My mother often likes to note that the decision to celebrate Christmas in this time of year is really a celebration of the birthday of Mithras or Sol Invictus. Mom is in part right. There's no Biblical warrant for Joseph and a pregnant Mary riding a donkey through a December blizzard to Bethlehem or any other like clue as to the season. For one thing, the Earth's climate was driven by sunnier weather than usual during a period still called by climatologists, the Roman Maximum. And snow is rare enough in the Levant or the similar climate of coastal California, though it does happen as Los Angeles residents learned this year. Sorry, Miss Rosetti, your snow likely was not real but merely a metaphor for our world frozen in sin.
If I had to guess, the Roman census in Judea and Galilee probably was conveniently scheduled between major Jewish holidays and pilgrim feasts and avoided a season of major agricultural activity. So February or early March looks more promising if Hanukkah really was a pilgrim feast. But the Bible does not say, so it really doesn't matter.
What does matter is when we choose to celebrate it. And disagreeing with my mother, I suspect Christmas is celebrated on December 25 to place Jesus' circumcision on the eighth day from this event: 1 January, the beginning of the Roman civil year. In Rome, this day would be filled with omen-casting and inauguration of magistrates in rituals varying from the reasonably ordinary to the very, very strange. (HBO's Rome shows one ritual meant to give a sacrosanct character to a tribune. It's quite bloody.)
The Church originally celebrated 1 January as the Feast of the Circumcision, the first opportunity in Jesus' life to fulfill outward submission to the Law, and in which Joseph redeemed Jesus as his firstborn with a small sum given to charity or the local priests, depending on the exact custom. This act commemorated the redemption of the firstborn Israelites from the Angel of Death in Egypt as the circumcision recalled the circumcision of Israel from Egypt signified by the plagues. But it's all rather funny, because Joseph and Mary know that this child is God's son. That the Son of God is being incorporated into Israel. That Joseph is redeeming God from God on God's behalf. That in the submission of this child to the rituals of the Law, messianic prophecy is coming towards fulfillment and the reason of the Law ("the way of your statutes") is breaking down.
And since this day requires an unusual "redemption," they name the child Yeshua, a common enough name, held first in lore by the most obedient child of the Generation of the Wilderness, who took the mantle of Moses after his death and smote Canaan with the sword, purifying the land from the abominations of the nations. The child'
s parents might have hoped that this child, too, might be Israel's liberation from Roman oppression. But instead this child's name was not Yeshua Yisroel but Yeshua Tebel, God saves the entire world, Jew and Gentile alike. God saves. God redeems. And on New Year's Day, it signifies to us that God redeems all time, all struggle, all challenge, all change, and all things old we would like to bring with us into the new.
Today, I was reading a columnist who noted that the Roman Catholics, like the Episcopalians, no longer call 1 January the Feast of the Circumcision. The Episcopalians call it the Feast of the Holy Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, which retains some of the original significance of the day. The Roman Catholics now call it the Solemnity of Mary. Charity forbids further comment.
A blessed Christmas and New Year from all of us at the Monastery, knowing that the only certainty of a new year is the continuing gift of God's salvation.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Picking Olives Tomorrow
My great-grandfather Josephus was an Italian peasant. When he came to this country, he spent his leisure time growing grapes, making wine, and then consuming it. Back in Italy, I'm sure he had olive trees because I get this deep atavistic pleasure from harvesting them. For the last couple of years, my institution has decided to harvest as many olives as they can from the trees that grow around the campus and make olive oil. So early tomorrow morning, I will be enjoying myself with a little arboriculture. Unlike the solar plants being installed around campus, the effort seems a bit of a stunt. For one thing, the olive oil made last year tastes horrible, like turpentine, just not as poisonous. It apparently won last place in a taste test competition of forty producers in Ionia. It, however, might be useful for other purposes. But it makes a point. Many of us (not me) spend our days trying to figure out sustainable and less carbon-intensive ways of powering the future. Our now less neglected olive trees are a reminder that there are older, but successful approaches to the problem lying dormant all around us. Like the foods that feed our bodies, our external energy use may be healthiest for us with a little locally adapted diversification.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways
Earlier today, I was electioneering against California's Proposition 8 in these parts. One of the people with whom I was electioneering asked me why I was doing this, so I told her the story of a man I knew in my childhood, a vestryman of my church and an attorney, who had nursed his partner as he died of AIDS while dealing with HIV infection himself. His union taught me that same sex partners could be "married" in the same way that my parents could be and such unions should be entitled to the same or similar rights. Just now, I was curious about where this man was now. After all, I had seen him in a video promoting a fundraiser for AIDS services back in high school. So I googled him and found that he had re-married in this state. And he's still working hard against AIDS both in himself and in the rest of the world.
So thank you, Mr. Milan, for being an inspiration for so many, I hope it brings you joy.
So thank you, Mr. Milan, for being an inspiration for so many, I hope it brings you joy.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Contradictions in the Life of a Climate Scientist
I am a regular reader of Pandagon, mainly in order to remind myself that I am out of place with the American center left as presently constituted. And also because I find many of the opinions expressed there wrong but well-considered. Today, I found myself amused by this blog . Maybe it's just the title, since I generally have dated by bus and train and find it rather romantic, just not practical for ladies' footwear as presently constituted. But also because it really forced some of the commentariat to think about a less mobile world and the potential impact it could have on the general cosmopolitanism of our society.
It also made me think about my own love life, which sometimes involves pining after someone with whom I would have to have a long distance relationship (often abbreviated LDR in the Pandagon piece). The commentariat is right about one thing. LDRs have a definite connection with graduate school. In the sciences, it is especially bad. American anti-intellectualism is particularly pronounced toward the sciences (even among other intellectuals), and so scientists have a great deal of trouble finding someone who understands their passion and depth of purpose and are willing to build a common life with that considerable distraction always fighting toward the center of that relationship. To some extent, the onus falls on the scientist to set limits for themselves in order to care for the needs of their beloved as well as their own. I've heard plenty of divorce stories about older colleagues that make me think that science (and scientific discovery) can become an addiction and a rather obvious threat to relationships. But it's still helpful for a scientist's partner to either be a scientist or be a more flexible person with their own work of deep creativity and passion. And I'm happy to say I've seen some wonderful marriages of this type of long standing.
But often those kind of people find themselves in graduate school or similar situations, and not always in the same place. An LDR is so tempting in that neither of you have much time and so can block out a few phone calls etc. a week and see each other twice a year. On the other hand, many of my graduate school friends are pretty much set against LDRs. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps sex drive issues are involved. But maybe it's more generally incarnational than carnal. That your limited spare time is best spent being with someone than trying to compensate for being apart.
Of course, I also worry about climate/resources implications as in the Slate article referred to in the Pandagon piece. I have a friend at another school who was flying every month cross-country to see his girlfriend. The friend in question probably would have a deeper understanding of the latest IPCC Report than Al Gore, but he recognizes that in a society with distorted priorities and infrastructure, human relationships trump carbon emissions.
I understand the feeling. I try to limit both my business and personal travel. But my extended family on the East Coast likes to see me, and I've been only doing so about once per year. Friends are getting married. The only thing you can do is to try support less carbon-intensive transportation options. This year I will be using Amtrak Ionia to travel to a conference in Byzantion. (I even may get some colleagues to join me.) It doesn't quite make me feel better the three transcontinental round-trips I will be making in the next two months, but I know that those trips are not made frivolously. In all three cases, it is important for me to present for people, both in my family and in my field. If I lived in China, I gladly would ride from Lanzhou to Beijing by rail for the same necessity. If I lived in India, I'd say the same for Delhi to Madras. But I live in America...
There's one particular comment from Alara Rogers on the Pandagon piece that I think is worth reading. Small communities do tend to be insular societies, especially when isolated from cultural cues from the larger society (good or bad, q.v. Rwandan genocide) and there is a potential for excess, resentment of the alien, family rivalries and jealousies, and all manner of other evils. And so in the process of localizing our stuff while keeping our data global (sorry, Derek, I love your phrasing), it will be important to plan for human mobility, not the in and out mobility of the international businessman or global gatherings like Lambeth Conferences but room for mobility that still allows an American priest to spend a year in Southern Africa (and vice versa, especially vice versa). A prioritization of travel for purposes of experience, cultural exchange, and incarnation rather than goods and simple information. The best thing about this is that such travel needs only to be safe and reliable, not fast, permitting travel as a less energy-intensive pleasant experience and time of potential social interaction instead of an energy-intensive unpleasantness necessary to get from point A to point B. But will there be fewer LDRs? You betcha.
It also made me think about my own love life, which sometimes involves pining after someone with whom I would have to have a long distance relationship (often abbreviated LDR in the Pandagon piece). The commentariat is right about one thing. LDRs have a definite connection with graduate school. In the sciences, it is especially bad. American anti-intellectualism is particularly pronounced toward the sciences (even among other intellectuals), and so scientists have a great deal of trouble finding someone who understands their passion and depth of purpose and are willing to build a common life with that considerable distraction always fighting toward the center of that relationship. To some extent, the onus falls on the scientist to set limits for themselves in order to care for the needs of their beloved as well as their own. I've heard plenty of divorce stories about older colleagues that make me think that science (and scientific discovery) can become an addiction and a rather obvious threat to relationships. But it's still helpful for a scientist's partner to either be a scientist or be a more flexible person with their own work of deep creativity and passion. And I'm happy to say I've seen some wonderful marriages of this type of long standing.
But often those kind of people find themselves in graduate school or similar situations, and not always in the same place. An LDR is so tempting in that neither of you have much time and so can block out a few phone calls etc. a week and see each other twice a year. On the other hand, many of my graduate school friends are pretty much set against LDRs. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps sex drive issues are involved. But maybe it's more generally incarnational than carnal. That your limited spare time is best spent being with someone than trying to compensate for being apart.
Of course, I also worry about climate/resources implications as in the Slate article referred to in the Pandagon piece. I have a friend at another school who was flying every month cross-country to see his girlfriend. The friend in question probably would have a deeper understanding of the latest IPCC Report than Al Gore, but he recognizes that in a society with distorted priorities and infrastructure, human relationships trump carbon emissions.
I understand the feeling. I try to limit both my business and personal travel. But my extended family on the East Coast likes to see me, and I've been only doing so about once per year. Friends are getting married. The only thing you can do is to try support less carbon-intensive transportation options. This year I will be using Amtrak Ionia to travel to a conference in Byzantion. (I even may get some colleagues to join me.) It doesn't quite make me feel better the three transcontinental round-trips I will be making in the next two months, but I know that those trips are not made frivolously. In all three cases, it is important for me to present for people, both in my family and in my field. If I lived in China, I gladly would ride from Lanzhou to Beijing by rail for the same necessity. If I lived in India, I'd say the same for Delhi to Madras. But I live in America...
There's one particular comment from Alara Rogers on the Pandagon piece that I think is worth reading. Small communities do tend to be insular societies, especially when isolated from cultural cues from the larger society (good or bad, q.v. Rwandan genocide) and there is a potential for excess, resentment of the alien, family rivalries and jealousies, and all manner of other evils. And so in the process of localizing our stuff while keeping our data global (sorry, Derek, I love your phrasing), it will be important to plan for human mobility, not the in and out mobility of the international businessman or global gatherings like Lambeth Conferences but room for mobility that still allows an American priest to spend a year in Southern Africa (and vice versa, especially vice versa). A prioritization of travel for purposes of experience, cultural exchange, and incarnation rather than goods and simple information. The best thing about this is that such travel needs only to be safe and reliable, not fast, permitting travel as a less energy-intensive pleasant experience and time of potential social interaction instead of an energy-intensive unpleasantness necessary to get from point A to point B. But will there be fewer LDRs? You betcha.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Good Theology Is Simply A Matter of Changing Pronouns When We Have Evolved To Do So
Or at least that's what they believe in Laodicea .
I am sorely tempted to write on a third viewpoint in reply and mail it to the Bishop. The hubris... It burns...
I am sorely tempted to write on a third viewpoint in reply and mail it to the Bishop. The hubris... It burns...
Monday, October 13, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
Politics
bls has been concerned lately about what the purpose of blogging could be if one has no opinions. I understand the feeling. And then I thought about it and realized I have a lot of opinions but I'm not sure they matter very much.
In both the earthly and heavenly city, the city has an analogy with a human. In the case of the earthly city, we go round about with who among us is what part. In antiquity, the elite were said to be the head of the society and so consumed by the mouth and let the lower classes be the hands to work to feed them. In modern times, the same analogy holds in practice, but the hands and feet now are permitted to send nerve impulses to the brain on occasion and serious doses of neurotransmitters every six years. In the heavenly city, whose only described building is the sanctuary, the analogy is between the city and the God made man, Jesus Christ, who has resurrected the temple of his Body that the whole creation be at peace therein.
