Some Standard Wisdom on Brain Pickling

One of the recurrent themes in the articles that caught my eye while reading through the 1880 editions of the Christian Standard was the confidence with which they trumpeted the scientific knowledge of their day. Looking at the science of a bygone era, in edition to being tremendously amusing, ought to give us pause today about our own scientific hubris and force us to wonder how future generations will perceive our cutting-edge thought, particularly as it filters down to the popular level. This piece was copied by the Standard from Scientific American, which is still in publication.

[…], by far the greatest anatomist of the age, used to say that he could distinguish in the darkest room by one stroke of the scalpel the brain of the inebriate from that of a person who lived soberly. Now and then he could congratulate his class upon the possession of a drunkard’s brain, admirably fitted from its hardness and more completed preservation for the purpose of demonstration. When the anatomist wishes to preserve a human brain for any length of time, he effects that object by keeping that organ in a vessel of alcohol. From a soft pulpy substance , it then becomes comparatively hard, but the inebriate, anticipating the anatomist, begins the indurating process before death, begins it while the brain remains the consecrated temple of the soul while, while its delicate and gossamer-like tissues still throb with the pulse of heaven-born life. Strange infatuation this, to desecrate the God-like. Terrible enchantment that dries up all the fountains of generous feelings, petrifies all the tender humanities and sweet charities of life, leaving only a brain of lead and a heart of stone.

Some Standard Wisdom on Ministers' Wives

After a couple of weeks of more serious excerpts, it is time to return to more lighthearted fare. This offering, entitled "The Minister's Wife" was intended, almost certainly, as a sarcastic critique of the unrealistic expectation that congregations had for the spouses of their leaders. Still, I can't help but read it and think that, hovering just beneath the surface, is an genuine wish.

The minister’s wife ought to be selected by a committee of the church. She should be warranted never to have a headache, or neuralgia; she should have nerves of iron; she should never be tired or sleepy, and should be everybody’s cheerful drudge; she should be cheerful, intellectual, pious, domesticated; she should keep her husband’s house, darn his stockings, make his shirts, cook his dinner, light his fire, and copy his sermons; she should keep up the style of a lady on the wages of a day-laborer, and be always at leisure for “good works,” and ready to receive morning calls; she should be secretary to the Band of Hope, Dorcas Society, and the Home Mission; she should conduct Bible classes and mothers’ meetings; should make clothes for the poor and gruel for the sick; and finally she should be pleased with everybody and everything, and desire no reward beyond the satisfaction of having done her own duty and other people’s too.

Thinking Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln has always loomed large in the American consciousness, as martyr president's have a tendency to do. Interest has peaked in recent years, however, with a number of major insertions of Lincoln into the popular culture. Bill O'Reilly's best selling book stands out, as does the Oscar-winning Spielberg film Lincoln. Better than both of those, as far as I'm concerned, is the highly plausible revisionist history film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. In each case, and throughout history, there has been a tendency to glorify the dead president, a pull that even historians have trouble resisting. While there is no need to disparage Lincoln, contrary voices needed to be heard and praise needs to be qualified by critical analysis. Consider, for example, the following quote from the New York Evangelist written in the midst of Lincoln's first term:

A year and a half of very difficult administration has shown our President to be a plain, good man, honest in heart, pure in intention, but certainly not those rare geniuses, who are born to “ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.” We have taken a plain country lawyer out of his village and placed him at the head of the Government, and imagined him to be a great man, and because he does not quite measure to the character, we're ready to censure and complain. Might we not rather reprove ourselves for our unreasonable expectations?

Here we have a laudatory account of the "good," "honest," and "pure" president from a friendly source, but consider how great a leap it is for the mind in 2013 to transport into a context in which Lincoln would need to be defended against detractors not by stressing his monumental works but by emphasizing his mediocrity. We should not be so enamored for Lincoln that we forget that even his friends did not perceive him to be one of "those rare geniuses," a status he would assume indelibly after his death.

Some Standard Wisdom on Invisible Gas

This weeks thought from the Christian Standard was borrowed from the New York Evangelist and, like last week, illustrates just how little things have changed, if not in the way Christianity is actually treated by society than at least how Christian perceive their relationship to the broader culture.

Invisible Christianity seems to be a favorite doctrine with many people. The doctrine, it would appear, is this: that you may be saved and nobody know of it. You may get to heaven nicely without any “ado”—so quietly, in short, that nobody will suspect where you are going. Such is a fair statement of the doctrine so many people like. By all means get to heaven, they say, but don’t alarm anybody about it. Keep it all to yourself—the quieter you go to heaven the better. This is the doctrine of invisible Christianity.

I wonder what the world would think if some man told them he had invented invisible gas? Why, they would say the man’s mad—the very thing gas is for is to give light; it must be visible. And, strange to tell, this is just what God says of the Christians—that is, of the soul that’s saved. “Ye are the light of the world,” He says. What could be plainer? But is the light to be seen? Hear what God says, “A City that is set on a hill can not be hid” (Matt. V. 14). “Can not be hid.” That’s what God says about the man or woman that’s saved. Invisible Christianity is not in the Bible. Quite the opposite. If you are saved, your light will be easily seen by the world as a city built on a hill.

Some Standard Wisdom on Asceticism

We pick back up our quotes series from the 1880 Christian Standard with some thoughts on asceticism, which appeared to have the same negative connotation in nineteenth century American Protestantism that it has today.

