In a recent review of Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World, Mark D. McGarvie praises the author, Michael I. Meyerson, for his

“considerable insight into the intellectual and political history of the constitutional era…”

and for providing

“a good account of how Hamilton conceived of the project of writing the Federalist Papers.”

But he faults Liberty’s Blueprint for:

“…a few grammatical errors, such as the use of plural pronouns with singular noun referents on pages 21 (”their”–”each member”) and 27 (”their”–”army”). It is hard to correct students’ errors when assigned texts include examples of the same mistakes.”

Presumably, in addition to Liberty’s Blueprint, McGarvie would dismiss the following works for their use of plural pronouns with singular noun referents, since it is hard, too, to correct students’ errors when these following works of literature include examples of the same mistakes:

Shakespeare:

“There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me
As if I were their well-acquainted friend…”

“Now leaden slumber with life’s strength doth fight;
And every one to rest themselves betake,
Save thieves, and cares, and troubled minds, that wake.” (LL)

Jane Austen:

“Perhaps, then, you would bestow it as a reward on that person who wrote the ablest defence of your favourite maxim, that no one can ever be in love more than once in their life — your opinion on that point is unchanged, I presume?”

George Eliot:

“I shouldn’t like to punish anyone, even if they‘d done me wrong.”

Walt Whitman:

“…everyone shall delight us, and we them.”

J. D. Salinger (from The Catcher in the Rye):

“He’s one of those guys who’s always patting themself on the back.”

Doris Lessing:

“And how easy the way a man or woman would come in here, glance around, find smiles and pleasant looks waiting for them, then wave and sit down by themselves.”

C. S. Lewis:

“She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.”

Oscar Wilde:

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

And, of course, an example that McGarvie, a legal scholar, has no doubt encountered in the Articles of the Confederation:

“Each house shall keep a journal of its proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy…” (The Federalist, 1888, p. 563)

(more)

This usage is common in everyday language, too, such as:

“Somebody gave me directions, but they didn’t tell me where to go.”

“Each person has the right to eat their pancakes.”

In fact, as Geoffrey K. Pullum points out, singular they is often clearer and preferable. For instance, the following sentences would be rendered more unclear if we followed McGarvie’s rule:

“Any employee who wants their office repainted…”

“Every writer has their own style…”

“If either your father or your mother breaks their hip…”

If we were to follow McGarvie’s usage guidelines for singular they (and the advice of most style manuals), we would find ourselves saying

“Any employee who wants his or her office repainted…”

“Every writer has his or her own style…”

“If either your father or your mother breaks his or her hip…”

McGarvie’s made-up grammar rule renders these sentences more cumbersome, and would require three or four sentences of caveats that would follow the last sentence. (”Which parent?” “Why’d your mom break your dad’s hip?” etc.) If the point of McGarvie’s rule, and the style guides from which it came, is to promote clear communication, then it fails. The rules of grammar are not found in style guides, usage manuals, or even your English classes. They are found in your brain. And they’ve been there since before your first day of school, before the first time your parents corrected your usage, and practically before you even uttered a single word.

In fact, you probably read the title of the post and didn’t even notice the singular they.

The problem, as should be plainly evident, isn’t with singular they. It’s with McGarvie’s definition of “grammatical mistake.” If every speaker of English uses singular they, and if the English language’s greatest literary figures have been using singular they for hundreds of years, and if singular they is found in one of the documents to which Mark D. McGarvie himself owes his profession, then what, exactly, makes singular they a grammatical error, poised to corrupt the linguistic and literary well-being of his students?

Calvin originally wrote the Institutes in two languages–Latin for scholars and French for non-scholars. Unfortunately, the standard English translation is, at present, accessible only to scholars and even then, barely so.

Christian, Nathan, and the folks at CCEL have begun a translation that recovers Calvin’s original intent for the French version: that it be accessible for everyone.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Almost all the things we know—the good things, the true things—center on two kinds of knowledge: What we know about God, and what we know about ourselves. There’s a lot of common ground between the two, and it’s difficult at first glance to say which one comes first.

On one hand, I’d like to start by suggesting that we can’t think about ourselves without also thinking about God—in whom the book of Acts says we “live and move.” Obviously, all the life and movement we’re born with don’t come from us – in fact, there’s nothing about us that doesn’t fully depend on God.

Four in particular:

First, the sounds: choir, organ, singing, and the like. What made the music more poignant this year was that our church gave up almost all music for Lent: since Ash Wednesday, we haven’t sung much of anything. The absence of music had the benefit of exposing the liturgical logic behind the aesthetics and reminded everyone that all art in worship is never an end in itself. (Also fitting, since our church has two morning worship services with separate styles of music that haven’t coalesced well for the past nine years.)