Some concern with the heavenly city has seemed appropriate lately. Recall the Collect for Proper 20:
It helped to think on this this week. The Collect dates from the uneasiness during the era of the barbarian invasions of the 5th century AD. But as Will Durand reminds us, the invasions from without only have the power when we are corrupt within. The good person is neither buoyed up by joy nor brought down by misfortune saith Augustine. But I find it hard to cultivate ataxia, so how can it be for a Wall Street trader?
So given this analogy between the city and the human being, I wonder what is the point of the occasional nerve impulses to our legislators and seratonin shots to them in the voting booth. Why not simply externalize each and every listing of the state to the organs to which our constitution has externalized that function (ignoring our rights of suffrage and petition). If I feel myself as a scientist to be a communal externality of our individual curiosities, why not let the politicians be a similar communal externality of our individual deliberative functions?
The answer, of course, is that this brain is on drugs, in particular Special K (Street). And like a human being, the state has the potential to act extremely stupidly when intoxicated and panicked. Indeed, all of us acting extremely stupidly is infinitely more dangerously than one of us acting extremely stupidly.
I think I might have looked at this bailout plan a bit differently if I hadn't just read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novel of Non-Conformity, mutiny, romance, early industrial capitalism, and labor agitation. It's amazing how much globalization shapes a novel written in 1855. But that's the idea. England had advantages in the early Industrial Revolution, but now it faces competition from a growing United States with better soil, cheaper food, easier access to raw materials, and more favorable conditions for immigration. In other words, the United States was the developing country capable of undercutting English textile manufacturers in the world market in a world of much more expensive transportation. Gaskell took a lot of flack from her husband's mill owner parishioners, but she portrays mid 19th century capitalists in a sympathetic light. What's interesting is how Gaskell notices how comfortable the industrial working class is relative to the rural working class. They have furniture, reasonably comfortable lodging, and generally are better fed. Many of them even have substantial savings, completely unthinkable from the rural poor, who seem dependent on the trickle down of ecclesiastical charity. But they are more prone to illness, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and often live just as marginally.
The amazing thing about this novel is that it represents a middle period in the relation between the capitalist manager and the working class man and woman of production. In the early stage, industrial capitalism began in the context of the artisanal workshop emerging from the collective and conservative force of the medieval guild. In this middle stage, the worker has been demoted from a potential master but still remains in intimate contact with the manager whose capital is embodied by the factory, who lives next to the factory, and runs the operations of the factory himself. The increasing globalization of capital (as opposed to the globalization of the market, which is distinct) has eliminated these kinds of relations. If someone in some other city or country manages your factory and "funds" own the capital, the social controls that allow labor and management to have a mutual interest fall away. The capitalism seen in Gaskell is attractive because it is mutualistic. Modern capitalism is feared because of the instances in which it is parasitic.
Many would ask why is it important that capitalism be mutualistic. That's often inefficient. Well, capitalism in a democratic world is only justifiable on two grounds: one is in its aesthetic. In its purest form, capitalism is the self-sufficient and self-defensible person using his or her excess to do or make things that others find "useful" and will gladly provide their excess to obtain. Its eventual end, however, lies in the perpetual excrescence of human existence beyond sufficiency. The pure capitalist exchange requires a weighing of desire, not a weighing of need. The choice of sale or starvation makes a transactional party unfree. Most critiques of capitalism are of its impure form. But in a world of self-defensible and self-sufficient people with desires in proportion to their resource base, capitalism is a beautiful thing and fine director of human curiosity and innovation.
The other value of capitalism lies in its purity hopefully being its aim. In a world of uncertainty and scarcity, capitalism brings technology and a global marketplace, allowing a sort of half-sufficiency, in which the market hopefully compensates for the limitations of our individual economic lives.
Unfortunately, since its inception, capitalism has been perverted by force. The earliest industrial workers were those driven off by enclosure, which took land in which the peasantry had interest through the mixture of their labor with the ground and the aristocracy had interest through their defense of that ground and announced that the capital in that ground would belong to the sword alone. So all of this is to say that I understand the beauty and benefits of libertarianism, especially for Christians, in that there are certain aspects of ancient Israel that seem anarchocapitalist. Unfortunately, we are fallen people who pervert all things with force. And so I lean to the social democratic approach of supporting a variety of strategies to use the force of popular sovereignty and scientific curiosity to encourage local sufficiency and various checks on the activity of capital to ensure that property rights not easily apportioned in a flawed capitalist system become reserved to the people.
Mainly, I take the American approach pioneered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, "While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation." In Taney's case, he was merely arguing that the government could modify exclusive monopolies in the public detriment. I feel free to extend this to any government interference with enterprise tending to the good of the public at large, but generally restricted to "public goods." Public health care management, public utilities, and public transit generally work for me. In World War II, the United States Government had nearly communistic control of factories. They ensured they paid well, though, and directed the excess salary into buying into the war debt. Considering the way defense contractors work now, why can't we have wartime control of those industries all the time? Well, maybe not.
The key is that the left generally likes to repeat the mistake of Marx, which insists that capitalism and private property are so deeply flawed as to be worthy of destruction. Yet private property at least is rather basic to humankind. We are social and political animals but do much better than ants on our own. Adam and Eve chose their downfalls on an individual basis after all.
I think it's much better to think of capitalism as something beautiful and flawed, like a lover with a substance abuse problem. If our love is true, we neither enable them, nor cast them away. We try to get them help when they fall down, but we do let them hit bottom. Both the right and the left like drag us toward class warfare. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to tax $500,000 income individuals and $1,000,000 income couples with a special surtax for ten years to help pay for the bailout. California has a similar surtax. I find these kinds of measures punitive, because it only measures economic activity in terms of income, and it equally punishes and rewards the best and the worst of a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, it would be nearly impossible to implement my perfect tax system (based on ecological economics). Instead, I favor progressive tax rates similar to the 1960s and spending and debt reservice in fixed proportions of GDP, possibly delineated in broad categories. I wish I could do things to bring back the middle phase of capitalism and the conscientious class unity possible between "master and man." But I think the energy issue will take care of that soon enough.
So in the end, I remain opposed to a bailout of the financial system at this stage. Let the toxic debt crash upon the relevant ears and let those unaffected climb to the top of the financial heap. The government seems like it can find buyers for the distressed. And if not, the government should buy them at lower prices in the coming year. I don't imagine it's going to be easy. Bond issues will slow. Credit will be tighter. 20% down payments generally may be required. But this crisis is a crisis of lust and overreaching. Easier credit and lower taxes encouraged irresponsibility of both government and people. In some, it led to desperation. As credit tightens, certain goods will return to reasonable prices. Other goods will seem necessary. From what I can tell, lending to industrial expansion continues apace. If you are willing to change your ways, a new structure of the American economy is coming. But as this economy develops, we are going need a little bit of cash to pay down government debt and create a less energy-intensive infrastructure. And some of that money should go into restructuring housing. I'd like to see the government offering benefits to mortgaged properties that are insulated, put to agricultural use, or divided into multiple family dwellings.
So I have opinions. And if you read carefully enough, you may realize that I am in favor of one drug addict letting another drug addict potentially overdose in order to allow another drug addict to go into treatment, which is often the consequence of analogies in this vale of tears.
So what about our presidential candidates? I'm at least voting for one of them, though I have to admit they're increasingly ridiculous. Just listening to them talk about Russia tonight made me want to scream. No consideration of Russia's strategic position at all. Instead, anyone who opposes people we support hates freedom. No mention of how we're going to be pointing missiles at them from Poland and want all their neighbors to join their military alliance. And I really want someone to ask why we're defending borders drawn by Joseph Stalin.
In both the earthly and heavenly city, the city has an analogy with a human. In the case of the earthly city, we go round about with who among us is what part. In antiquity, the elite were said to be the head of the society and so consumed by the mouth and let the lower classes be the hands to work to feed them. In modern times, the same analogy holds in practice, but the hands and feet now are permitted to send nerve impulses to the brain on occasion and serious doses of neurotransmitters every six years. In the heavenly city, whose only described building is the sanctuary, the analogy is between the city and the God made man, Jesus Christ, who has resurrected the temple of his Body that the whole creation be at peace therein.
Some concern with the heavenly city has seemed appropriate lately. Recall the Collect for Proper 20:
Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things which are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
It helped to think on this this week. The Collect dates from the uneasiness during the era of the barbarian invasions of the 5th century AD. But as Will Durand reminds us, the invasions from without only have the power when we are corrupt within. The good person is neither buoyed up by joy nor brought down by misfortune saith Augustine. But I find it hard to cultivate ataxia, so how can it be for a Wall Street trader?
So given this analogy between the city and the human being, I wonder what is the point of the occasional nerve impulses to our legislators and seratonin shots to them in the voting booth. Why not simply externalize each and every listing of the state to the organs to which our constitution has externalized that function (ignoring our rights of suffrage and petition). If I feel myself as a scientist to be a communal externality of our individual curiosities, why not let the politicians be a similar communal externality of our individual deliberative functions?
The answer, of course, is that this brain is on drugs, in particular Special K (Street). And like a human being, the state has the potential to act extremely stupidly when intoxicated and panicked. Indeed, all of us acting extremely stupidly is infinitely more dangerously than one of us acting extremely stupidly.
I think I might have looked at this bailout plan a bit differently if I hadn't just read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novel of Non-Conformity, mutiny, romance, early industrial capitalism, and labor agitation. It's amazing how much globalization shapes a novel written in 1855. But that's the idea. England had advantages in the early Industrial Revolution, but now it faces competition from a growing United States with better soil, cheaper food, easier access to raw materials, and more favorable conditions for immigration. In other words, the United States was the developing country capable of undercutting English textile manufacturers in the world market in a world of much more expensive transportation. Gaskell took a lot of flack from her husband's mill owner parishioners, but she portrays mid 19th century capitalists in a sympathetic light. What's interesting is how Gaskell notices how comfortable the industrial working class is relative to the rural working class. They have furniture, reasonably comfortable lodging, and generally are better fed. Many of them even have substantial savings, completely unthinkable from the rural poor, who seem dependent on the trickle down of ecclesiastical charity. But they are more prone to illness, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and often live just as marginally.
The amazing thing about this novel is that it represents a middle period in the relation between the capitalist manager and the working class man and woman of production. In the early stage, industrial capitalism began in the context of the artisanal workshop emerging from the collective and conservative force of the medieval guild. In this middle stage, the worker has been demoted from a potential master but still remains in intimate contact with the manager whose capital is embodied by the factory, who lives next to the factory, and runs the operations of the factory himself. The increasing globalization of capital (as opposed to the globalization of the market, which is distinct) has eliminated these kinds of relations. If someone in some other city or country manages your factory and "funds" own the capital, the social controls that allow labor and management to have a mutual interest fall away. The capitalism seen in Gaskell is attractive because it is mutualistic. Modern capitalism is feared because of the instances in which it is parasitic.
Many would ask why is it important that capitalism be mutualistic. That's often inefficient. Well, capitalism in a democratic world is only justifiable on two grounds: one is in its aesthetic. In its purest form, capitalism is the self-sufficient and self-defensible person using his or her excess to do or make things that others find "useful" and will gladly provide their excess to obtain. Its eventual end, however, lies in the perpetual excrescence of human existence beyond sufficiency. The pure capitalist exchange requires a weighing of desire, not a weighing of need. The choice of sale or starvation makes a transactional party unfree. Most critiques of capitalism are of its impure form. But in a world of self-defensible and self-sufficient people with desires in proportion to their resource base, capitalism is a beautiful thing and fine director of human curiosity and innovation.
The other value of capitalism lies in its purity hopefully being its aim. In a world of uncertainty and scarcity, capitalism brings technology and a global marketplace, allowing a sort of half-sufficiency, in which the market hopefully compensates for the limitations of our individual economic lives.
Unfortunately, since its inception, capitalism has been perverted by force. The earliest industrial workers were those driven off by enclosure, which took land in which the peasantry had interest through the mixture of their labor with the ground and the aristocracy had interest through their defense of that ground and announced that the capital in that ground would belong to the sword alone. So all of this is to say that I understand the beauty and benefits of libertarianism, especially for Christians, in that there are certain aspects of ancient Israel that seem anarchocapitalist. Unfortunately, we are fallen people who pervert all things with force. And so I lean to the social democratic approach of supporting a variety of strategies to use the force of popular sovereignty and scientific curiosity to encourage local sufficiency and various checks on the activity of capital to ensure that property rights not easily apportioned in a flawed capitalist system become reserved to the people.
Mainly, I take the American approach pioneered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, "While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation." In Taney's case, he was merely arguing that the government could modify exclusive monopolies in the public detriment. I feel free to extend this to any government interference with enterprise tending to the good of the public at large, but generally restricted to "public goods." Public health care management, public utilities, and public transit generally work for me. In World War II, the United States Government had nearly communistic control of factories. They ensured they paid well, though, and directed the excess salary into buying into the war debt. Considering the way defense contractors work now, why can't we have wartime control of those industries all the time? Well, maybe not.