Too much is said in these days against “asceticism,” but the danger of the Church does not lie in that direction. […] in cloaks are more in vogue than “hair shirts.” Daily food is a lawful indulgence. But fasting is sometimes profitable to both body and soul. Many luxuries of domestic life are lawful in themselves; to give them up in order to have more money for benevolent uses, or in order to discourage social extravagances, is a dictate of pure Christianity. John Wesley had a right to own silver plate, yet he nobly refused to possess more than two or three silver spoons “while so many poor people were lacking bread.” An excellent man in my congregation sold his carriage just as soon as he found that his horses were eating up his charity fund too fast. My friend is no ascetic. He is a very sensible and sun-shiny Christian. If the same spirit which actuated him were more common in the church, there would be fewer luxurious equipages, fewer wine bottles, fewer card tables, fewer sumptuous evening parties; but there would be more missionaries in the West, and more Bibles in China and Japan. Self-denial soars above them.

Feast of Franz

Today we take a break from our regularly scheduled wisdom from the Christian Standard in order to observe the feast day of Franz Jägerstätter. Not on your calendar? Perhaps it should be. Jägerstätter was a German Catholic who refused to take up arms during World War II. He offered himself for non-combatant service, but the Nazis cared even less for conscientious objection during the nationalistic global wars than Americans did. Instead of allowing him to work as a military paramedic, the Nazis sentenced him to execution by guillotine. On the day of his death, he penned these words:

If I must write... with my hands in chains, I find that much better than if my will were in chains. Neither prison nor chains nor sentence of death can rob a man of the Faith and his free will. God gives so much strength that it is possible to bear any suffering.

His story would remain largely untold, until academics uncovered him and offered him to the world. In 2007, the Roman Catholic Church recognized him formally as a martyr and beatified him, making May 21st his feast day. Jägerstätter is a reminder both of the unconquerable power of the human will invigorated by the divine and of our certain ignorance of the countless stories of brave, pious fortitude that might inspire us if only we knew the half of them.

Creation vs. Evolution vs. Catholicism

The Barna Group, commissioned by BioLogos, has just released an intriguing new study about sharp divides among "today's pastors" about science, faith, and the origin of species. The study shows an almost even split between those who believe in Young Earth Creation and those who do not, with the do not group being divided between proponents of theistic evolution and progressive creationism. Young Earth Creationists have their stronghold in the South, while theistic evolution is most common in the Midwest. Most clergy think that questions of faith and science are important, but, at the same time, a majority fear that disagreements are distracting from the greater Christian witness.

There is little there to shock, unless you realize one glaring omission: Catholics. While the survey of Protestant ministers actually excludes both Orthodox and Catholic leaders, the Orthodox have only about one million members in the United States, making their omission excusable (at least from a statistician's point of view). Catholics, on the other hand, are no minority to be trifled at. As the largest single Christian denomination in the United States--one in four Americans belongs to the Roman Catholic Church--their absence from a survey about the origins of life suggests an array of possible biases, all of them disturbing. It is likely that, in lockstep with history, that Catholics are still being treated as second class Christians or (perhaps implicitly) not real Christians at all. It would not be the first time the self-proclaimed Protestant establishment drew a sharp line between Christianity and papism--even if it can no longer express the dichotomy in those terms in our politically correct age. Equally possible, Catholics may have been excluded because their presumed answers would have tipped the scale away from a picture of conflict between conservative and progressive thought on origins. The Roman Catholic Church never engaged in the kind of systematic anti-evolution campaigns that so many Protestants did at the turn of the twentieth century in response to Darwin. In fact, for more than sixty years the official Catholics position has been that there is no conflict between evolution and Christianity, leading to a de facto triumph of theistic evolution among leading Catholic divines. Admitting Catholics into the dialogue would throw off both the slim majority of Young Earth Creationists and the geography of creationism (with the South and Southwest being an area of significant Catholic presence).

Or maybe the Barna Group just never thought to include Catholics. But would that really be better?

Some Standard Wisdom for Managing Canals

In 1880, long before the canal would come to fruition but while it was certainly in the minds of many, the Christian Standard came out in favor of the Panama Canal. At the time, the French were preparing to build a canal, and in fact would make an expensive and deadly attempt at it in the following decade. The Christian Standard was very much opposed to this, for reasons that display the editors' profound naivete and almost criminal patriotism.

It is nevertheless clear that the United States government, the only considerable government in the world, not committed to the war policy should guard this great highway of nations. Every such international work, however, is a great preserver of peace. The greater the interest of each nation in all other nations, the greater the interest of that nation in the preservation of peace. And there is no work in which all civilized nations would have a greater interest than in this canal. It is commerce that rules the world now, and it is commerce that always suffers in war. Therefore we may assume that a work in which the commerce of the world is directly concerned will diminish the possibilities of war. Let it be in the hands of a nation whose policy is peace, and no limit need be put on its influence on the affairs of men.

Funny. I always thought it was people, not commerce, that suffered in war.

Some Standard Wisdom of Hiring Help

Continuing with the amusing theme of anti-Irish racism picked up in the Deseret News, this week's tidbit from the Christian Standard has it all: racial, class, and religious chauvinism.

The people who need house servants find the Chinese more serviceable than any others they employ, and they have relieved them from the tyranny of the Irish girls. Mr. James Redpath says, “The real secret of this outcry against the Chinese is that the Catholic Church can no longer levy a tax on every Protestant family on $5 a month, which used to be added to the Irish girl’s wages; and the Irish girls openly avow it.”

The world has changed so much. Whereas once Americans advocated switching to Chinese domestic labor, now Americans are content to let the Chinese stay in their own country and do American labor (all the while, of course, complaining that no labor is domestic anymore).

Good Ol' Fashioned Racist Humor

Reports the Deseret News, December 26, 1855:

An Irishman, on arriving in America, took a fancy to the Yankee girls and wrote to his wife as follows: "Dear Norah--These few lines are to inform you that I died yesterday and I hope you are enjoying the same blessing. I recommend you to marry Jemmy O'Rourke, and take good care of the children. From your affectionate husband till death."

Those Irishmen. Scamps, every last one of them.

Rejoicing on Pascha

Hallelujah! Christ is risen!

