—and this is no less true of us as a nation than it is of us as individuals. We cannot understand who we are and why we do things the way we do if we don’t understand how we got here; and as a consequence, we may well throw away treasures because we don’t know enough to see their value.The last word on this really should belong to David McCullough, of whom I am a great and fervent admirer, who put it beautifully in his 1995 acceptance speech (which is well worth reading in its entirety):
History shows us how to behave. History teaches, reinforces what we believe in, what we stand for, and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. History is—or should be—the bedrock of patriotism, not the chest-pounding kind of patriotism but the real thing, love of country.At their core, the lessons of history are largely lessons in appreciation. Everything we have, all our great institutions, hospitals, universities, libraries, this city, our laws, our music, art, poetry, our freedoms, everything is because somebody went before us and did the hard work, provided the creative energy, provided the money, provided the belief. Do we disregard that?Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.I’m convinced that history encourages, as nothing else does, a sense of proportion about life, gives us a sense of the relative scale of our own brief time on earth and how valuable that is.What history teaches it teaches mainly by example. It inspires courage and tolerance. It encourages a sense of humor. It is an aid to navigation in perilous times. We are living now in an era of momentous change, of huge transitions in all aspects of life-here, nationwide, worldwide-and this creates great pressures and tensions. But history shows that times of change are the times when we are most likely to learn. This nation was founded on change. We should embrace the possibilities in these exciting times and hold to a steady course, because we have a sense of navigation, a sense of what we’ve been through in times past and who we are.
The crowning irony of a strange campaign
Paul Hinderaker of Power Line has brilliantly captured something I’ve been thinking about but hadn’t quite put together like this:
If it turns out to be the financial crisis that puts Barack Obama over the top in his quest for the White House, the irony will be difficult to overstate. First, the biggest driver of the financial crisis was not any conservative policy such as the kind of deregulation John McCain supports. Rather, as Diana West argues, the biggest driver was the “race-based social engineering” that “virtually created the sub-prime mortgage industry.” The implosion of that industry, in turn, triggered the present crisis.The operative vision, then, was leftist and racialist, not free-market. As West puts it, the social engineers decided that not “enough” minorities had homes because not “enough” minorities were eligible for mortgages. The solution was to junk the bottom-line, non-racial markers of mortgage eligibility traditionally used by banks to distinguish between good and bad credit risks—steady employment, clean credit, and a down payment. Obama, then, is the beneficiary of the terrible failure of affirmative action style policies in the mortgage banking sector.But the irony extends further. For it turns out that intimidating banks into making bad loans to minorities was a major activity of “community organizations” during the 1990s. And, according to Stanley Kurtz, Obama himself trained and funded ACORN activists who engaged in such intimidation.Using a combination of intimidation and white guilt to plunge the banking industry into the crisis that brings a radical activist to power—even Saul Alinsky couldn’t have drawn it up this well.
The Palin school of media management
Check this out—this is just too funny.
HT: Power Line For those interested, Scott Johnson’s post includes links to video of Gov. Palin’s whole speech to the rally in Carson, CA.
“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.”
So said Willy Wonka, anyway (though I’m not sure if he said it in the book or only in the movie). Anyway, for some random reason I looked up this site that a friend of ours back in Bellingham introduced us to almost a decade ago, and was surprised to find it not only still up, but updated. (I suppose I shouldn’t have been.) It’s by no means deep, but it’s amusing for a little while, if your sense of humor tends toward the goofy. If it does, and you want a grin or two, you might want to go check out Dancing Paul.
The order of decrees
For those who aren’t theology wonks, “the order of decrees” is a theological catchphrase dealing with a disagreement among Calvinist theologians. The phrase relates to the order in which God decided to decree, or determine, certain things; the dispute relates to the question of whether God decided to create people, then decided to permit the fall into sin, and then set the plan of salvation in motion, or whether he decided to create human beings in order to save some and not others. (That’s a very rough sketch of the difference between the positions, and not really fair to either of them, but I think it’s the best way to capture their difference for those who aren’t familiar with this discussion. If you are, my apologies, and I’ll be happy to have a serious conversation on the subject with you at some other point. If you aren’t but would like to be, go read the chapter for Boettner linked above.)It seems to me, though, that this is a concept and a question which is of value beyond simply the Reformed understanding of the Christian doctrine of salvation by grace. In particular, I think this is valuable in evaluating our political positions and our political philosophy if we apply it to ourselves: what is our own “order of decrees” with regard to the positions we choose to take and defend?What got me thinking about this was Chris Matthews (he of the tingly leg), and specifically his comparison of the first presidential debate and the VP debate: as Mary Katherine Ham pointed out, he argued that the Democrat won both—for mutually contradictory reasons. Had he been consistent, he would have had to score one of them as a win for the GOP ticket; so he scrapped consistency for the sake of ideology.Now, Matthews’ performance here is easy to mock, as a particularly blatant (and particularly ludicrous) example of bias trumping logic; but it’s also, I think, a valuable pointer to an approach to politics that we see all over the place. To borrow the “order of decrees” language, his decree of support for the Democratic Party and its candidates is prior to all his other decrees in this instance, and controls them. Therefore, his chain of reasoning and consequent analysis of the situation in front of him (the debates, in this case) is not independent, but is dictated by his a priori commitment to do what is best for the Democratic candidate; what matters is not that what he says is logically coherent or represents a rationally consistent position, but that it serves his agenda.As I say, though this is an especially obvious and risible example, I believe it’s something most of us do: we put our decree of which side we’re on ahead of our evaluations of people, positions, and situations. Rather than putting our governing principles first and trying to reason independently from them in each instance to determine what we think of this candidate or that, of this position or that, of this bill or that (and, yes, of this debate or that), we have the tendency to decide who we’re rooting for and who we’re rooting against and let that shape, or even determine, what we think about all those other matters. Chris Matthews did it in his debate analysis. More than a few people on both sides of the political aisle have done it with respect to Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin—we’ve seen some of the arguments over Sen. Clinton reprised over Gov. Palin, only with the sides switched. Scads and scads of folks did it over the Paulson plan, because they’d already decided they were against “Wall Street fat cats.” It’s certainly a faster and more efficient way to come to conclusions, because it cuts out the need for all that time-consuming thought; that’s an especially strong temptation given the speed with which our world moves these days. What it isn’t, however, is a good way to build politics with integrity—or indeed, to build integrity in any area of life.