The key is that the left generally likes to repeat the mistake of Marx, which insists that capitalism and private property are so deeply flawed as to be worthy of destruction. Yet private property at least is rather basic to humankind. We are social and political animals but do much better than ants on our own. Adam and Eve chose their downfalls on an individual basis after all.
I think it's much better to think of capitalism as something beautiful and flawed, like a lover with a substance abuse problem. If our love is true, we neither enable them, nor cast them away. We try to get them help when they fall down, but we do let them hit bottom. Both the right and the left like drag us toward class warfare. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to tax $500,000 income individuals and $1,000,000 income couples with a special surtax for ten years to help pay for the bailout. California has a similar surtax. I find these kinds of measures punitive, because it only measures economic activity in terms of income, and it equally punishes and rewards the best and the worst of a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, it would be nearly impossible to implement my perfect tax system (based on ecological economics). Instead, I favor progressive tax rates similar to the 1960s and spending and debt reservice in fixed proportions of GDP, possibly delineated in broad categories. I wish I could do things to bring back the middle phase of capitalism and the conscientious class unity possible between "master and man." But I think the energy issue will take care of that soon enough.
So in the end, I remain opposed to a bailout of the financial system at this stage. Let the toxic debt crash upon the relevant ears and let those unaffected climb to the top of the financial heap. The government seems like it can find buyers for the distressed. And if not, the government should buy them at lower prices in the coming year. I don't imagine it's going to be easy. Bond issues will slow. Credit will be tighter. 20% down payments generally may be required. But this crisis is a crisis of lust and overreaching. Easier credit and lower taxes encouraged irresponsibility of both government and people. In some, it led to desperation. As credit tightens, certain goods will return to reasonable prices. Other goods will seem necessary. From what I can tell, lending to industrial expansion continues apace. If you are willing to change your ways, a new structure of the American economy is coming. But as this economy develops, we are going need a little bit of cash to pay down government debt and create a less energy-intensive infrastructure. And some of that money should go into restructuring housing. I'd like to see the government offering benefits to mortgaged properties that are insulated, put to agricultural use, or divided into multiple family dwellings.
So I have opinions. And if you read carefully enough, you may realize that I am in favor of one drug addict letting another drug addict potentially overdose in order to allow another drug addict to go into treatment, which is often the consequence of analogies in this vale of tears.
So what about our presidential candidates? I'm at least voting for one of them, though I have to admit they're increasingly ridiculous. Just listening to them talk about Russia tonight made me want to scream. No consideration of Russia's strategic position at all. Instead, anyone who opposes people we support hates freedom. No mention of how we're going to be pointing missiles at them from Poland and want all their neighbors to join their military alliance. And I really want someone to ask why we're defending borders drawn by Joseph Stalin.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Things Anglicans Like: Iberian Fortified Wines
One usually does not associate Episcopalians with temperance. As the old joke goes, "Whenever two or three are gathered together, there is a fifth." And while there is something to be said for the divine favor that smiles on "wine that gladdens the heart of man," our fallen natures and imperfect bodies lead us to excess and genuine illness and addiction. Many of our last generation of priests were alcoholics. Many of our present generation are the children of alcoholics.
But when Anglicans aren't dealing with addiction and broken family systems, they probably need a drink, and not just a beer, despite Mother England's reputation as a land of beers and ciders. If we're talking Anglican booze, we're talking Iberian fortified wines: port, Madeira, and sherry. I don't know who first thought to mix brandy with red wine, but the English clearly loved it. And let's not forget the white version: the sack that Shakespeare writes about. Just the other day, I was buying a bottle of port as a gift for a non-Anglican Kiwi friend when I see my Anglo-Baptist Rector just behind me in line. He asks in his Cotton Kingdom accent, "Have a night of drinking ahead of you?" Not a bad guess, just a wrong one. After all, I'm a cradle Episcopalian. I've been a member of one parish where we'll serve sherry to you after Eucharist every Sunday of the year. And let's not forget how many parishes we'll do so at Eucharist as well. All during college, the Chaplain consecrated tawny port. I was fairly vexed he never mixed it with water, but don't most other catholic churches insist on "pure, fermented juice of the grape—good and wholesome," including the Church of England? Does wine mixed with grape distillate count?
But when Anglicans aren't dealing with addiction and broken family systems, they probably need a drink, and not just a beer, despite Mother England's reputation as a land of beers and ciders. If we're talking Anglican booze, we're talking Iberian fortified wines: port, Madeira, and sherry. I don't know who first thought to mix brandy with red wine, but the English clearly loved it. And let's not forget the white version: the sack that Shakespeare writes about. Just the other day, I was buying a bottle of port as a gift for a non-Anglican Kiwi friend when I see my Anglo-Baptist Rector just behind me in line. He asks in his Cotton Kingdom accent, "Have a night of drinking ahead of you?" Not a bad guess, just a wrong one. After all, I'm a cradle Episcopalian. I've been a member of one parish where we'll serve sherry to you after Eucharist every Sunday of the year. And let's not forget how many parishes we'll do so at Eucharist as well. All during college, the Chaplain consecrated tawny port. I was fairly vexed he never mixed it with water, but don't most other catholic churches insist on "pure, fermented juice of the grape—good and wholesome," including the Church of England? Does wine mixed with grape distillate count?
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Christianity and the Children of Her Handmaid
Derek of Haligweorc just reposted an old essay of his on the intellectual collision of Christianity and the natural sciences with the preface that he tires of the collision being reconciled by two options: either the rejection of doctrinal orthodoxy or the rejection of the most basic and well-tested hypotheses of the natural sciences. Casual readers might think he was arguing for something on the lines of Gould's much vaunted and much critiqued Non-Overlapping Magisteria, but I think it's fairer to say that he expects Christian doctrine to inform how Christians put science and technology to use. As a reading of Job 38-41 might indicate, God syrely considers natural science and technology to constitute a gradual encroachment on his dominion. Christians understandably might think that there are doctrinal limitations on the extent of that dominion, especially with respect to the dominion of action (as opposed to knowledge unless the act of investigation is itself encroachment). For instance, some of my present research is covered by Job 38:35 (and some of it by other verses), but I'm far more interested in lightning telling me about itself rather than putting it to use myself. I'm rather wary of weather modification, both on practical and theological grounds.
Thus, Derek, I think, expects Christian doctrine and the natural sciences to be complementary magisteria and not merely in morals. It is C.S. Lewis' observation that the miracles of Christ involve the slowing and speeding up of the natural order rather than its distortion or destruction. Water under the proper conditions can become wine. Olive oil not so much. Doctrine and science are at least complementary in this sense. Without "the rules that govern the heavens or [those] that determine the laws of nature on the earth" (Job 38:33), which are the same rules, there would be no room for signs and wonders, for we would have no null hypotheses when faced with a personal and self-revelatory God. There would be no distinction between reproducible and irreproducible phenomena nor between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypotheses. In addition, Christian theology long has recognized analogy or even homology between the Divine Word in Christ, in Scripture, and in Creation. This pseudohypostatic union presupposes a harmony between them. The question of Christian theology at this point in history is not the substance of this proposition but its details.
In some sense, the conflict between Christianity and the natural sciences should not be unexpected. Natural science, as we know it, comes out of two great intellectual stirrings in western Europe: the post-Reformation Enlightenment (Newtonian physics, non-alchemical chemistry, and Linnaean biology) and the post-Revolutionary era (modern physics and evolutionary biology). Newton was one of great early Unitarians and Einstein was a major socialist activist. Their religious and political beliefs integrated well with their physical hypotheses. Newton argued stenuously with Leibniz against the importance of relationship and harmony in physical systems and instead stressed deterministic cause and effect to the extent that the close of Book III of the Principia was one of the great Deist manifestoes. Newton's physics allows a world not continually held in being by "the Love that moves, the sun, the stars" as Dante puts it but one that starts like a pinball machine without any love being required. Einstein's inclination toward socialism familiarized him with egalitarian thinking that suggested there were no privileged reference frames in physics.
Thus, when Christianity subsumed Greco-Roman philosophy by late antiquity, it sowed the seeds of a new philosophy that spurred a great number of viable physical hypotheses and axiomatic principles that shape modern natural science. The so-called central dogma of physics, which my more moderate agnostic and atheist friends will admit is an act of faith, states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. While generally treated as axiomatic, it is so far a very well-proven hypothesis. Yet its initial success depended on another act of faith: one in a God who guaranteed natural law by His almighty power, who had made both the heavens and the earth. This wasn't exactly the majority report in Christian doctrine before Newton, but when presented with evidence of corruption and change in the deep heavens, adaptation was inevitable. And the central dogma of physics is far more harmonious with Christian doctrine than the Aristotelian gradient theories about natural law. The progressive nature of sacred history surely inspired 19th century thermodynamics with its heat death of the universe and forward arrow of time.
In fact, I have seen arguments against the conclusions of the IPCC Reports on a similar basis, that the notion of humans progressively bringing themselves to apocalyptic catastrophe through sin is a doctrinal one, not justified by scientific evidence, which for the authors in question primarily describes cyclical change. The fact that the first head of the IPCC was Sir John Houghton, one of the UK's leading public Evangelicals (Anglican) (and a fine scientist), lends the necessary credence to this particular conspiracy theory. Global warming thus is a Christian Tory plot, which would be funny except that the editorial pages of Britain's newspapers often contain garbled versions of this particular fairy story.
The point is here not that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus etc. have not or cannot contribute to the natural sciences or their general intellectual direction. They have and will. The natural sciences owes a debt to the mathematics of Baghdad and the mystics of the Kabbalah. And the originally Christian egalitarianism and ontological universality that consumes the West makes it impossible to say that there is a human being who cannot be a natural scientist. Science is as free and intrinsically human as salvation. But Christian doctrine, by positing a God-created reality and a pseudohypostatic union between the process rather than the substance of the real, was well positioned to create the natural science we know today. Indeed, we are obsessed with the physics of our sacred rites (q.v. transubstantiation) and their resultant chemistry (transubstantiation again, ontological change in Baptism, Holy Orders etc.) like no other religion on earth. Though, of course, some of us would prefer we stop obsessing about these subjects.
One intermediate word about quantum physics: the fundamental idea of quantum physics is the reduction of laws to probabilities at small scales. Derek is right that it is going to take some time for this idea to percolate into our general cognition. If it ever does. As I pointed out to two of my colleagues recently, though, quantum inflation satisfies creation ex nihilo , though creation by quantum inflation is highly troublesome to many because it does not imply God's love, omnipotence, intelligence, or coherence, only His randomness. But after all, this why we have Scripture and the Creeds. See what I mean about complimentary magisteria.
Now we come to how the pseudohypostatic union actually might work. The first solutions involve privileging one entity over the other. Most obvious is Fundamentalist Christianity and its backsliding cousins along the spectrum, which support young earth creationism. They are privileging a particular reading of the Book of Genesis over Creation, not only in attempt to maintain the inerrancy of Scripture but a very narrow soteriology (how does the Fall happen???). Neglecting arguments that scientists are godless frauds, their most interesting arguments posit inconsistencies in special relativity and atomic physics that suggest the central dogma of physics is historically invalid. The laws of physics 6,000 years ago were different than than today. Thus, young earth creationism is not merely a conflict between science and religion but really a complex panoply of doctrinal disputes within Christianity itself. And it would really be helpful if this were more public knowledge. Liberal Christianity often becomes the opposite extreme. I wonder what would happen if I told certain preachers, "I'm a very well-educated scientist, who finds the NT miracles quite plausible if and only if Jesus is the Son of God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Otherwise, I'm quite skeptical."
In the miscellaneous category, we have some conservative Catholics who think that Aristotle is still right, at least on special occasions. Yes, they exist. Or else this article makes no sense whatsoever .
Today, I mentioned in comments at Haligweorc that there were three Anglican options I knew of: John Donne, Joseph Butler, and Alister McGrath. I'm sure there are hints in other theologians of other or similar options, but these were the three that popped into my head. The key works are Donne's Essay on Divinity (note that this is not poetry but still quite poetic in places), Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (required reading for many 19th century American college students, which is why I read it as a student of philosophical curricula of that era), and McGrath's A Scientific Theology (whose epitome, The Science of God I have stuck amidst Bible, BCP, Hymnal, and Bede's Homilies on the Gospels). I don't have suitable access to the first two, though Analogy should be online.
Donne's harmony is a difficult one, possibly because the work seems addressed to particular viewpoints in early Jacobean London. On one hand, he quotes a very many chronologies for the world from a variety of sources (and clearly he hadn't heard of the 9 trillion year Hindu chronologies) but asserts that the Holy Scriptures are reliable in saying that the world began with creation by God. We are not in endless recurrence. But later it seems possible that he only can say there is uncertainty in the age of the Earth because there are inherent uncertainties in the interpretation of the Genesis chronology, for he says that if the numbers in the Bible are not right, we have no confidence in God's promises. My guess is that he is poking fun at an extreme Puritan position without directly angering the Puritans in question, whom he considered too obtuse to get the joke. But this passage appears to be an argument for non-literal interpretation. And if I am right, his general position is that apparent Biblical errancy relative to Creation (and history) must be considered to be of mystical significance.