I love Easter. I love it more when the Christian community, East and West, by delightful coincidence happens to be celebrating it on the same day, but on years like this, when they don't, I do my best to look at the silver lining: I get twice as many resurrected Christs. My intent had been to share another passage from John of Sinai today, but he has nothing very pleasant to say about Easter.

The gluttonous monk...counts the days to Easter, and for days in advance he gets the food ready. The slave of his belly ponders the menu with which to celebrate the feast. The servant of God, however, thinks of the graces that may enrich him.

Joy and consolation descend on the perfect when they reach the state of complete detachment. The warrior monk enjoys the heat of battle, but the slave of passion revels in the celebrations of Easter. In his heart, the glutton dreams only of food and provisions whereas all who have the gift of mourning think only of judgment and of punishment.

Well, I'm not a warrior monk, and I left my mourning on Great and Holy Saturday where it belongs. I suppose there is a reason why John of Sinai is standard Lenten reading for the Orthodox and not standard Easter reading. Though I admit the possibility that this is duplicitous of me, and I'm sure John of Sinai would accuse me of just that, but I'd like to think that I can think both of the physical feast and of the spiritual feast afforded by the resurrection. In fact, I rather like to believe that the two are related. With sacramental flavor, the feasts of holy days are intended to make tangible to our bodies and minds--more accustomed and attuned to the immediacy of physical stimuli than spiritual ones--the great joy which we have received from God. Today being the remembrance of that consummate joy of Christian existence, I intend to make that as holistic an experience as possible, letting my body partake of the joy of my heart, and vice versa. I can only hope that God consecrates that effort rather, and I don't run headlong into gluttony and dissipation.

On that note, happy Easter everyone (even those of you who thought Easter was more than a month ago).

Mourning on Great and Holy Saturday

Today Jesus is in the tomb and the Orthodox Christians around the world are mourning the savior. But this mourning cannot help but anticipate it relief, as the Paschal feast is within sight and the Lord is eager to spring from the tomb, resurrected, triumphant, and regnant forever. It is because of this that John of Sinai can speak of sorrow the way that he does.

Groans and sadness cry out to the Lord, trembling tears intercede for us, and the tears shed out of all-holy love show that our prayer has been accepted...Hold fast to the blessed and joyful sorrow...and do not cease laboring for it until it lefts you high above the things of the world to present you, a cleansed offering, to Christ.

Contemplating Death on Great and Holy Friday

Today Christians in the Orthodox world are recalling the crucifixion of Christ, perhaps the most famous death in human history and, if our testimony is to be believed, the most important one as well. Christ death is itself a victory over death, which has a rightful claim on all humanity except the undefiled Christ. With his death, Jesus has sapped death of all its finality, taken from death its sting. It is a truth which warrants endless rejoicing, but just as the victory over death was not complete until the resurrection and our freedom over death not complete until the eschatological future, so today is not a day for the ruminating on victory but for contemplating death. John of Sinai believes that the remembrance of death is a necessary product of our sins, but he also insists that it is a spiritual virtue if rightly practiced.

As thought comes before speech, so the remembrance of death and sin comes before weeping and mourning...To be reminded of death each day is to die each day; to remember one's departure from life is to provoke tears by the hour...Just as bread is the most necessary of all foods, so the thought of death is the most essential of all works. The remembrance of death brings labors and meditations, or rather, the sweetness of dishonor to those living in community...Just as some declare that the abyss is infinite, for they call it the bottomless pit, so the thought of death is limitless and brings with it chastity and activity.

Someone has said that you cannot pass a day devoutly unless you think of it as your last.

Remembering that humanity must still die keeps our sins in the forefront of our mind standing in judgment of our behavior now so that they will not stand so before the Lord in the last days. Considering our own deaths also reminds us of the inadequacy of them when compared to the atoning death of Christ, for "the day is not long enough to allow you to repay in full its debts to the Lord."

Learning Humility on Great and Holy Thursday

After a couple excellent years of sharing the date of Easter (Pascha) and one year of reasonably close proximity, the holiest day in Christianity is once again being celebrated at completely different times by Catholics and Protestants, on the one hand, and the Orthodox, on the other. While for most Americans, Maundy Thursday is just a distant March memory (if it's remember at all), but today is Great and Holy Thursday in the Orthodox Church, the day when, like their Western counterparts, the Orthodox remember the washing of the disciples feet and the last supper on the night when Jesus was betrayed. Both these events--the radical servanthood of Jesus and the betrayal of the Christ for material gain--ought to inspire in us an enduring sense of humility. Humility, unfortunately, has a bitter taste to Christians, being one of those virtues which we know we ought to have but we never really aspire for because its no fun and (unsurprisingly) garners us little praise. John of Sinai, standard reading for the Orthodox during the Lenten season, views humility differently.

As soon as the cluster of holy humility begins to flower within us, we come, after hard work, to hate all earthly praise and glory. WE rid ourselves of rage and fury; and the more this queen of virtues spreads within our souls through spiritual growth, the more we begin to regard all our good deeds as of no consequence, in fact as loathsome...We have risked so far a few words of a philosophical kind regarding the blossoming and the growth of this everblooming fruit. But those of you who are close to the Lord Himself must find out from Him what the perfect reward is of this holy virtue, since there is no way of measuring the sheer abundance of such blessed wealth, nor words nor could word convey its quality.

Humility, after all, is only the rejection of false blessings in favor of real blessings, divine blessing of eternal import. To eschew earthly praise is only to suggest that we prefer the praise of God our Father to that of the devil our enemy. It is this humility which Jesus embraced in kneeling before his disciples, and this humility which Judas rejected in turning Jesus over to be crucified.

