o1mnikent

Perspectives: Essay: Reformed Intramurals – Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell
During the struggles against apartheid in South Africa, more than a few critics noted how Abraham Kuyper’s theology, with its spheres and orders of creation, was distorted by Kuyper’s Afrikaner followers into a theological justification for apartheid. To lay apartheid at the feet of neo-Calvinism is an exaggerated and unfair accusation. It does, however, demonstrate how easily a theology that focuses on orders and restoration can become a tool of rigidity and fear. In the morass of today’s postmodern relativism, some sort of natural law or creational orders may seem appealing to Christians. Recovering and restoring these structures seems to offer solid ground on which to stand. But this approach is inherently conservative and static. It is more likely to be a theology of “hold the line” and “hang on,” always in danger of attaching itself to something the future will require us to toss overboard. History is littered with examples of Christians anointing our preferences and understandings as “natural” or “rooted in creation.” By contrast, an eschatological and future-looking perspective is open, adaptable, reticent and perhaps even somewhat agnostic about the future. Exactly where the Holy Spirit will lead in the future, where God’s in-breaking Kingdom will next surprise us is less defined and more of an emerging trajectory. Christians keep their eyes on places like the margins of society and the frontiers of learning, expecting we are more likely to find God’s work and purposes there, rather than harkening back to the Garden.

Perspectives: Essay: In Reply – Nicholas Wolterstorff
My problem with the engagement of American evangelicals in politics over the past couple of decades is not that they have engaged in politics; not at all. My problem is that their understanding of what the Christian has to think and say about political issues has been so pinched and distorted, and that their ways of acting have been so contrary to the gospel and so self-destructive. They have used the levers of power like everyone else, to gain power for their own party and to enhance American nationalism, nativism, and economism; they have heaped abuse on those who disagree with them. They have sold their own soul.

One Nation Under Elvis | Rebecca Solnit | Orion magazine
Today, rural citizens see themselves in an unappreciated, fast-shrinking middle zone between wilderness and development (even though agriculture is often the best bulwark against sprawl). In many ways, rural culture is dying, and that seems to push many rural people into near-paranoia. During the water-scarcity crises in the Klamath River region on the California–Oregon border, farmers spoke of “rural cleansing” and seemed to believe that environmentalists wanted to empty out the countryside. Some of them do. Rural life, other than sentimental fantasies of an idyllic past, cowboy fetishism, or the pseudo-ruralism of people who live in rustic-looking settings but commute to work in the white-collar economy, is largely invisible to most of us most of the time. It’s true that agriculture and wilderness are often in competition—the farmers of the Klamath Basin are competing with salmon for water. But if rural culture and rural life were positive values also being defended, the negotiations might go better.

Solidarity Politics | The American Prospect
Clinton and Obama and their supporters aren’t playing “identity politics” any more than John Kerry’s supporters did in 2004, or George W. Bush’s did in 2000. It’s absurd to suggest that the Andover-Yale-Harvard-bred Bush adopting a swagger and thickening his Texas accent, or John Kerry riding a borrowed Harley onto The Tonight Show set, was anything other than identity politics.

Anatomy of a Stump Speech – washingtonpost.com

Language Log: National (omigod) Grammar Day
The National Grammar Day site issues its overheated manifesto:

We owe much to our mother tongue. It is through speech and writing that we understand each other and can attend to our needs and differences. If we don’t respect and honor the rules of English, we lose our ability to communicate clearly and well. In short, we invite mayhem, misery, madness, and inevitably even more bad things that start with letters other than M.

I’ll pass over the only-too-familiar themes of threat and decline, to comment on three things.