Donne's position is unsatisfactory. Perhaps, AKMA's "Signifying Theology": the epilogue to his recent Faithful Interpretation is most convincing in this respect. AKMA sees harmony between theology and exegesis in Christ, who literally expounds God through every aspect of His life. AKMA has a variety of rather technical and particular things to draw from this insight but what concerns us is this passage:
And indeed AKMA's primary inspirations, Maurice de la Taille and the Gospel of John, are good places to look to understand the deep importance of the pseudohypostatic union I keep positing. But the key point is that Donne's position logically might be taken to the extreme that the Gospels (particularly the miracles and the Great Acts of Resurrection and Ascension) are stories about what Jesus meant rather than stories about things that Jesus did that expound His life in God. But AKMA and de la Taille warn us otherwise. If we expect actual encounter with the Living God in our own lives through the conduit to Christ in the sanctuary not made with human hands, we must expect that Jesus' life was filled with genuine encounter between the world and God through mystery and miracle. This is a sentiment as old as the Apostle who warned us, "If Jesus is not risen, then we are most pitiable." But AKMA speaks even more deeply to me.
Butler, writing a hundred years later than Donne post Newton, argues that there is a religion that may be empirically inferred from nature that becomes corrupted by our fallen human nature to the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity. He even reasons out their basic principles such as the immortality of the soul and a future system of rewards and punishments. He then argues that Christianity is the revealed religion most consistent with these natural principles. Butler's general intellectual orientation may appear familiar. Not only is Butler a key part of the natural theological tradition that influenced Darwin and which he only rejected in part. (I have a lovely essay in college on the subject.), but the eventual goal of the Intelligent Design movement is a Butlerian argument, in which mankind is the culmination of a particular kind of designer, whose characteristics may be derived from biological and physical creation, and who is most likely the Christian God (and not Allah or an extraterrestrial or a Mouse and Disco Ball or an entity with Noodly Appendages). The basic argument itself may not be original to Butler. Alister McGrath cites a slightly earlier work of Thomas Tindal in the same vein. But it had many refiners and imitators, including early scientists of importance such as Joseph Priestley and William Whewell.
Butler's position is problematic in that it insists on an empirically derivable religion consistent with Christian truth. It puts too far to the side questions of why such a religion can be recovered in a fallen world, limited both by our own fallenness and the potential fallenness of nature and why Christianity should be harmonious with a religion meant for man before the Fall when the Fall and the Incarnation is generally assumed to change God's original plans for humanity. So far intelligent design has fallen on the central dogma of physics and an inherent notion of divine economy as William Whewell puts it in his Bridgewater Treatise and Darwin quotes,
Intelligent design still has a theological case to make, not just a scientific one. It must explain why and to what extent the world was punctuated by such insulated interpositions of Divine power before the Fall. It also must explain what role revelation plays in salvation history in this case and how design is maintained in a fallen world, but this juncture brings us to McGrath.
McGrath is a third option and much of the first paragraphs of this essay are shaped by his position, though I held much of it well before I read anything of his. A priest friend of mine in high school was McGrath's student at Wycliffe Hall, but I have had to infer this in later life from an offhand comment that the head of his theological college had two doctorates in theology and (bio)physics. McGrath observes the pseudohypostatic union, "the same divine rationality that that is embedded in creation is embodied in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate [emphasis his]" (q.v. Thomas F. Torrance...or Bonaventure, Augustine, Cappadocian Fathers) and concludes that Christian theology is by first principles required to be in dialogue with the natural sciences. Since he's at Wycliffe Hall, we can assume that the analogy/homology with Scripture is given. (He mentions it every once in a while). And the rest of the work is trying to explain how that dialogue might take place procedurally. Since I am quite exhausted, I'll leave those details to my next entry.
So until next time, the Holy Brothers leave you with U2:
Thus, Derek, I think, expects Christian doctrine and the natural sciences to be complementary magisteria and not merely in morals. It is C.S. Lewis' observation that the miracles of Christ involve the slowing and speeding up of the natural order rather than its distortion or destruction. Water under the proper conditions can become wine. Olive oil not so much. Doctrine and science are at least complementary in this sense. Without "the rules that govern the heavens or [those] that determine the laws of nature on the earth" (Job 38:33), which are the same rules, there would be no room for signs and wonders, for we would have no null hypotheses when faced with a personal and self-revelatory God. There would be no distinction between reproducible and irreproducible phenomena nor between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypotheses. In addition, Christian theology long has recognized analogy or even homology between the Divine Word in Christ, in Scripture, and in Creation. This pseudohypostatic union presupposes a harmony between them. The question of Christian theology at this point in history is not the substance of this proposition but its details.
In some sense, the conflict between Christianity and the natural sciences should not be unexpected. Natural science, as we know it, comes out of two great intellectual stirrings in western Europe: the post-Reformation Enlightenment (Newtonian physics, non-alchemical chemistry, and Linnaean biology) and the post-Revolutionary era (modern physics and evolutionary biology). Newton was one of great early Unitarians and Einstein was a major socialist activist. Their religious and political beliefs integrated well with their physical hypotheses. Newton argued stenuously with Leibniz against the importance of relationship and harmony in physical systems and instead stressed deterministic cause and effect to the extent that the close of Book III of the Principia was one of the great Deist manifestoes. Newton's physics allows a world not continually held in being by "the Love that moves, the sun, the stars" as Dante puts it but one that starts like a pinball machine without any love being required. Einstein's inclination toward socialism familiarized him with egalitarian thinking that suggested there were no privileged reference frames in physics.
Thus, when Christianity subsumed Greco-Roman philosophy by late antiquity, it sowed the seeds of a new philosophy that spurred a great number of viable physical hypotheses and axiomatic principles that shape modern natural science. The so-called central dogma of physics, which my more moderate agnostic and atheist friends will admit is an act of faith, states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. While generally treated as axiomatic, it is so far a very well-proven hypothesis. Yet its initial success depended on another act of faith: one in a God who guaranteed natural law by His almighty power, who had made both the heavens and the earth. This wasn't exactly the majority report in Christian doctrine before Newton, but when presented with evidence of corruption and change in the deep heavens, adaptation was inevitable. And the central dogma of physics is far more harmonious with Christian doctrine than the Aristotelian gradient theories about natural law. The progressive nature of sacred history surely inspired 19th century thermodynamics with its heat death of the universe and forward arrow of time.
In fact, I have seen arguments against the conclusions of the IPCC Reports on a similar basis, that the notion of humans progressively bringing themselves to apocalyptic catastrophe through sin is a doctrinal one, not justified by scientific evidence, which for the authors in question primarily describes cyclical change. The fact that the first head of the IPCC was Sir John Houghton, one of the UK's leading public Evangelicals (Anglican) (and a fine scientist), lends the necessary credence to this particular conspiracy theory. Global warming thus is a Christian Tory plot, which would be funny except that the editorial pages of Britain's newspapers often contain garbled versions of this particular fairy story.
The point is here not that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus etc. have not or cannot contribute to the natural sciences or their general intellectual direction. They have and will. The natural sciences owes a debt to the mathematics of Baghdad and the mystics of the Kabbalah. And the originally Christian egalitarianism and ontological universality that consumes the West makes it impossible to say that there is a human being who cannot be a natural scientist. Science is as free and intrinsically human as salvation. But Christian doctrine, by positing a God-created reality and a pseudohypostatic union between the process rather than the substance of the real, was well positioned to create the natural science we know today. Indeed, we are obsessed with the physics of our sacred rites (q.v. transubstantiation) and their resultant chemistry (transubstantiation again, ontological change in Baptism, Holy Orders etc.) like no other religion on earth. Though, of course, some of us would prefer we stop obsessing about these subjects.
One intermediate word about quantum physics: the fundamental idea of quantum physics is the reduction of laws to probabilities at small scales. Derek is right that it is going to take some time for this idea to percolate into our general cognition. If it ever does. As I pointed out to two of my colleagues recently, though, quantum inflation satisfies creation ex nihilo , though creation by quantum inflation is highly troublesome to many because it does not imply God's love, omnipotence, intelligence, or coherence, only His randomness. But after all, this why we have Scripture and the Creeds. See what I mean about complimentary magisteria.
Now we come to how the pseudohypostatic union actually might work. The first solutions involve privileging one entity over the other. Most obvious is Fundamentalist Christianity and its backsliding cousins along the spectrum, which support young earth creationism. They are privileging a particular reading of the Book of Genesis over Creation, not only in attempt to maintain the inerrancy of Scripture but a very narrow soteriology (how does the Fall happen???). Neglecting arguments that scientists are godless frauds, their most interesting arguments posit inconsistencies in special relativity and atomic physics that suggest the central dogma of physics is historically invalid. The laws of physics 6,000 years ago were different than than today. Thus, young earth creationism is not merely a conflict between science and religion but really a complex panoply of doctrinal disputes within Christianity itself. And it would really be helpful if this were more public knowledge. Liberal Christianity often becomes the opposite extreme. I wonder what would happen if I told certain preachers, "I'm a very well-educated scientist, who finds the NT miracles quite plausible if and only if Jesus is the Son of God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Otherwise, I'm quite skeptical."
In the miscellaneous category, we have some conservative Catholics who think that Aristotle is still right, at least on special occasions. Yes, they exist. Or else this article makes no sense whatsoever .
Today, I mentioned in comments at Haligweorc that there were three Anglican options I knew of: John Donne, Joseph Butler, and Alister McGrath. I'm sure there are hints in other theologians of other or similar options, but these were the three that popped into my head. The key works are Donne's Essay on Divinity (note that this is not poetry but still quite poetic in places), Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (required reading for many 19th century American college students, which is why I read it as a student of philosophical curricula of that era), and McGrath's A Scientific Theology (whose epitome, The Science of God I have stuck amidst Bible, BCP, Hymnal, and Bede's Homilies on the Gospels). I don't have suitable access to the first two, though Analogy should be online.
Donne's harmony is a difficult one, possibly because the work seems addressed to particular viewpoints in early Jacobean London. On one hand, he quotes a very many chronologies for the world from a variety of sources (and clearly he hadn't heard of the 9 trillion year Hindu chronologies) but asserts that the Holy Scriptures are reliable in saying that the world began with creation by God. We are not in endless recurrence. But later it seems possible that he only can say there is uncertainty in the age of the Earth because there are inherent uncertainties in the interpretation of the Genesis chronology, for he says that if the numbers in the Bible are not right, we have no confidence in God's promises. My guess is that he is poking fun at an extreme Puritan position without directly angering the Puritans in question, whom he considered too obtuse to get the joke. But this passage appears to be an argument for non-literal interpretation. And if I am right, his general position is that apparent Biblical errancy relative to Creation (and history) must be considered to be of mystical significance.
Donne's position is unsatisfactory. Perhaps, AKMA's "Signifying Theology": the epilogue to his recent Faithful Interpretation is most convincing in this respect. AKMA sees harmony between theology and exegesis in Christ, who literally expounds God through every aspect of His life. AKMA has a variety of rather technical and particular things to draw from this insight but what concerns us is this passage:
...but it is the recollection of the unanimous teaching of Scripture, the saints, and reason itself that the Truth transforms lives that acknowledge its truth.
Finally, the signifying practices to which exegesis and theology lend complementary energies may arguably point to a consummation in the church's signifying practice par excellence: the Eucharist, which is 'an essential action,' not 'an isolated presence or merely illustrative symbol.'"
And indeed AKMA's primary inspirations, Maurice de la Taille and the Gospel of John, are good places to look to understand the deep importance of the pseudohypostatic union I keep positing. But the key point is that Donne's position logically might be taken to the extreme that the Gospels (particularly the miracles and the Great Acts of Resurrection and Ascension) are stories about what Jesus meant rather than stories about things that Jesus did that expound His life in God. But AKMA and de la Taille warn us otherwise. If we expect actual encounter with the Living God in our own lives through the conduit to Christ in the sanctuary not made with human hands, we must expect that Jesus' life was filled with genuine encounter between the world and God through mystery and miracle. This is a sentiment as old as the Apostle who warned us, "If Jesus is not risen, then we are most pitiable." But AKMA speaks even more deeply to me.