Some Standard Wisdom for the Proactive Church Lady

Having highlighted the seedier side of Stone-Campbell views on the prospects and methods for evangelizing the newly freed slaves, let us turn now to a more egalitarian note. This comes from the Querists' Drawer where Errett and his editorial staff answered questions on belief and practice sent in by readers. Here Errett comes to the defense of some women fed up with their unmotivated fellow congregants.

“We met today for social worship and the elder no being present, the deacon and the brethren would not lead in worship; the sisters went ahead and had singing, prayer and Bible reading. Did we do right? Would it have been right for a sister to have led in the breaking bread?”

In our judgment, you did just right. And if you had added the Lord ’s supper to observances, we should still say you did right. If a company of sisters in a neighborhood in which no brethren lived were to assemble for reading and prayer, what would there be to hinder their observance of the Lord’s supper? And if brethren are present and refuse to lead in the worship, no one can charge that the women usurp authority over them, if they go forward in the performance of duties from which the men shrink. Certainly, such men should never complain because the women outstrip them in zeal and faithfulness.

It's an Arbor Day Miracle: A History of the Tennessee Badlands

Image by UNC Press

Duncan Maysilles's Ducktown Smoke: The Fight over One of the South's Greatest Environmental Disasters is not actually a history of the Tennessee Badlands so much as it is a history of the legal battles being fought over the smelter smoke that created the badlands. Consequently, for those unaccustomed to environmental or legal history, the narrative can be quite dry. The discussion of legal principles and courtroom delay tactics, interspersed with obscure Latin, is spiced up only with the occasional turn to the chemical reaction of sulfur smoke with water in the air and the resultant effects on top soil. All in all, they are about the two dullest historical imaginable. Yet Maysilles crafts such an interesting narrative about such an unjustly obscure subject, that the curious reader can bear with the limits of his genre long enough to see the story to its end. The result is a fascinating little book that should be of interest to legal historians, environmental historians, and those who, like me, found themselves living right in the backyard of one of the most curious environmental anomalies in America.

The Ducktown Basin, Maysilles explains, was a geography that cried out for disaster. The rich copper deposits right on the surface were too tempting for miners to ignore. Transportation deficiencies made the raw materials too expensive to transport off site to smelt. The sulfur content of the rocks was unusually high, creating unusually toxic smelting smoke. The geography of the basin was such that the smoke, once in the air, could not escape and dissipate into the atmosphere. The moist climate of the temperate rainforest meant that the chemicals were constantly being delivered back into the the soil in the form of toxic rain. The resulting concentration of chemicals in the air and water stripped the soil, killed the trees, and launched a legal battle between the state of Georgia and the mining companies that made it all the way to the Supreme Court on multiple occasions.

Intrigued as I was by this untold story and fortunate enough to be going to east Tennessee for a visit, I took the opportunity to drive down to Ducktown and see what remained of the infamous badlands created through ignorance, negligence, and geographical misfortune. The answer: very little. At the Ducktown museum, which commemorates both the mine and the unusual topography it created, the woman behind the desk took me with pride to a satellite photo of the region from some decades ago. She recalled with pride, "The only two man made things you could see from space were the Great Wall of China and the Tennessee Badlands." The nostalgia poured out of her as she remembered a time when, stripped of all flora and fauna, she need not worry about snakes or mosquitoes like her neighbors outside the basin in the lush Tennessee mountain forests. "It's too bad," she told me, "because we just look like everyone else now." Maysilles tells a different story, one of workers who had to have separate car for work and everything else because just by driving into the basin the air would begin to peel away the paint. He shares, perhaps for the first time for modern eyes, the stories of small subsistence farmers who had their land stripped of its fertility and, when they protested, found themselves fired from the mines where they worked to supplement their income. He tells of a single woman who spent years in court seeking damages from the mining companies and won, only to have her settlement reduced to one dollar on appeal. Memory is truly a curious phenomenon, and it is difficult to sort out whose story should take precedence: Maysilles, the outside critic, or the woman at the museum who grew up in Ducktown and whose husband was a mine worker.

In any case, the story does not linger in the confusing days of the Tennessee Badlands. Cooperative ventures by the government and the various industries who have controlled the mining companies over the years have struggled to make the basin green again. These herculean efforts to reforest have been largely rewarded, though not immediately and not without struggle and expense. Driving over the crest and into the basin, we noticed no difference between the forests without and the forests within. The Ducktown Basin is teeming with life again, even snakes and mosquitoes. As the reforestation began to take hold, many in the basin, I suspect the woman at the museum among them, lobbied to have a piece of the badlands preserved as a memorial. It was actually this memorial that I had traveled out to see, a relic of the way the basin had looked when it was an environmental catastrophe and a tourist attraction. Here then, is the arbor day miracle. The reclamation efforts have been so successful, life so insistent on reclaiming the dead basin, that it is a struggle to keep the last little bit of badlands in its pristine, unnatural state. Here it is, as it appeared at the time of my visit, trying to fight off the invasion of trees, but failing so completely that the little saplings are springing up even in the steep slope that terminates in a flooded mineshaft:



Maysilles has given the curious and patient reader a wonderful glimpse into a largely ignored subject. His interest is primarily in the way the legal battle continues to be cited in major environmental cases today. Mine was in the hidden treasure that had been in my backyard all the years I lived in Tennessee but that I had never known about until I left. A law student told me recently that she loved the way Maysilles had made obscure legal principles comprehensible, in ways that even her text books couldn't. Whatever it may be, if something about Ducktown has peaked your curiosity, I highly encourage picking up this book. I also wholeheartedly recommend that anyone in the region make a journey down to Ducktown to explore. The drive is beautiful (no matter what direction you come from), the community is quaint, and the history is engaging.

And if you should stop in and see the precious little old woman at the museum desk, tell her you read about her online and that there are still people fascinated by her community, even if they "just look like everyone else now."