The first is the assumption that non-standard variants are unclear and therefore impede communication.  This proposition is mostly just taken for granted, without any kind of defense — in what way is “between you and I” less clear than “between you and me”?  in what way is “all shook up” less clear than “all shaken up”?  they’re non-standard, certainly, but LESS CLEAR? — and the occasional explanations of how particular non-standard usages are unclear don’t survive scrutiny.  Instead, it’s just an article of faith that non-standard variants (and conversational, informal, and innovative variants, and variants restricted to certain geographic regions or social groups) are unclear, vague, sloppy, or lazy; the written, formal, established, generally used standard variants are taken to be intrinsically superior, and everything that deviates from them to be intrinsically debased to some degree.  I have yet to see actual arguments in favor of this idea, and it has always struck me as deeply mean-spirited.  After all, you can point out that some variant is standard (generally used by the educated middle class) and an alternative non-standard without demonizing the non-standard variant….

Not to Complicate Matters, but … – ChronicleReview.com
To defend binary thinking is to invite opprobrium. It is true that fixed oppositions between good and evil or male and female and a host of other contraries cannot be upheld, but this hardly means that binary logic is itself idiotic. Binary logic structures the very computers on which most attacks on binary logic are composed. Some binary distinctions are worth recognizing, if not celebrating: the distinction, let us say, between pregnant and not pregnant, or between life and death. Others are at least worth noticing — for example, that between a red and a green light. You either have $3.75 for a latte or you do not. Can that be “complicated”?

The Smart Set: The Mosquito and the Itch
Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center recently used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see how people’s brains responded when their lower leg was scratched. They found scratching significantly lessened activation of the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, areas of the brain associated with unpleasant or aversive emotions and memories. The more intense the scratching, the lower these areas were activated. The investigators hypothesized that scratching may suppress the negative emotional components of an itch to bring about its relief.

How to talk about things we know nothing about | openDemocracy

The author’s position as a professor of literature at Paris VIII University naturally predisposes him to reflect on questions of cultural literacy. How is it possible to be culturally literate when a) one cannot read everything; b) one forgets much of what one reads and c) one’s knowledge of any book is always partial? Bayard argues that a person should never be ashamed of the gaps in her or his literary knowledge, for this knowledge can only ever be incomplete. Talk about books is not inferior to reading books, but is in fact what constitutes literacy. Bayard urges his readers to treat books – read and unread – as the jumping-off point for discussion, for individual creativity, for the examined life itself.

[…]

In a world saturated by expertise and conflicting opinions, the ability to judge things we know nothing about is an indispensable one. But the starting-point of this ability should be an admission (to oneself and to others) of the scope and nature of our ignorance. Lack of expertise should not disqualify anyone from participation in important debates, provided that one is honest about the gaps in one’s knowledge. Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous concept of “known unknowns” is helpful here. We cannot know everything, but we can – if we are humble enough – estimate more or less accurately the dimensions of our ignorance.

FIRST THINGS » An Interview with Timothy Keller

What would you say is the greatest difference between how someone must approach apologetics today as opposed to when Lewis was doing it in the 1940s and 1950s?

First of all, I’m inspired by Lewis, and my book is inspired by his book, but I’m a preacher first of all, not a writer, and I don’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as a writer like C.S. Lewis. And yet everybody’s doing that, and I take it as a compliment, but it’s pretty unjustified. However, he’s the benchmark, so everybody’s going to be compared.

Lewis definitely lived at a time in which people were more certain across the board that empirical, straight-line rationality was the way you decided what truth was, and there’s just not as much of a certainty now. Also, when Lewis was writing, people were able to follow sustained arguments that had a number of points that built on one another. I guess I should say we actually have a kind of rationality-attention-deficit disorder now. You can make a reasonable argument, you can use logic, but it really has to be relatively transparent. You have to get to your point pretty quickly.

In New York City, these are pretty smart people, very educated people, but even by the mid-nineties I had found that the average young person found Mere Christianity—it just didn’t keep their attention, because they really couldn’t follow the arguments. They took too long. This long chain of syllogistic reasoning wasn’t something that they were trained in doing. I don’t think they’re irrational, they are as rational, but they want something of a mixture of logic and personal appeal.

I know for a fact that Lewis was just heavy sledding for even smart Ivy League American graduates by the mid-nineties. One of the reasons I started doing this was I thought I needed something that gave them shorter, simpler, more accessible arguments.