Butler, writing a hundred years later than Donne post Newton, argues that there is a religion that may be empirically inferred from nature that becomes corrupted by our fallen human nature to the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity. He even reasons out their basic principles such as the immortality of the soul and a future system of rewards and punishments. He then argues that Christianity is the revealed religion most consistent with these natural principles. Butler's general intellectual orientation may appear familiar. Not only is Butler a key part of the natural theological tradition that influenced Darwin and which he only rejected in part. (I have a lovely essay in college on the subject.), but the eventual goal of the Intelligent Design movement is a Butlerian argument, in which mankind is the culmination of a particular kind of designer, whose characteristics may be derived from biological and physical creation, and who is most likely the Christian God (and not Allah or an extraterrestrial or a Mouse and Disco Ball or an entity with Noodly Appendages). The basic argument itself may not be original to Butler. Alister McGrath cites a slightly earlier work of Thomas Tindal in the same vein. But it had many refiners and imitators, including early scientists of importance such as Joseph Priestley and William Whewell.
Butler's position is problematic in that it insists on an empirically derivable religion consistent with Christian truth. It puts too far to the side questions of why such a religion can be recovered in a fallen world, limited both by our own fallenness and the potential fallenness of nature and why Christianity should be harmonious with a religion meant for man before the Fall when the Fall and the Incarnation is generally assumed to change God's original plans for humanity. So far intelligent design has fallen on the central dogma of physics and an inherent notion of divine economy as William Whewell puts it in his Bridgewater Treatise and Darwin quotes,
"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."
Intelligent design still has a theological case to make, not just a scientific one. It must explain why and to what extent the world was punctuated by such insulated interpositions of Divine power before the Fall. It also must explain what role revelation plays in salvation history in this case and how design is maintained in a fallen world, but this juncture brings us to McGrath.
McGrath is a third option and much of the first paragraphs of this essay are shaped by his position, though I held much of it well before I read anything of his. A priest friend of mine in high school was McGrath's student at Wycliffe Hall, but I have had to infer this in later life from an offhand comment that the head of his theological college had two doctorates in theology and (bio)physics. McGrath observes the pseudohypostatic union, "the same divine rationality that that is embedded in creation is embodied in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate [emphasis his]" (q.v. Thomas F. Torrance...or Bonaventure, Augustine, Cappadocian Fathers) and concludes that Christian theology is by first principles required to be in dialogue with the natural sciences. Since he's at Wycliffe Hall, we can assume that the analogy/homology with Scripture is given. (He mentions it every once in a while). And the rest of the work is trying to explain how that dialogue might take place procedurally. Since I am quite exhausted, I'll leave those details to my next entry.
So until next time, the Holy Brothers leave you with U2:
You speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
But I'm waiting on the crumbs from your table
Monday, August 25, 2008
Scattered Thoughts from A Quiet Summer
I started reviewing the events planned for the next few months in my head this afternoon.
There's the big meeting of my current project in mid-September followed by the day dedicated to planning for the future of a certain program of planetary exploration.
There's another meeting about atmospheric modeling of that certain planet up in the Silicon Valley at the end of September.
I have to give a talk in these parts at the end of October.
And it's a good thing I'm in town, because I agreed to help with baptismal preparation that month, too, and there's a very nice young adult Bible study planned during the same time. One thing has changed at ILEOS during my time: the membership between 18-39 has grown by leaps and bounds to at least 1200!
Then I have a big sub-sub-field conference in November and the big field conference in December before I head home for Christmas.
And since a presidential election will intervene (and Kunstler is claiming the second Great Depression will start about Halloween), my life may just hit the mean for excitement.
And September draws near and with it, the start of yet another academic year, the first year in which I will not be a student in the same way I've been one for twenty years. There'll be papers and oral presentations and hours and days spent in computer programming and library research. But no homework, tests, exams, and grades. The first day of classes will not be a day of new beginnings, but merely another day at work and its own occasional excitements, those days in which as Susan Stewart writes in "The Owl" in her new collection, Red Rover , "...the circuit of the world/ belies the chaos of its forms--(the kind/of thing astronomers/look down to write/in books)." (Stewart is an acquaintance...and possibly her editor, too, but it's a good collection...about how children's games presage adult foolishness).
I wish I had something edifying to say, but the common company I share with many of you is the rhythm of the Office: a daily look at a quirky book. What are we to make of Israel's obsession with worshipping ephods? Could early Israelite religion have considered the ephod to be the manifestation of the Divine Presence? And what are we to make of the priest-stealing Danites? Whatever the significance of these incidents, I am looking forward to Job: the book that more than any other in the Old Testament takes us outside the particular obsessions of Israel to the general condition of both Jew and Gentile. Indeed, it is the book Tom Paine attributed to some unknown goy. But I think it's instead a work of the Diaspora, a meditation on the exilic misfortune as part of general misfortune: a minority report on both the uniqueness of Israel and the significance of her sin and a reproach to the reforms of Ezra. And when God and Job's author finished the work surely He said, "soon comes the time for me to be incarnate within the circles of the world. Now is the time for the Messiah." Oh, and I always do appreciate Saul living the death and resurrection of Jesus in his blindness. Thomas just had to see, but Saul was so pig-headed, he had to experience.
There's the big meeting of my current project in mid-September followed by the day dedicated to planning for the future of a certain program of planetary exploration.
There's another meeting about atmospheric modeling of that certain planet up in the Silicon Valley at the end of September.
I have to give a talk in these parts at the end of October.
And it's a good thing I'm in town, because I agreed to help with baptismal preparation that month, too, and there's a very nice young adult Bible study planned during the same time. One thing has changed at ILEOS during my time: the membership between 18-39 has grown by leaps and bounds to at least 1200!
Then I have a big sub-sub-field conference in November and the big field conference in December before I head home for Christmas.
And since a presidential election will intervene (and Kunstler is claiming the second Great Depression will start about Halloween), my life may just hit the mean for excitement.
And September draws near and with it, the start of yet another academic year, the first year in which I will not be a student in the same way I've been one for twenty years. There'll be papers and oral presentations and hours and days spent in computer programming and library research. But no homework, tests, exams, and grades. The first day of classes will not be a day of new beginnings, but merely another day at work and its own occasional excitements, those days in which as Susan Stewart writes in "The Owl" in her new collection, Red Rover , "...the circuit of the world/ belies the chaos of its forms--(the kind/of thing astronomers/look down to write/in books)." (Stewart is an acquaintance...and possibly her editor, too, but it's a good collection...about how children's games presage adult foolishness).
I wish I had something edifying to say, but the common company I share with many of you is the rhythm of the Office: a daily look at a quirky book. What are we to make of Israel's obsession with worshipping ephods? Could early Israelite religion have considered the ephod to be the manifestation of the Divine Presence? And what are we to make of the priest-stealing Danites? Whatever the significance of these incidents, I am looking forward to Job: the book that more than any other in the Old Testament takes us outside the particular obsessions of Israel to the general condition of both Jew and Gentile. Indeed, it is the book Tom Paine attributed to some unknown goy. But I think it's instead a work of the Diaspora, a meditation on the exilic misfortune as part of general misfortune: a minority report on both the uniqueness of Israel and the significance of her sin and a reproach to the reforms of Ezra. And when God and Job's author finished the work surely He said, "soon comes the time for me to be incarnate within the circles of the world. Now is the time for the Messiah." Oh, and I always do appreciate Saul living the death and resurrection of Jesus in his blindness. Thomas just had to see, but Saul was so pig-headed, he had to experience.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
At A Party
CS: So you're an actor?
NA: Well, I majored in religious studies.
CS: Oh, I know a lot of religious studies majors from my time at [alma mater].
NA: Yeah, alma mater has a good divinity program. But I'm trying acting out, but I could do religious studies again, probably teach.
CS: Really? What are your research interests?
NA: Well, my thesis was about reconciliation and the Anglican Communion...
CS: Um, I'm going to have to keep myself from talking to you for the rest of the night.
Anyway, NA may show up at ILEOS. We ended up talking Christology and Job for a while. And he's read Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex . But I tuckered myself out dancing. It was a party, after all.
NA: Well, I majored in religious studies.
CS: Oh, I know a lot of religious studies majors from my time at [alma mater].
NA: Yeah, alma mater has a good divinity program. But I'm trying acting out, but I could do religious studies again, probably teach.
CS: Really? What are your research interests?
NA: Well, my thesis was about reconciliation and the Anglican Communion...
CS: Um, I'm going to have to keep myself from talking to you for the rest of the night.
Anyway, NA may show up at ILEOS. We ended up talking Christology and Job for a while. And he's read Countryman's Dirt, Greed, and Sex . But I tuckered myself out dancing. It was a party, after all.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
The Local Big City Police Chief
So I saw this story today . The last graph made me think of a story in the LA Times mentioned by Getreligion.
The most interesting part is that Bratton clearly thinks that Lohan's relationship with Ronson is a stabilizing influence, which is entirely consistent with his support for gay marriage. Imagine that.
In other news, the only moratorium I want to see from Lambeth is a moratorium on reports and covenants and agreements, unless the agreement requires bishops who want to intervene in other dioceses to have a meal with the diocesan bishop in question.
The most interesting part is that Bratton clearly thinks that Lohan's relationship with Ronson is a stabilizing influence, which is entirely consistent with his support for gay marriage. Imagine that.
In other news, the only moratorium I want to see from Lambeth is a moratorium on reports and covenants and agreements, unless the agreement requires bishops who want to intervene in other dioceses to have a meal with the diocesan bishop in question.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Poetry Jam Wrap-Up
Let us begin with a little-known fact about Caelius Spinator, he was the only white person in his Montessori class and the only white male in the entire school. I do not say this to claim I transcend race or am enlightened about race or any other egocentric white liberal fantasy about American racial politics. No, I'm only mentioning this because I've always found being in the minority in a temporary and local sense is highly educational. And the first thing I learned was to keep my head down. To be honest, the only thing I remember from Montessori school is the times tables and an extremely mangled version of Jehovah's Witness theology that involves some small child confusing the word "saint" with "Satan."
My present city is extremely racially divided. My institution sits near extremely wealthy, almost completely white neighborhoods, not far from the excellent local community college, whose student body is mostly African-American and Latino. My institution has about as many African-Americans as I can count on one hand, possibly more. It is a world-renowned institution. I have asked someone familiar with undergraduate admissions, who informed me that it is estimated that less than 700 African-Americans each year in the entire country are qualified to be admitted to my institution and almost all of them will choose Ivy League schools because of their closer connections to power etc. Lowering admissions standards for these students would doom them to misery and failure. I was admitted to my institution as an undergraduate. I wonder if I was qualified. The low diversity of my institution in this particular respect says to me something about the failure of America to educate all of her children according to their aptitude. I'm happy to see that campus is more diverse in the summer, thanks to the institution's programs to bring minority students from high schools and other colleges to the institution for enrichment and research experience. But I spend most of my time in a world mainly dominated by white and Chinese males.
So this evening I went north to a hair salon on the border between the wealthy and mostly white section of town and the impoverished and mostly non-white side of town. And here, too, I was the only white male until a homeless man I know from church entered and discovered that the race now finally was between Obama and McCain. Living proof that the sermons at my church are not all about presidential politics.
So I was first on the bill, being introduced by a local talk radio personality (who makes his living I suspect in comedy). I surprised everyone by reading one short poem and was asked, "Is that it?" I have a rule not to read more than twenty lines or so at a time, since a disastrous reading of my John Merton and the Weight of the World during my senior year in high school, which while a credible attempt to imitate the alliterative meters common in Anglo-Saxon poetry, is a bit tiring to the ear. But one lady in the audience pointed out that this was an important issue.
And then it became a poetry jam proper. One young man wrote a beautiful love poem to "spoken word." There was a gentleman who had spent six months in jail reading Isaiah and read an excellent compilation of extracts. One woman read an anti-war poem, whose constant refrain was how she wished she could write about something else. But much of the poetry was about racial oppression. Perhaps, the highlight of the evening was a youth counselor with a very cool staff (Akinola school of race-sexual orientation politics, shall we say), who read a poem with the repeated refrain, "Kill the slavemaster!" At that moment, I felt very sorry for the middle-aged white woman to my rear who had mentioned she was a Republican for Obama. Though she probably figured out she was in for a rough night with the level of pre-game Republican bashing.
Then there was an appearance by a former Black Panther, who resides in the area and is presently charged with conspiracy to murder a police officer in San Francisco 36 years ago. The case was dropped back then because of doubts about some confessions made under torture. After September 11, the government apparently started investigating anyone with a possible history of domestic terrorism, because juries might be more sympathetic to cases involving violations of civil and human rights. He endorsed the Green Party candidates. The Republican for Obama snuck out, perhaps noticing the resemblance between this meeting and some fundraising events during Obama's early career.
Then finally came the platform meeting. The big theme of the meeting was debt. People are in debt and the credit card companies are calling back balances. Predatory lending has torn a hole through urban African-American communities, offering older people some money to keep the wolves from the door for relatively little equity at usurious rates. One young woman complained about cuts to the state's university system by our environmentalist plutocrat governor. I pointed out that the federal government really can't do much about a state university system except restore need-based financial aid to 1979 levels. Yay, Pell Grants. That was a hit. Student loan debt apparently is staying with people into their 50s. Many people were taught and believed that education was a means to improve their economic lot. As one of the poets said, the American Dream is phony. Instead, they find themselves in poorly paid white collar jobs (if employed at all), living worse than their working-class parents. Primary and secondary education also are problems, but it's clear that people do not realize much of this can be done on the state, local, and individual level until our esteemed youth counselor encouraged people to prepare their children for school by buying books and reading to them, everything from literature to law. Apparently, he's defended himself successfully from two serious sets of felony charges.