Some Standard Wisdom for Converting Blacks

Less than a month into this series, I already feel the need to sound the reminder that in quoting some of these articles, my intent is not to endorse or make light of or even to stand in judgment of some of the darker sides of late nineteenth century thought. This warrants particular restatement with the following article by J. W. Crenshaw. It would be easy to read the below and assume either that my intent is racist or callous or anarchonistically judgmental. It is none of these. Instead, the following article sounds, among other things, a pair of themes that I have tried to reiterate here in various ways. The first is the need to complicate the narrative of the Civil War that we all learned in school: the North invaded the South to free the slaves and give blacks their rights. Historians have almost entirely abandoned this carefully constructed fiction, but the public still casts the Civil War in these terms, failing to see the stark racism and paternalism that dominated in the North no less than the South. The other is the sinister overtones that education often takes on in the hands of progressives. It's a message that has ongoing merit.

Even if neither of these themes were present, however, the following is important to read both for those in the Stone-Campbell Movement because it is part of our collective history the consequences of which we continue to live with in the de facto racial segregation of our churches and for Americans in general who need to be forced to read chapters of our history which serve neither to glorify US nationalism or to provide the starting point in a narrative of national redemption. What follows in "Difficulties in Christianizing the Colored Race" is precisely the shades of grey that we all need to grapple with in the formation of our historical consciousness.

As to what the future of the colored race of America is to be, socially, politically or religiously, we do not believe any one can conjecture with any degree of accuracy. Naturally superstitious and with their race prejudices to contend with, we approach them more from a sense of Christian duty than from any hope of achieving grand results. To succeed in our mission work among them we must agree upon some decided policy. If properly approached, we do not believe that there is a better missionary field in the world.

Experience has proven that we can not reach them through the preaching of white men. The colored leaders now, excepting a few, are ignorant and superstitious. In what direction, then, does hope lie? Certainly not in this shouting generation. The hope and the only hope, speaking from experience, is in the children. And when we educate a few colored men, as we have been doing for this work, we must not measure their success by converts made. The children, who are just learning to read, are the ones most benefited. Those whom we send out must be impressed with the importance of continuing to sound into the ears of the auditors that Christianity is something more than shouting the clothes off in the first part of the night, and serving Satan the balance of the night. We need to select young men of good character to educate them for this work. There are brethren among us who have the means to help build such a school as we need for this purpose. With the plain gospel plea that we have, if loving liberal hearts, could be interested in this work, in the next generation many of the difficulties that now so hinder our progress could be surmounted, and thousands of this unfortunate race could be Christianized.

Brethren, this is a question worthy of the attention of every Christian.

The Wisdom of J. Gresham Machen

J. Gresham Machen is one of my intellectual heroes and the man at whose metaphorical feet I (like so many others) first learned Greek. Here he is on the anti-intellectualism of his fellow conservatives:

The Church is perishing to-day through the lack of thinking not through an excess of it.

In Other News

Thanks to the DPLA, images like this are accessible to all!

The DPLA has launched, yesterday while I was too busy presenting at a conference to join in the festive announcements across the history blogosphere. The DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) is an ambitious project which casts itself as the first step toward a global, free access library that will include the fullest possible amount of material (i.e. everything not covered by copyright). It is a social leveling project as much as an intellectual endeavor, allowing students at community colleges, in poorer regions of this country and eventually the world, and all the academically disadvantaged to have access to archives at places like Harvard. Relying on a variety of charitable institutions, the DPLA in its present form is a centralizing service that allows scholars--or curious web browsers--to search across a wide range of participating institutions in a single place and be linked directly to the material in those archives. It promises be, whether or not it fulfills its utopian vision of an equal academic play field, a tremendous resource for research (even as it is also likely to thwart the efforts of young scholars trying to think up excuses to get research funding to visit Boston). A link to the DPLA can now be found enshrined on my Resources page.

In less exciting news, the church institutional continues to disgrace itself on a variety of fronts. The Episcopal Church has won a "victory" in its civil case against itself before the Virginia Supreme Court.

The panel affirmed a lower court’s decision that the 3,000-member congregation, which voted in 2006 to leave the Episcopal Church, did not have the right to keep the sprawling property known as the Falls Church.

The Falls Church property is one of the country’s largest Episcopal churches and is a central landmark in downtown Falls Church.

The breakaway congregation, now called the Falls Church Anglican, has been worshiping in the Bishop O’Connell High School auditorium in Arlington County while it sought to overturn the Fairfax County Circuit Court decision from last year.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court affirmed that the property was rightly given to the mainline denomination but said some of the nearly $3 million in church coffers belongs to the Falls Church Anglican congregation.

I put "victory" in scare quotes because it hardly seems appropriate to call either side victorious when both have so miserably failed the basic standard of Christian charity and forbearance, applied particularly to this situation by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6. "Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?" Probably because Paul's churches never had anything like three million dollars in its "church coffers." If it did, maybe Paul wouldn't have been so quick on the draw with that "to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat to you" nonsense.

The Orthodox Church global is having its own struggles. At the end of a long saga that has witnessed significantly more diligence than Catholic handling of sexual misconduct, Bishop Matthias has resigned. The head of the Chicago diocese of the Orthodox Church in America could no longer bear the odium of his sexual misconduct scandal and finally yielded to pressure from above to step down. In a deferential address--a momentary lapse from his conspiratorial theories about a liberal plot to manufacture his ouster--he expressed hope that "my stepping down will end the ordeal, allowing the diocese to move toward healing," and asked "for everyone's forgiveness for my failings, my mistakes and sins." He then graciously offered to forgive everyone else, for what is not entirely clear. Maybe he forgives the woman who misunderstood his "inappropriate words that I thought were being received as humorous." That certainly is the way this sincere apology feels: "I am sorry that my kindness and generosity to this person was viewed with suspicion and ulterior motives." Growing up, when I made apologies like that I got slapped. I suppose being stripped of your diocese is the ecclesiastical equivalent.