Second, the silence. There was lots of it: awkward, counter-cultural, did-those-morons (we)-just-crucify-him, what-style-of-worship-is-this? silence. For three entire minutes, I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. I don’t think there’s a more liturgically appropriate day for listening to myself inhale and exhale while contemplating the dire ramifications of a Fall great enough to require God to breathe his last.

Third, during a reading of the Passion narrative in John’s Gospel, I noticed that Joseph of Arimathea isn’t alone when he buries Jesus. From John 19:39: “He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.” That’s an odd anecdote to include, since Nick, the social elite teacher of the law, sneaks a conversation with Jesus in the secrecy of darkness, only to find out that he can’t become born again. Yet there he is, burying the Son of God. Maybe he had a change of heart, or maybe he expresses his skepticism by doing something formative for himself, or maybe he’s trying to make up for his earlier cowardice by removing the alleged king of Jews from the most uncivil and public form of execution. Or maybe John intentionally inserts Nick to point out that his rebirth is only as impossible as Christ’s death.

Fourth, as Jesus was hanging on the cross, the disciples didn’t gather together to figure out how they could apply this to their lives. We shouldn’t either.

From Kevin Corcoran’s blog, fitting Bob Dylan lyrics for Holy Saturday:

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden while the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An’ the unpawned painter behind beyond his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

http://www.isitchristmas.com

The thing I love most about this site is that it has rss feeds.

Darryl Pinckney wrote a great piece on Barack Obama in the latest issue of the New York Review. He chronicles Obama’s rise to potential presidential nominee within the context of the “psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation.” Exactly.

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s new book is excellent. And it smells great, too (am I the only one for whom the act of reading is begun by opening the book, cracking the spine, and taking a whiff?). Even the footnotes are brilliant. And if your appetite needs whetting, you can read a lecture he delivered on human rights at the Reformed Institute of Metropolitan Washington, whatever that is.

Anecdotally, I finished his book on John Locke almost a year ago. After spending most of the week struggling through it, along with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Wolterstorff happened to sit in front of me at church the following Sunday. That was some of the hardest peace I’ve ever passed.

But knowing a thing or two about Locke has made watching Lost a little easier. Yesterday I learned that all episodes are online, which means I won’t be leaving the house for several days.

Speaking of things online, Kevin Corcoran is blogging. He’s a professor at Calvin whose courses I never took, but lots of my friends did, and most of them like him. He also contributes thoughtful articles to Books and Culture from time to time.

I’ve also been reading Steve Matheson’s blog for awhile now. He’s one of those thoughtful Reformed folk who say brilliant things about religion and science and show why the Discovery Institute may have a thing or two to discover for itself. Like a less-ridiculous epistemology. And other stuff, too.

or, How to Follow the Presidential Campaign Sans Cable News

If you live in Washington, you’ll want to caucus next Saturday, February 9 at 1:00 in the afternoon. Don’t skip the caucus in lieu of voting in the primary. The primary is only a straw poll and has little more than symbolic value. The caucuses determine the delegates to conventions. If you live in Lynden, you’ll want to refer to this article in today’s Tribune that explains the process and lists the locations for each party.

If you can’t wait for the caucus to see who your neighbors are voting for, you can always refer to one of many websites that disclose campaign donations. I find the New York Times campaign finance website the easiest to work with.

Speaking of the Times, they also have a fascinating animation that illustrates campaign stops geographically, along with a schedule that lists future campaign appearances. It’s a useful predictor of campaign drop-outs. Yesterday I noticed that all of John Edwards’ campgain stops for today were canceled. Odd, I thought. Turns out there was a reason for that.

If you’re still following primary polls after the New Hampshire kerfuffle earlier this month, this site and this site are useful.

Since, as in 2004, religion plays a significant role in the campaign, I’ve enjoyed reading the GetReligion blog, which includes frequent contributions by Terry Mattingly, the religion editor of the Grand Rapids Press.

For other campaign matters, especially on the Democratic side, I’ve been following Andrew Sulliven’s blog. He also wrote a fascinating article on Barack Obama in last month’s Atlantic and also makes occasional appearances on the Colbert Report.

It snowed four inches last night, which means that people around here are finding new and creative ways to freak out. School was canceled, so Shelly and I decided to enjoy our morning by making pancakes.

Our plans were thwarted when I realized we didn’t have any pancake mix left.

“Where is the pancake mix?” A fitting question, except that I am notorious for staring several minutes into the pantry while looking directly at the food I cannot find.

“Where do you think it is?”

“It’s not here. I swear. There’s no pancake mix.”