At some points, you need to remain silent. One woman, probably influenced by a non-allopathic medical education, claimed that mandatory vaccinations were a means of stultifying children and asked whoever heard of cervical cancer in reference to the HPV virus. I'll just observe the rate of cervical cancer is higher in African-American women, like almost everything else. After Tuskegee and with what pharmaceutical companies do in other countries, vaccine suspicion is understandable.
I pitched railroad electrification, of course, explaining how it could act as some control on the price of food and other goods in the event of rising fossil fuel prices. I also promoted streetcars over buses for similar reasons. Even in Laodicea, many of the people in this meeting are regular public transit riders. They seemed to understand fossil fuel prices contributing to higher fares. And I quite enjoyed having an activist for fairer and more transparent credit practices warn the audience about the coming days of $8 and $10 gas.
But what I took from the meeting is how difficult modern life is for all of us. We find ourselves at the financial mercy of many systems we have little time to understand from mortgage lending to insurance to Social Security. I would encourage anyone with expertise about these matters out there to find ways to educate adults in plain language about how to decode and use their health plan etc. Churches and community groups should consider such efforts.
OK, I'm off my soapbox for the night. The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.
My present city is extremely racially divided. My institution sits near extremely wealthy, almost completely white neighborhoods, not far from the excellent local community college, whose student body is mostly African-American and Latino. My institution has about as many African-Americans as I can count on one hand, possibly more. It is a world-renowned institution. I have asked someone familiar with undergraduate admissions, who informed me that it is estimated that less than 700 African-Americans each year in the entire country are qualified to be admitted to my institution and almost all of them will choose Ivy League schools because of their closer connections to power etc. Lowering admissions standards for these students would doom them to misery and failure. I was admitted to my institution as an undergraduate. I wonder if I was qualified. The low diversity of my institution in this particular respect says to me something about the failure of America to educate all of her children according to their aptitude. I'm happy to see that campus is more diverse in the summer, thanks to the institution's programs to bring minority students from high schools and other colleges to the institution for enrichment and research experience. But I spend most of my time in a world mainly dominated by white and Chinese males.
So this evening I went north to a hair salon on the border between the wealthy and mostly white section of town and the impoverished and mostly non-white side of town. And here, too, I was the only white male until a homeless man I know from church entered and discovered that the race now finally was between Obama and McCain. Living proof that the sermons at my church are not all about presidential politics.
So I was first on the bill, being introduced by a local talk radio personality (who makes his living I suspect in comedy). I surprised everyone by reading one short poem and was asked, "Is that it?" I have a rule not to read more than twenty lines or so at a time, since a disastrous reading of my John Merton and the Weight of the World during my senior year in high school, which while a credible attempt to imitate the alliterative meters common in Anglo-Saxon poetry, is a bit tiring to the ear. But one lady in the audience pointed out that this was an important issue.
And then it became a poetry jam proper. One young man wrote a beautiful love poem to "spoken word." There was a gentleman who had spent six months in jail reading Isaiah and read an excellent compilation of extracts. One woman read an anti-war poem, whose constant refrain was how she wished she could write about something else. But much of the poetry was about racial oppression. Perhaps, the highlight of the evening was a youth counselor with a very cool staff (Akinola school of race-sexual orientation politics, shall we say), who read a poem with the repeated refrain, "Kill the slavemaster!" At that moment, I felt very sorry for the middle-aged white woman to my rear who had mentioned she was a Republican for Obama. Though she probably figured out she was in for a rough night with the level of pre-game Republican bashing.
Then there was an appearance by a former Black Panther, who resides in the area and is presently charged with conspiracy to murder a police officer in San Francisco 36 years ago. The case was dropped back then because of doubts about some confessions made under torture. After September 11, the government apparently started investigating anyone with a possible history of domestic terrorism, because juries might be more sympathetic to cases involving violations of civil and human rights. He endorsed the Green Party candidates. The Republican for Obama snuck out, perhaps noticing the resemblance between this meeting and some fundraising events during Obama's early career.
Then finally came the platform meeting. The big theme of the meeting was debt. People are in debt and the credit card companies are calling back balances. Predatory lending has torn a hole through urban African-American communities, offering older people some money to keep the wolves from the door for relatively little equity at usurious rates. One young woman complained about cuts to the state's university system by our environmentalist plutocrat governor. I pointed out that the federal government really can't do much about a state university system except restore need-based financial aid to 1979 levels. Yay, Pell Grants. That was a hit. Student loan debt apparently is staying with people into their 50s. Many people were taught and believed that education was a means to improve their economic lot. As one of the poets said, the American Dream is phony. Instead, they find themselves in poorly paid white collar jobs (if employed at all), living worse than their working-class parents. Primary and secondary education also are problems, but it's clear that people do not realize much of this can be done on the state, local, and individual level until our esteemed youth counselor encouraged people to prepare their children for school by buying books and reading to them, everything from literature to law. Apparently, he's defended himself successfully from two serious sets of felony charges.
At some points, you need to remain silent. One woman, probably influenced by a non-allopathic medical education, claimed that mandatory vaccinations were a means of stultifying children and asked whoever heard of cervical cancer in reference to the HPV virus. I'll just observe the rate of cervical cancer is higher in African-American women, like almost everything else. After Tuskegee and with what pharmaceutical companies do in other countries, vaccine suspicion is understandable.
I pitched railroad electrification, of course, explaining how it could act as some control on the price of food and other goods in the event of rising fossil fuel prices. I also promoted streetcars over buses for similar reasons. Even in Laodicea, many of the people in this meeting are regular public transit riders. They seemed to understand fossil fuel prices contributing to higher fares. And I quite enjoyed having an activist for fairer and more transparent credit practices warn the audience about the coming days of $8 and $10 gas.
But what I took from the meeting is how difficult modern life is for all of us. We find ourselves at the financial mercy of many systems we have little time to understand from mortgage lending to insurance to Social Security. I would encourage anyone with expertise about these matters out there to find ways to educate adults in plain language about how to decode and use their health plan etc. Churches and community groups should consider such efforts.
OK, I'm off my soapbox for the night. The Lord grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
A Sonnet
As you may know, the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign are soliciting ideas for the party platforms. Note that there is a parallel Republican effort.
For some reason, the platform event in my town is a poetry jam. So I have put my platform proposal in the form of a sonnet, inspired by this excellent article in the Oil Drum. .
I would like input on the poem, so it can be an effective pitch. Also if you improbably happen to be going to another platform poetry jam, feel free to use my sonnet.
For some reason, the platform event in my town is a poetry jam. So I have put my platform proposal in the form of a sonnet, inspired by this excellent article in the Oil Drum. .
For billions five of years the sun has shone
On the Earth’s roiling surface e’er rolling.
And bless those microbes of the coastal zone
Who sun consumed to keep our oil flowing.
Though the ages are long, the oceans wide,
The coastlines rich and the plankton many.
The crude trails grow cold, the petrol hides,
The price drains slowly our land of plenty.
Still, still, the sun stirs the winds and water
And iron horses run their derbies yet.
Diesel grows dear and the planet hotter
Bringing brilliant futures toward the sunset.
I know not our means of extrication,
At least railroad electrification.
I would like input on the poem, so it can be an effective pitch. Also if you improbably happen to be going to another platform poetry jam, feel free to use my sonnet.
Friday, July 11, 2008
Local Bank Fails
Having been born fifty years after the Great Depression, my image of bank failure pretty much comes from It's A Wonderful Life and the Savings and Loans scandal in the 1980s.
IndyMac Bank apparently went into conservatorship today. I do not live in a small Texas town, so it's a great surprise to me there was a $2 billion run in the last week on a bank with a branch a few blocks away and headquarters in the neighborhood. It occurs to me that I was walking by that same headquarters nine days ago, just when they probably were making the last ditch effort to save the bank.
I also note that the IndyMac headquarters shares its building with eHarmony. I expect a story on the personal lives of federal banking regulators to appear somewhere. Don't disappoint me, dear Fourth Estate.
As for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, they were names much referenced in my household when I was growing up. I have no opinions on their capitalization at present, except to note that banks seem to be failing these days at a greater than normal rate.
IndyMac Bank apparently went into conservatorship today. I do not live in a small Texas town, so it's a great surprise to me there was a $2 billion run in the last week on a bank with a branch a few blocks away and headquarters in the neighborhood. It occurs to me that I was walking by that same headquarters nine days ago, just when they probably were making the last ditch effort to save the bank.
I also note that the IndyMac headquarters shares its building with eHarmony. I expect a story on the personal lives of federal banking regulators to appear somewhere. Don't disappoint me, dear Fourth Estate.
As for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, they were names much referenced in my household when I was growing up. I have no opinions on their capitalization at present, except to note that banks seem to be failing these days at a greater than normal rate.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
This Last American Summer
For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark -- Matthew 24:38
I was at a wedding this weekend a couple of hundred miles to my north. Let not the epigraph say anything about the couple I saw married. They are two nice and intelligent people with solid values and good humor. Their wedding was a fairly modest mostly family affair, so much so that there were only three eligible women of suitable age there.
But I unfortunately spent much of the festivities trying not to think, "This all soon will pass away." Since I may wax apocalyptic for the rest of this piece, let me just say that Revelation is a rather flexible work. It presents a world in which divine agency is responsible for a breakdown in basic economic systems, the dominance of great empires, and ecological ruin. I, for one, do not take John of Patmos literally or generally for much of the book. God, as author of nature, need not punish the human race directly for our contempt for the world He has made. Nature does a very good job of punishing us anyway. Instead, God's direct agency in the world lies in arrest of judgment and clemency for us with regard to the forces of nature, the last enemy to be destroyed that will be death. But until the just reign on earth and the entire created order is overturned, the seven seals are sometimes broken and the Four Horsemen roam the earth.
I traveled north and south by train: a surprisingly popular operation in this part of the world. There are signs that it always has been this way, that new ridership due to high gas prices has encouraged slight improvements in efficiency and introduced considerable strain in the system. My train rides (and bus rides) gave me time to contemplate James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency and this Sunday's New York Times , even as many of the conversations around me concerned many of the problems being discussed by Kunstler.
My elders have been trying to tell me for some time that present patterns of human life and consumption, especially in the United States, cannot continue. Alfred Ziegler, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, is the father of modern historical geology, i.e., after the convincing demonstration of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics introduced the final pieces to the puzzle of the origins of coal, oil, and other mineral resources. By piecing together the continents as they grew and changed during the history of the Earth, Ziegler gained access to immense amounts of information about coal, oil, phosphorite, and other mineral deposits and considerable funding from companies interested in those deposits.
Like older colleagues such as M. King Hubbert, Ziegler noticed that the world was highly dependent on the products of both geographically and historically rare ecological and geological circumstances. Coal is the result of the flooding of coastal forests, like the mangrove swamps of the Carolinas and the rather careful refinement of the soggy carbon by burial at depth. It has been known since the middle of the 19th century that it does not occur any earlier than the Silurian Period of Earth's history. Later geologists realized that this was because trees originated then. Strangely enough, ephemerally flooded forests on tectonically active margins are rare indeed. Oil has an even more interesting past. It's mostly the result of algal blooms in coastal upwelling zones burying huge amounts of organic carbon on the ocean floor. Preservation of organic carbon in anoxic environments is usually favored by the same conditions under which hydrogen sulfide precipitates as off the present coast of Namibia or the Black Sea. Here, too, tectonics determines whether the carbon will become oil, natural gas, or fade away into the mantle to be exhaled as carbon dioxide from volcanoes. Let's just say that the conditions under which oil forms are fairly narrow, not unlike the conditions under which shale becomes slate that you can use as roof shingles. But since hydrogen sulfide is involved, oil contains more or less sulfur and sulfur makes it harder to refine oil into gasoline.
So Ziegler bothered to teach me these helpful facts and then gave his last lecture as a professor at the University of Chicago, a sobering lecture on what everyone seems to be talking about except the folks on television and the campaign trail, "peak oil." He reviewed most of the alternative means of getting energy and concluded that nuclear power was a fair medium term solution. He then proceeded to sell his house and purchase a water mill in West Virginia.
Other people have tried to teach me a general principle of geological resources: the least energy-intensive resources are exploited first (since they are cheapest) and so on until the amount of energy required exceeds the desire for the resource. And when your energy source is a non-renewable geological resource, life becomes very bad when the amount of energy needed to get your source of energy comes close to the recovered amount of energy.