In Prague, a much bigger fish has been fried by a much sexier scandal. Metropolitan Krystof, the head of the Orthodox Church in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, has stepped down after scandal broke about his lascivious life. The prelate is alleged to have had an affair with the wife of one of his priest's and of fathering numerous illegitimate children. With all the talk of progress in Europe, it seems they are still very much medieval over there.

Some Standard Wisdom for Purifying Politics

Some of the most interesting and surprising stories in the Christian Standard are in the "Current Topics" section, a kind of miscellany that includes comments on current news, politically charged barbs, and sarcastic quips. Here is a tidbit about one of what have probably been hundreds of failed political reform movements (should we read in this a prediction of how history will treat the Occupy movement?). Whatever its ultimate fate, the editorial staff at the Standard had high hopes for what seems to be a fairly simple proposition:

We hail with joy the Independent Scratchers, whose mission is a purification of politics. It is urged that while the worst elements of a party may secure the nomination of unfit men, nothing but the apathy of the best elements will secure their election. T he independent scratchers propose to defeat those men—and only those—on a ticket who are known to be corrupt. This will force the nomination of honest men, and be an effectual “brake” on machine politics. It has already done effective service, and is destined to play an increasing part in our public affairs.

Denying the Holocaust: Albany Teacher Suspended for Teaching Nazism

The Nazis are stealing your children!

Nazis are bad. I learned that lesson in high school like everyone else, though, let's be honest, we all knew that Nazis were bad before we ever made it to high school. Nevertheless, that is the lesson I was taught. Nothing more; nothing less. At Albany High School in New York, one teacher tried to take this lesson a little further in three sophomore English classes:

As part of the 10th grade English persuasive writing assignment, the Albany High students were asked to pretend their teacher is a Nazi government official who must be convinced they believe Jews are the source of Germany's problems: "You must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich!"

The teacher is on leave, facing possible termination, because school officials and government leaders were appalled. Said Superintendent Vanden Wyngaard, "You asked a child to support the notion that the Holocaust was justified, that's my struggle. It's an illogical leap for a student to make." Said New York City Councilmen David Greenfield, "The teacher responsible for coming up with and assigning students with this task must be held accountable for attempting to indoctrinate children with anti-Semitic beliefs." Said Director of the Jewish Federation Shelly Shapiro "It's not how you teach about how prejudice has led to genocide."

Well it certainly was not how I was taught that prejudice led to genocide. I learned, "Prejudice leads to genocide. It happened with the Nazis. So don't be prejudiced like the Nazis." And that was it. Something tells me that Shapiro is short-selling the pedagogical value of what is happening here. These students, in addition to learning a valuable lesson in English (because no creative writer has only had to write the perspective of laudable characters with whom everyone agrees), would take away from this assignment a powerful and deep understanding of not merely the tired truism that "prejudice has led to genocide" but an experience of precisely how it led to genocide. It teaches the student, in the most basic way, what it was to be a civilian in Nazi Germany, under a government that flooded the intellectual marketplace with antisemitic propaganda and expected you to learn a new cultural script to mirror it. The applications extend far beyond merely a better grasp of the history of 1930s Germany to a life lesson in the way propaganda continues to be employed and continues to shape the thinking of citizens around the world. Some clever honors student might even have concluded that the consumption of media in contemporary America might be shaping his or her thought in similar ways.

Renowned scholar of religion and American culture Stephen Prothero draws much the same conclusion:

I think it’s Greenfield who is lacking in common sense here. And it's the superintendent who is being illogical.

I suppose it is possible that the teacher is a closet Nazi attempting to reconstruct the Third Reich in Albany. But isn’t it more likely that he or she is trying to teach students about the dangers of propaganda and the horrors of the Holocaust?

Consider the student who felt “horrible” about doing this assignment. Is that really a bad thing? How are high school students today supposed to feel about Nazism and the Holocaust?

Apparently, what they are supposed to feel (and think) is nothing, because the lesson high school teachers are going to take away from this fiasco is to avoid this topic at all costs, lest they risk losing their jobs.

Prothero points to a further dimension of "this fiasco," the special place of the Holocaust in the American imagination. Historian John Fea has pointed out that if the principles espoused here to teaching the Holocaust were universally applied, teachers could no longer teach the thinking of Puritans who killed witches, settlers who killed Native Americans, southerners who kept slaves, nativist who oppressed Catholic immigrants, etc. What a moralistic history we are left with! And an incomplete history at that, a half history. Of course, no one would ever suggest hamstringing historians on those topics because they are not blessed by the kind of special pleading that surrounds the Holocaust. There is no villain like Hitler, no enormity like the Holocaust, and no racism like antisemitism. That, in the end, is the kind of lesson we were taught by the two-dimensional treatment of Nazism in school. No depth, no perspective, because the history of Nazism is alone a truly simple matter in history. It is a lesson against thinking for most students, and it is a tragedy that this teacher should suffer for bringing thought--in the form of an entertaining thought experiment the like of which I never enjoyed in high school or college--back into the subject of Nazism.

I hope the teacher is reinstated, because termination over something so ridiculous is unthinkable. I also hope the teacher is fired, because to take any punishment, even a slap on the wrist, and then return willingly to that environment of educational repression strikes me as a tacit admission that the teacher actually did something wrong. Of course, the teacher is probably sitting at home now worrying about paying bills, working long enough to retire some day, and coping with social ostracism. So what I really hope is that whatever the teacher wants happens. It's a shame that it had to go this far.