“It’s there.”

“No, seriously. It’s not here.”

“Okay, let me look.”

She did, and soon confirmed that I was, in fact, right. For the second time in SEVEN MONTHS. The first time was when I told her she shouldn’t put my sweater in the dryer.

I decided to go to the store. Normally an easy task, but it took a lot longer this morning than I intended. Not because the roads were bad (although they were), but because my neighbor was shoveling the driveway, and since we share a driveway, I felt compelled to help before leaving, even though four inches of snow hardly necessitates shoveling.

Ten minutes later, when I had safely determined that it would no longer be impolite to leave, I left.

I dislike driving in the snow here in Lynden, not because I’m a bad driver (I lived in Michigan for six years), but because everyone else is. Most people around here drive unnecessarily large trucks for reasons that are more Freudian than practical, which made it easier for me to watch one slide onto the curb while I drove to the grocery store in my trusty Oldsmobile.

And made the pancakes taste that much better.

We won second place in the annual Lynden Christian School Soup-Off for our potato soup.

I recently enjoyed Charles Taylor’s latest book. It is a refreshing departure from the current definitions of secularity espoused by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on the one hand and Bill O’Reilly and James Dobson on the other. Whatever convincing or philosophically redeemable arguments they offer (there aren’t many, but admittedly a few) become obscured by polemic and sarcasm and become so infused with politics that they lose the trust of those who would benefit the most from a clear-headed discussion. Toward that end, Taylor departs from the current religion/secular debate by taking a descriptivist approach: he’s lest interested in what we ought to do — reject religion as a source of evil (Dawkins) or prepare to fight the culture wars (Dobson) — and more interested in why the current context makes the religion/secular debate so fierce. Ultimately, Taylor is more interested in understanding why it was unlikely - even impossible - to reject religion in 1500, while today it is not only possible, but quite acceptable.

Taylor begins by offering three possible definitions of secularity. The first two are widely popular: in the first, the secular refers to public spaces that ought to be religiously neutral. This definition of secularity serves as the backdrop for the recurring debates about whether or not the ten commandments placement in courtrooms violates a space that, according to our definition, ought to be religiously neutral.

The second kind of secular refers to the overall decline in religious practice, or the absence of religion. Pastors and pundits usually refer to this kind of secular to describe the overall religious climate in America or the kind of belief-system from which faithful church-goers ought to abstain.

To these two definitions of the secular, Taylor adds a third. This kind of secular “consists of new conditions of belief; it consists in a new shape to the experience which prompts to and is defined by belief; in a new context in which all search and questioning about the moral and spiritual must proceed” (20). In other words, the secular is not defined by religious neutrality or plurality, nor by the continual errosion of religion since the Enlightenment - what Taylor calls the “subtraction theory”; rather, the secular is defined as the overall context that makes a particular belief possible or more likely. This full-orbed definition of secularity rises above petty politics or the kind of hopelessness that informs most secularization theories.

From here, Taylor repeats his initial question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” and he spends the next seven hundred pages outlining a possible answer to that question, complete with a sweeping history of philosophy and politics since the Enlightenment, with an eye toward understanding the origins of the current milieu. He explains the shift from a monolithic, Aristotelian, enchanted, and ordered world that has fractured and now opens itself up to new and various possible beliefs, for better or worse. In his story, Taylor also discerns the place of the subplots, such as Romanticism, transcendentalism, Providential Deism (and its descendant, Intelligent Design), and sixties counter-culture. His book is fascinating.

That said, I found A Secular Age cumbersome in many respects. For one, Taylor’s book suffers from poor organization. Taylor often begins a thought, explains why it’s important, and then promises to “return to this later” before exploring something else. Moreover, a book such as this should not be written in the first person. Taylor begins many paragraphs with a key thought that helps him develop his thesis; he then spends the rest of the paragraph writing first-person caveats that attempt to clarify the first sentence, lest his readers misunderstand him. This is not a good way to write a history of philosophy (instead, rewrite the first sentence in a way that makes sense; move on; repeat).

Nonetheless, A Secular Age is a good read, and will be in print for many years to come. It is a refreshing and gentle alternative to New Atheism.

(Also, this book has been the subject of discussion on The Immanent Frame, a blog hosted by the Social Science Research Council, with an impressive list of contributors that includes Robert Bellah, D. Michael Lindsay, James K.A. Smith, and Charles Taylor himself.)

All readers of this blog can be broadly grouped into one of two categories:

(1) devoted fans of Gary Schmidt and voracious readers of everything he writes

(2) vastly inferior to all persons in the first category

That said, Gary Schmidt has won another Newbery, this time for The Wednesday Wars.