David Archer, another of my professors, taught me one final fact of interest: the carbon we combust and emit into the atmosphere adds to the climate system roughly 100,000 times the energy we gained from its combustion through mainly absorption of infrared emission from the surface.
Last year, I wondered whether climate change would become disastrous at the same time we hit peak exploitation of resources on the Earth (primarily oil and gas). This year, I'm fairly sure that we'll see resource problems before the summer icepack at the North Pole is mostly gone. Saudi Arabia has hit its peak oil production. I wish I still had my course handout that gave a predicted date for this (based on 2002 numbers). It was either 2012 or 2020. Either estimate seems a lowball.
Responses to these terrifying results of the principles of geophysics vary. Some believe a technical solution is possible. I do, too, as a matter of fact. But I fear the implementation of such a solution is improbable. Moreover, it's going to be very difficult to replace oil as a medium for individualistic energy exploitation.
Kunstler's Long Emergency is somewhat more pessimistic. But he's more than twice my age and might regard me as a wild-eyed dreamer. Kunstler may be some sort of folk hero in coming decades. Like some of the gurus of the resource peak known in the popular media, he has an ideology. It's an interesting one and a quite ancient one in Europeanized America. In architecture, he is clearly the anti-Ayn Rand, rejecting modernist forms in architecture and urging the recovery of forms in harmony with the environment, such as those which allow efficient passive heating and cooling. In systems theory, he praises the value of inefficient systems for sustainability in everything from agriculture (polyculture) to education (highly localized and vocational). He came to this issue through his interest (and dislike, I suspect) of suburbia. And so he's rather glad that the suburbs soon will turn into a slum.
And that is always going to be major weakness of Kunstler's oeuvre or the oeuvre of peak resources folks in general, they are (myself included) generally discontents from the automobile and consumer good obsessed mainstream of American culture. They're very glad it's not long for this world. Some long happily for the extinction of the human species. Kunstler's blog, "Clusterfuck Nation" is suffused with rage. I frankly was surprised how cool The Long Emergency reads. He either has tremendous discipline in print or a good editor.
However, a good editor could not remove Kunstler's virulent hatred of Southerners. Lutherpunk, who Kunstler might regard as an unusual example of the "cracker lumpenproletariat", will boil with rage at a certain part of this book. I don't know what to say except to refer him to the body of scholarship that demonstrates the proximity of many counties in the Southern states to the state of nature in the 19th century. But the contempt and ethnic slurs he reserves for a people who actually might teach him to hunt partridge competently are despicable.
For you see, Kunstler, is a Yankee of the old school, a believer in covenantual and communal rights and responsibilities in the sense as it was understood by the Founding Fathers in the Massachusetts Bay. Paul Revere and John Adams are his ideological forefathers. While he doesn't say it openly, he must regard libertarians as the lowest and most dangerous form of life, especially in times of social crisis. And thus Kunstler longs for a society much like pre-1869 New York or New England, a little pocket of idyllic bliss somewhat isolated from the dieoff of the 5.5 billion excess humans whose deaths he assures us he does not desire. I, too, a Yankee by blood and somewhat by education am interested in such a world, too, though not the last part and also recognize my present profession is unlikely to exist in such a localized world.
Kunstler recently has published a novel about this near future world he envisions, A World Made by Hand in which the protagonist (who some think is modeled in himself) has a surprisingly active and dangerous sex life for a New Englander of the early 19th century. (Read the reviews on Amazon). Clearly, he has not grasped certain aspects of covenantual rights and responsibilities.
My basic conclusion on reading was that Kunstler may despise you and your way of life, but he is telling you much of the truth. Writing in 2003, he predicts much of the mayhem we are currently experiencing in energy and credit such as the return of stagflation. I expect this book may be an excellent guide to the next five years as well.
Reading the New York Times today, I felt like I was reading pharmaceutical advertisements for American society. The Times solicited several opinions on high gas prices. They ranged from paeans to the promise of technology and limited conservation such as Daniel Gross on a coming alternative energy investment bubble (not another freaking bubble) or a discussion of how we can improve the fuel efficiency of our cars by being more courteous drivers. There was one proposal to give us tax credits for not driving our cars. There's a few thinkers on the same lines of Kunstler (transition/suburbs to small city fed by country, the joys of a Maine island vacation) but more moderate (no people dying or breakdown of public order). Tom Friedman encourages the renovation of the Republic rather than obsessive focus on national security.
But my favorite piece for its sheer vapidity is a piece by Ben Stein in Sunday Business. An piece in Op-Ed observed that the rise in prices has disproportionately hurt the poor. Stein notes this, too, for only 2% of our national income is spent on oil and gasoline, he says. Well, he's wrong first of all. It's closer to 7%. It was 2-2.5% when oil was at $50. He's quoting the March Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, which was reporting on 2007, the year in which oil rose from $75-$150. But anyway, Stein notes the poor are hurting because real income from 1947-1973 rose 40% but only has risen a $1 on ~$670 per week since. Stein makes the sensible suggestion of paying off the national debt, which would strengthen the dollar and make prices a little easier to bear. But since Congress won't do this. He suggests that people buy smaller cars and trucks and focus on educating their children to become doctors, dentists, and lawyers, who magically have the money to spend on fuel. Because really this proposal so beneath his intelligence as to appear almost sarcastic is the only way Stein can excuse the negligence of him and his ilk in allowing his Grand Old Party to be sold to the corporatists, the neoconservatives, and the Religious Right wholesale since the late 1970s. But then again, I think he sold out to them eventually, too.
Our final sign from the Times is that a noticeable decline in adolescent automobile cruising has been observed. Cruising is a phenomenon that only has existed since World War I. The mixture of adolescents with automobiles forever changed the structure of our mores and our national life. Moreover, Kunstler observes our tendency to infantilize adolescents and allow them incredible amounts of leisure time dedicated to consumption as a relief for the mechanized form of education to which we subject them. But apparently the waste of fuel is no longer tolerable.
You see, my friends, we live now during the last American summer, the last summer in which the imagined invincibility of the cultural and economic life of the American people against the constraints of nature and geopolitics will remain unscathed. This is the last summer in which our transportation networks are likely to work as they have since 1980, in which a combination of cheap air travel and automobile travel allows us mobility and flexibility of diet hitherto unknown in the history of the world. The big box store and the commercial airplane are dead, though to borrow from Nietzsche, "but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which their shadow will be shown." Well, if not ages, at least years. The automobile someday will follow. The chemical fertilizer, strong national governments, large-scale armaments, sic transit, sic transit .
I guess I don't know what to do. In the kind of post-oil future the sensible people envision, I do have certain uses. I can decipher tremendous amounts of information about land and its resources, test your soil, suggest where to build mills, and teach many subjects in both the sciences and humanities. I even can build fences, weed gardens, and do some crude carpentry and masonry. I'll likely need to improve some of these skills. But I do like what I do for a living now, despite its dependence on oil and a strong national government. And I do need to finish my thesis research. And I do wonder if I could put together a crash program to make this transition a bit easier and ensure that the world at least was electrified. And perhaps we'll just live with smaller amounts of oil made by cockroaches eating weeds (as bls pointed out to us) and gradually learn to maintain the carrying capacity of the Earth to a few billions to which the world's population hopefully will shrink less violently than many fear.
But in this last American summer, there's one development that won't be worth a sprig of wheat (old Roman expression) in time to come. And it's this business of global Anglican realignment consummated in the final declaration of GAFCON. I'll give the Lambeth Conference a couple of more meetings after this one and any competing organization the same lifetime. Evangelical Anglicans in this country will blend rather quickly with those with whom they have aligned themselves in this country, q.v. Rick Warren. Those in Sydney and Abuja soon will be occupied solely with the problems of Sydney and Abuja. The Anglo-Catholics will swim the Tiber in a world where the Roman Pontiff will seem very far away. And the Episcopal Church will return to its early 19th century institutional structure with bishops involved in day to day clergy training. Seminaries, too, may pass away. But I do warn that a society in crisis often looks for scapegoats and agricultural societies have a particular attitude toward the possible sources of crop failure. My hope is that these years of unpleasantness may make some corner of the world safe for an orthodox gospel in which all people may live lives of moderation and virtue in the Body, where gay and straight are one in Jesus Christ.
I was at a wedding this weekend a couple of hundred miles to my north. Let not the epigraph say anything about the couple I saw married. They are two nice and intelligent people with solid values and good humor. Their wedding was a fairly modest mostly family affair, so much so that there were only three eligible women of suitable age there.
But I unfortunately spent much of the festivities trying not to think, "This all soon will pass away." Since I may wax apocalyptic for the rest of this piece, let me just say that Revelation is a rather flexible work. It presents a world in which divine agency is responsible for a breakdown in basic economic systems, the dominance of great empires, and ecological ruin. I, for one, do not take John of Patmos literally or generally for much of the book. God, as author of nature, need not punish the human race directly for our contempt for the world He has made. Nature does a very good job of punishing us anyway. Instead, God's direct agency in the world lies in arrest of judgment and clemency for us with regard to the forces of nature, the last enemy to be destroyed that will be death. But until the just reign on earth and the entire created order is overturned, the seven seals are sometimes broken and the Four Horsemen roam the earth.
I traveled north and south by train: a surprisingly popular operation in this part of the world. There are signs that it always has been this way, that new ridership due to high gas prices has encouraged slight improvements in efficiency and introduced considerable strain in the system. My train rides (and bus rides) gave me time to contemplate James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency and this Sunday's New York Times , even as many of the conversations around me concerned many of the problems being discussed by Kunstler.
My elders have been trying to tell me for some time that present patterns of human life and consumption, especially in the United States, cannot continue. Alfred Ziegler, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, is the father of modern historical geology, i.e., after the convincing demonstration of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics introduced the final pieces to the puzzle of the origins of coal, oil, and other mineral resources. By piecing together the continents as they grew and changed during the history of the Earth, Ziegler gained access to immense amounts of information about coal, oil, phosphorite, and other mineral deposits and considerable funding from companies interested in those deposits.
Like older colleagues such as M. King Hubbert, Ziegler noticed that the world was highly dependent on the products of both geographically and historically rare ecological and geological circumstances. Coal is the result of the flooding of coastal forests, like the mangrove swamps of the Carolinas and the rather careful refinement of the soggy carbon by burial at depth. It has been known since the middle of the 19th century that it does not occur any earlier than the Silurian Period of Earth's history. Later geologists realized that this was because trees originated then. Strangely enough, ephemerally flooded forests on tectonically active margins are rare indeed. Oil has an even more interesting past. It's mostly the result of algal blooms in coastal upwelling zones burying huge amounts of organic carbon on the ocean floor. Preservation of organic carbon in anoxic environments is usually favored by the same conditions under which hydrogen sulfide precipitates as off the present coast of Namibia or the Black Sea. Here, too, tectonics determines whether the carbon will become oil, natural gas, or fade away into the mantle to be exhaled as carbon dioxide from volcanoes. Let's just say that the conditions under which oil forms are fairly narrow, not unlike the conditions under which shale becomes slate that you can use as roof shingles. But since hydrogen sulfide is involved, oil contains more or less sulfur and sulfur makes it harder to refine oil into gasoline.
So Ziegler bothered to teach me these helpful facts and then gave his last lecture as a professor at the University of Chicago, a sobering lecture on what everyone seems to be talking about except the folks on television and the campaign trail, "peak oil." He reviewed most of the alternative means of getting energy and concluded that nuclear power was a fair medium term solution. He then proceeded to sell his house and purchase a water mill in West Virginia.
Other people have tried to teach me a general principle of geological resources: the least energy-intensive resources are exploited first (since they are cheapest) and so on until the amount of energy required exceeds the desire for the resource. And when your energy source is a non-renewable geological resource, life becomes very bad when the amount of energy needed to get your source of energy comes close to the recovered amount of energy.
David Archer, another of my professors, taught me one final fact of interest: the carbon we combust and emit into the atmosphere adds to the climate system roughly 100,000 times the energy we gained from its combustion through mainly absorption of infrared emission from the surface.
Last year, I wondered whether climate change would become disastrous at the same time we hit peak exploitation of resources on the Earth (primarily oil and gas). This year, I'm fairly sure that we'll see resource problems before the summer icepack at the North Pole is mostly gone. Saudi Arabia has hit its peak oil production. I wish I still had my course handout that gave a predicted date for this (based on 2002 numbers). It was either 2012 or 2020. Either estimate seems a lowball.
Responses to these terrifying results of the principles of geophysics vary. Some believe a technical solution is possible. I do, too, as a matter of fact. But I fear the implementation of such a solution is improbable. Moreover, it's going to be very difficult to replace oil as a medium for individualistic energy exploitation.