Parsing Justice: Jill Lindsey Harrison's Pesticide Drift

Image by MIT Press

In the course of batting around with a colleague the possibility of doing a paper about a biblical approach to environmental justice, I picked up Jill Lindsey Harrison's Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice and, candidly, was disappointed. For those who are not familiar with the environmental justice movement, as I wasn't until recently, it is an attempt to correct what are seen as deficiencies in earlier environmental activism. It does this by recognizing the overlap between environmental and social justice problems, especially the disproportionate environmental burden born by those who are socially and economically marginalized and the same peoples' lack of voice in crafting environmental policy. Though the movement has been around for decades, and gained steam in the nineties, recently historians (like Ted Steinberg and Thomas G. Andrews), sociologists (like Harrison), and activists have begun to stress more and more that when environmental disasters "strike," they affect the poor and racial minorities more acutely than anyone else. It is a trenchant critique of the system, one that demands the attention of any and all concerned either with environmental ethics or with social equity. I certainly do not want to imply by my critique of Harrison that there is some flaw in the environmental justice perspective. My problem with Pesticide Drift is more academic and less foundational.

Harrison's book is not, first and foremost, an apology for environmental justice, though she does more than her fair share of preaching. Instead, she turns her critical eye on the movement's own perception of its place in the greater environmental discussion to point out an error in thinking among environmental justice advocates.

My aim in this book is to both uphold and amend this EJ argument. This book pivots around...a case that illustrates in sharp, present detail how the workings of "raw power" shift the burden of pesticide pollution to the bodies of California's most marginalized and vulnerable residents. That said, I also challenge the claim that environmental inequalities exist because mainstream (i.e., non-EJ) environmental politics are devoid of justice. I contend instead that environmental inequalities emerge from the cruelty and malfeasance, but also from the ways in which many well-intentioned actors are engaging in efforts to make California agriculture more environmentally sustainable.

Or, in other words, the road to the toxic contamination of Hispanic communities is paved with good intentions. It strikes me as something of an obvious point, but one that undoubtedly still needed to be made considering how haughty activists can be in the presentation of their causes as just and their methods as the lone means of achieving that justice. So, with the aim of exploring how alternate theories of justice have unintentionally collaborated with pesticides to create an environmental and social disaster, Harrison gives an overview of the pesticide drift problem in southern California and the many fateful ways that individuals, industry, and the regulatory bodies of the state have failed to prevent it.

Except that Harrison never actually proves her central claim, that there are other theories of justice operating in the various responses to environmental issues. That is not, of course, to say that she is wrong. Her proposition, having been stated, is so self-evident that it undoubtedly will stand without a proper defense. Her book, however, lacks a raison d'être without it. Harrison proposes the existence of two alternate theories of justice: the libertarian and communitarian. The former sees justice as primarily concerned with upholding personal property rights. The latter holds the community is best positioned to locate and enact justice. It is a simple taxonomy, so simple that it elucidates nothing for the reader. It would be just as convincing to say that a libertarian sense of freedom is centered on private property, or a libertarian conception of personal well-being. Or you could leave out "justice" altogether and say that libertarians focus on private property. Communitarians focus on the community. It says nothing about "justice" to collapse an entire worldview into it: Christian justice is cristocentric, utilitarian justice stresses utility. Harrison had the opportunity to explore the notions of justice--the ideas, the impulses, the cultural drivers--that inspire these alternate responses to environmental issues, but she declined to pursue any deeper than the most superficial definition of what "justice" might mean outsider her own movement.

Instead, she spends the majority of her time taking libertarianism and communitarianism to task more generally. (After all, not having defined their visions of justice with any rigor, it would be hard to do otherwise.) Libertarians have a false hope in the power of the person working in concert with the market. Individuals, while laudable in their efforts to farm sustainably, inevitably lack the ability to affect such a systemic issue as pesticide drift and struggle with the economic disincentive to do so. Industry, less laudable (why is not clear) has an even more powerful economic disincentive to create sustainable farming techniques, not when the pesticide industry is a multi-billion dollar quasi-monopoly for a handful of companies. Politicians, incentivized by industry, are content to shirk off their responsibility in exchange for campaign contributions. Communitarians are similarly naive in their assumption that a community can correct a structural issue in society and achieve social justice. Even agrifood advocates, the rank and file of the sustainable agriculture activists reading Michael Pollan and shopping at Whole Foods, reflect the kind of wealthy middle class assumptions about choice that cannot function for the impoverished communities that bear the brunt of environmental injustice. The problem with both mindsets is that problems of the size and scale of pesticide drift "require substantial government intervention" (189).*

Harrison is more than willing to set out detailed proposals for how to enact the environmental justice vision of justice on a national level, and for those who are interested only in exploring environmental justice policy, I can with all sincerity recommend (at least the last chapter of) Pesticide Drift. But for anyone expecting to have presented a compelling new intellectual framework for considering the way justice operates in environmental politics, Harrison proves an unforgivable tease. The book which will explore justice as an environmental concept in pre-EJ environmentalists, in industry, or in alternate political philosophies cries out to be written. Perhaps, if time and good fortune permit, we may yet make a contribution to that discussion by considering the implications a biblical approach to justice might have for environmental justice. In the meantime, Harrison has promised to fill a void and only stepped in to show us how empty it still is.

*(It is here that the regular reader will expect me to launch into a tirade about the gross inadequacy of the state to achieve anything of lasting good. I did just that in my personal conversations with my colleague who, like Harrison, seems to believe that after fifty years of intensive federal environmental legislation, the reason we are not seeing the kind of improvements we want is because we are simply not surrendering enough power to the state. I won't distract myself with that nonsense here.)