Kunstler's Long Emergency is somewhat more pessimistic. But he's more than twice my age and might regard me as a wild-eyed dreamer. Kunstler may be some sort of folk hero in coming decades. Like some of the gurus of the resource peak known in the popular media, he has an ideology. It's an interesting one and a quite ancient one in Europeanized America. In architecture, he is clearly the anti-Ayn Rand, rejecting modernist forms in architecture and urging the recovery of forms in harmony with the environment, such as those which allow efficient passive heating and cooling. In systems theory, he praises the value of inefficient systems for sustainability in everything from agriculture (polyculture) to education (highly localized and vocational). He came to this issue through his interest (and dislike, I suspect) of suburbia. And so he's rather glad that the suburbs soon will turn into a slum.
And that is always going to be major weakness of Kunstler's oeuvre or the oeuvre of peak resources folks in general, they are (myself included) generally discontents from the automobile and consumer good obsessed mainstream of American culture. They're very glad it's not long for this world. Some long happily for the extinction of the human species. Kunstler's blog, "Clusterfuck Nation" is suffused with rage. I frankly was surprised how cool The Long Emergency reads. He either has tremendous discipline in print or a good editor.
However, a good editor could not remove Kunstler's virulent hatred of Southerners. Lutherpunk, who Kunstler might regard as an unusual example of the "cracker lumpenproletariat", will boil with rage at a certain part of this book. I don't know what to say except to refer him to the body of scholarship that demonstrates the proximity of many counties in the Southern states to the state of nature in the 19th century. But the contempt and ethnic slurs he reserves for a people who actually might teach him to hunt partridge competently are despicable.
For you see, Kunstler, is a Yankee of the old school, a believer in covenantual and communal rights and responsibilities in the sense as it was understood by the Founding Fathers in the Massachusetts Bay. Paul Revere and John Adams are his ideological forefathers. While he doesn't say it openly, he must regard libertarians as the lowest and most dangerous form of life, especially in times of social crisis. And thus Kunstler longs for a society much like pre-1869 New York or New England, a little pocket of idyllic bliss somewhat isolated from the dieoff of the 5.5 billion excess humans whose deaths he assures us he does not desire. I, too, a Yankee by blood and somewhat by education am interested in such a world, too, though not the last part and also recognize my present profession is unlikely to exist in such a localized world.
Kunstler recently has published a novel about this near future world he envisions, A World Made by Hand in which the protagonist (who some think is modeled in himself) has a surprisingly active and dangerous sex life for a New Englander of the early 19th century. (Read the reviews on Amazon). Clearly, he has not grasped certain aspects of covenantual rights and responsibilities.
My basic conclusion on reading was that Kunstler may despise you and your way of life, but he is telling you much of the truth. Writing in 2003, he predicts much of the mayhem we are currently experiencing in energy and credit such as the return of stagflation. I expect this book may be an excellent guide to the next five years as well.
Reading the New York Times today, I felt like I was reading pharmaceutical advertisements for American society. The Times solicited several opinions on high gas prices. They ranged from paeans to the promise of technology and limited conservation such as Daniel Gross on a coming alternative energy investment bubble (not another freaking bubble) or a discussion of how we can improve the fuel efficiency of our cars by being more courteous drivers. There was one proposal to give us tax credits for not driving our cars. There's a few thinkers on the same lines of Kunstler (transition/suburbs to small city fed by country, the joys of a Maine island vacation) but more moderate (no people dying or breakdown of public order). Tom Friedman encourages the renovation of the Republic rather than obsessive focus on national security.
But my favorite piece for its sheer vapidity is a piece by Ben Stein in Sunday Business. An piece in Op-Ed observed that the rise in prices has disproportionately hurt the poor. Stein notes this, too, for only 2% of our national income is spent on oil and gasoline, he says. Well, he's wrong first of all. It's closer to 7%. It was 2-2.5% when oil was at $50. He's quoting the March Report of the Council of Economic Advisers, which was reporting on 2007, the year in which oil rose from $75-$150. But anyway, Stein notes the poor are hurting because real income from 1947-1973 rose 40% but only has risen a $1 on ~$670 per week since. Stein makes the sensible suggestion of paying off the national debt, which would strengthen the dollar and make prices a little easier to bear. But since Congress won't do this. He suggests that people buy smaller cars and trucks and focus on educating their children to become doctors, dentists, and lawyers, who magically have the money to spend on fuel. Because really this proposal so beneath his intelligence as to appear almost sarcastic is the only way Stein can excuse the negligence of him and his ilk in allowing his Grand Old Party to be sold to the corporatists, the neoconservatives, and the Religious Right wholesale since the late 1970s. But then again, I think he sold out to them eventually, too.
Our final sign from the Times is that a noticeable decline in adolescent automobile cruising has been observed. Cruising is a phenomenon that only has existed since World War I. The mixture of adolescents with automobiles forever changed the structure of our mores and our national life. Moreover, Kunstler observes our tendency to infantilize adolescents and allow them incredible amounts of leisure time dedicated to consumption as a relief for the mechanized form of education to which we subject them. But apparently the waste of fuel is no longer tolerable.
You see, my friends, we live now during the last American summer, the last summer in which the imagined invincibility of the cultural and economic life of the American people against the constraints of nature and geopolitics will remain unscathed. This is the last summer in which our transportation networks are likely to work as they have since 1980, in which a combination of cheap air travel and automobile travel allows us mobility and flexibility of diet hitherto unknown in the history of the world. The big box store and the commercial airplane are dead, though to borrow from Nietzsche, "but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which their shadow will be shown." Well, if not ages, at least years. The automobile someday will follow. The chemical fertilizer, strong national governments, large-scale armaments, sic transit, sic transit .
I guess I don't know what to do. In the kind of post-oil future the sensible people envision, I do have certain uses. I can decipher tremendous amounts of information about land and its resources, test your soil, suggest where to build mills, and teach many subjects in both the sciences and humanities. I even can build fences, weed gardens, and do some crude carpentry and masonry. I'll likely need to improve some of these skills. But I do like what I do for a living now, despite its dependence on oil and a strong national government. And I do need to finish my thesis research. And I do wonder if I could put together a crash program to make this transition a bit easier and ensure that the world at least was electrified. And perhaps we'll just live with smaller amounts of oil made by cockroaches eating weeds (as bls pointed out to us) and gradually learn to maintain the carrying capacity of the Earth to a few billions to which the world's population hopefully will shrink less violently than many fear.
But in this last American summer, there's one development that won't be worth a sprig of wheat (old Roman expression) in time to come. And it's this business of global Anglican realignment consummated in the final declaration of GAFCON. I'll give the Lambeth Conference a couple of more meetings after this one and any competing organization the same lifetime. Evangelical Anglicans in this country will blend rather quickly with those with whom they have aligned themselves in this country, q.v. Rick Warren. Those in Sydney and Abuja soon will be occupied solely with the problems of Sydney and Abuja. The Anglo-Catholics will swim the Tiber in a world where the Roman Pontiff will seem very far away. And the Episcopal Church will return to its early 19th century institutional structure with bishops involved in day to day clergy training. Seminaries, too, may pass away. But I do warn that a society in crisis often looks for scapegoats and agricultural societies have a particular attitude toward the possible sources of crop failure. My hope is that these years of unpleasantness may make some corner of the world safe for an orthodox gospel in which all people may live lives of moderation and virtue in the Body, where gay and straight are one in Jesus Christ.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Messy Blessing
One fine day at the end of May, a Rev. Mr. Cowell and a Rev. Mr. Lord registered a civil partnership in England. They then went to St. Bartholemew's in London and entered into something approximating fratrimony before friends and relatives (a good sampling of the liberal clerical establishment of the Church of England) with a Rev. Mr. Dudley as officiant. I say something approximating fratrimony, because the service was a cut and paste of the kind all too common in ILEOS, except you have to give someone credit for cutting and pasting the 1662 Marriage Service. Only this kind of high-handedness could make the first commenter on the liturgy at Peter Ould's site accuse them not just of deconstructing marriage but salvation. Yes, you read that right. This debate is not just about sex now, it's about God and the Church.
There's a lot to say about this. For instance, this isn't likely the first of these to take place. And there's endless speculation to be had about whether the celebrants intended the publicity just before GAFCON in a Lambeth summer. But I've decided to focus on the possible Chiquita aspect of the Holy Spirit of this. This theology states that the Holy Spirit occasionally likes to do things that are just plain silly in order to convince us of the foolishness of our ways. It's an idea at least as old as Erasmus and maybe as old as St. Paul. But the name derives from Chiquita banana for reasons I really can't explain.
For you see, I think the Rev. Mr. Dudley may have committed a liturgical and doctrinal abuse of such serious gravity that he probably could be prosecuted in the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved. The bishops on this high tribunal are so comically condign as to see the hand of God in their selection for such a case. We have Bishop Wright of Durham, Lord Harries of Pentegrath (who as Bishop of Oxford tried to appoint Jeffrey Johns as his suffragan), and Lord Hope of Thornes (former Archbishop of Canterbury and a lifelong celibate who has described his sexual orientation as a "grey area.") Their senior jurist colleagues would be a member of one of England's most prominent legal families (the Haverses), Elizabeth, Lady Butler-Sloss, and Lord Justice Mummery (Sir John Mummery). The presence of the latter on the panel mainly describes the kind of circus such a trial would be. Veni Creator Spiritus.
There's a lot to say about this. For instance, this isn't likely the first of these to take place. And there's endless speculation to be had about whether the celebrants intended the publicity just before GAFCON in a Lambeth summer. But I've decided to focus on the possible Chiquita aspect of the Holy Spirit of this. This theology states that the Holy Spirit occasionally likes to do things that are just plain silly in order to convince us of the foolishness of our ways. It's an idea at least as old as Erasmus and maybe as old as St. Paul. But the name derives from Chiquita banana for reasons I really can't explain.
For you see, I think the Rev. Mr. Dudley may have committed a liturgical and doctrinal abuse of such serious gravity that he probably could be prosecuted in the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved. The bishops on this high tribunal are so comically condign as to see the hand of God in their selection for such a case. We have Bishop Wright of Durham, Lord Harries of Pentegrath (who as Bishop of Oxford tried to appoint Jeffrey Johns as his suffragan), and Lord Hope of Thornes (former Archbishop of Canterbury and a lifelong celibate who has described his sexual orientation as a "grey area.") Their senior jurist colleagues would be a member of one of England's most prominent legal families (the Haverses), Elizabeth, Lady Butler-Sloss, and Lord Justice Mummery (Sir John Mummery). The presence of the latter on the panel mainly describes the kind of circus such a trial would be. Veni Creator Spiritus.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Would An Act of Parliament Be Required to Make Appointment of the ABC a more Communionwide Process
Kevin Montgomery asks this question in Comments to the Episcopal Cafe Lead this morning.
The answer is not necessarily so. At present, the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed by the Crown upon recommendation of a commission drawn from appropriate members of the Church of England, a procedure completely within the bounds of the Act of Restraint of Annates (1534) and the legislation it replaced such as King John's, "That Elections in the Whole of England Be Free." As long as none of the members are not in Communion with Rome, I know of no statute that would forbid foreigners from sitting on such a commission. To ensure this procedure had legal force (that a certain number of foreigners of a certain type had to be appointed), I believe a Measure of Synod would be required, which through joint resolution of Parliament confirming the same has equivalent force to an Act. As far as I can tell, removing the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Crown to another organ also could be enacted by Measure.
The answer is not necessarily so. At present, the Archbishop of Canterbury is appointed by the Crown upon recommendation of a commission drawn from appropriate members of the Church of England, a procedure completely within the bounds of the Act of Restraint of Annates (1534) and the legislation it replaced such as King John's, "That Elections in the Whole of England Be Free." As long as none of the members are not in Communion with Rome, I know of no statute that would forbid foreigners from sitting on such a commission. To ensure this procedure had legal force (that a certain number of foreigners of a certain type had to be appointed), I believe a Measure of Synod would be required, which through joint resolution of Parliament confirming the same has equivalent force to an Act. As far as I can tell, removing the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury from the Crown to another organ also could be enacted by Measure.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Books
From the Postulant/Candidate/Diaconabilis/Whatever
From various sources:
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (school)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (for school, funny story there)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (might have been for school)
The Fountainhead (Yes, I've read Ayn Rand, mainly while laughing.)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch I'm 35% or so through at the moment.
Frankenstein (school)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (Partially for school.)
The Satanic Verses (I can't remember if I finished it. I thought it was pretty poor.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (school)
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince (school)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (school)
The Scarlet Letter (school)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (school)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (I don't think I finished this one, could be wrong.)
The Aeneid (school in Latin and also in English)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
From various sources:
These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing users. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (school)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (for school, funny story there)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World (might have been for school)
The Fountainhead (Yes, I've read Ayn Rand, mainly while laughing.)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch I'm 35% or so through at the moment.
Frankenstein (school)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) (Partially for school.)
The Satanic Verses (I can't remember if I finished it. I thought it was pretty poor.)
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (school)
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince (school)
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (school)
The Scarlet Letter (school)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (school)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (I don't think I finished this one, could be wrong.)
The Aeneid (school in Latin and also in English)
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
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