Japan through a Lens

The New York Review of Books blog has a fascinating article on the work of Hamaya Hiroshi, a famous Japanese photographer. The article is in honor of an exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (if anyone is fortunate enough to be in the region) and includes some really exemplary samples of of his work (which I won't share here, because I am not all that confident in my grasp of fair use). For the historian, however, the article holds an interest all its own as it explores the way art and artists can be instrumental in the construction of national identity and, consequently, complicit in some of the more atrocious features of a nation's military and cultural imperialism. This is not an indictment of Hayama, of course, but an invitation into the world behind the photographs and their continuing aesthetic appeal. The parallels in other cultures are obvious. The article offers a contemporary examples of Nazis plundering Polish art looking for their own Teutonic heritage. Norman Rockwell springs to mind as an artist who constructed as much as reflected American national, cultural identity. But the example of Hayama suggests that art can work in more subtle ways:

Hamaya was born in a plebeian district of Tokyo, and his early photographs of the 1930s are of its typical denizens: geisha, beggars, prostitutes, and burlesque dancers. Typical urban scenes, in other words. His rejection of this world for the primitive life of peasants in the Snow Country is an interesting example of how important art can emerge from questionable motives....

This was the time when, encouraged by a famous Japanese businessman with ethnographic interests, Hamaya first set off for the Snow Country. The idea was to document the true “Japanese spirit.” Living among the northeastern peasants, recording their dignity in the face of hardship, was for him a “return to Japan.”

I will let you see where it goes from there, but the article and the exhibit both strike me as worthwhile for more than just the stunning photographs included. It is unfortunate that one is so much easier to access than the other.

Some Standard Wisdom for Avoiding Epidemics

Continuing with the theme of amusing ourselves at the expense of the level of scientific and technical knowledge in 1880, the Christian Standard published extensive quotes from and commentary on an article by E. W. Cushing which first appeared in the International Review:

We are apparently on the climax—which arrives in 1882—of a cycle of epidemics, which coincides with the sun spots of some eleven years and a fraction. As he argues, it is a time of great disturbances in temperatures, etc….After a carefully prepared table of the great epidemics known in history, which are shown to correspond very clearly with the semi-changes, he concludes: “Now what can these general influences be, this general cause, this morbific influence of an unknown nature? Does the earth itself change periodically? No. Does the mass of air or water change? No. What can change them? The force, the heat, the energy which is derived directly from the sun. Does this change regularly, periodically, and at intervals corresponding with those of this pestilence? It certainly does; and all these strange natural phenomena which we have seen to have been observed in all ages as the forerunners or accompaniments of epidemics are now known to depend on, or at least to coincide with, the changes of solar energy corresponding with the sun spot cycle. Here is certainly the post hoc; shall we not admit the propter hoc?”

Depending on what the fraction is in "eleven years and a fraction," I fear we may be due for another period of epidemic disease in 2013. Oh wait.

Robert E. Lee on History and Hope

Here is another intriguing quote from Robert E. Lee that I picked up in my readings (I believe, again, from Charles Reagan Wilson):

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them; nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite of failures, which I lament, or errors, which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present state of affairs, do I despair of the future. The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires so impatient, the work of progress so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble, the life of humanity is so long, and that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave, and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

I agree with Lee up until he invokes history. History has taught me everything except to hope in our feeble means of aiding progress. What discourages me is not the photograph of existence that I will experience before I wither like grass in a field, although it certainly would be enough. It is my understanding of history, of seeing how far we have advanced in the art we have made of sin, that makes me despair of progress. Though not of the future; on that Lee and I agree. But my confidence in the future is not based on history or progress but on the providence that Lee so emptily evokes. It is because I can mimic the words of another southern preacher quoted in Wilson: "His ends embrace the universe; His purposes are co-extensive with Time." I do not give myself over to despair precisely because, unlike Lee, I abandon any belief that man is a causal agent in progress or in attaining the object of our collective hope. My hope is in the Lord.

Some Standard Wisdom for Curing Scoliosis

To fill the gaping hole left in my heart, not to mention my schedule, by Dorothy Day, I am inaugurating a new weekly series today derived from the Christian Standard. Founded in 1866 by a group of progressively-minded Disciples (including future president James A. Garfield), the Christian Standard was the flagship paper for the growth and mainstreaming of the Disciples Movement. It continues publishing into the present.

My recent research has brought me into intimate contact with the 1880 editions of the paper while it was under the headship of its first and greatest editor, Isaac Errett. I tried desperately to focus exclusively on the development of church-state thought among the Disciples, as my research dictated, but my attention was constantly diverted to the dozens of amusing, intriguing, and insulting articles that appeared constantly in the pages of the Standard. It is those articles, unrelated to my research and, more often than not, unrelated to much of anything at all, that I propose to share. Some will likely be entertaining, either because they were intended to be or because they titillate our need to feel superior by virtue of our historical progress--as the one today does. Others will stimulate the curiosity of those of us who have an interest in Disciples history, particularly as it pertains to ongoing controversies within the churches of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Still others will offend. It is critical to remember that in quoting those articles, I intend neither an endorsement of the expressed view nor a judgmental critique. I present them as a historian hoping to elucidate key issues in the history of a religious movement and of the broader American culture of the post-bellum nineteenth century.

A wonderful starting point seems to be this bit of medical advice, pilfered by the Christian Standard from an article by Dr. Dio Lewis in the Congregationalist entitled "Crooked Spines."

The only way to straighten the spine, no matter what the curvature may be, is to strengthen the muscles of the spine. And the best possible way to do this is to carry a weight on the head. The best weight is a sheepskin bag containing from ten to fifty pounds of sand. the bag should be not quite full, so it will fit down upon the head and balance well. The weight may at first be light, but soon it should be from thirty to fifty pounds for a man, and from ten to thirty for a child or woman. The greatest weight you can carry will do no harm. In the morning while reading or studying carry this bag, walking slowly about with the spine erect, and chin close to the neck until you are tired. Do the same thing going to bed at night. In one month you will experience happy results. Your neck will be stronger, and the spine straighter and stronger. In twelve months you will lay up such treasures of straight strong spine as will last you a long time.

The New Pope on Easter

Most people are getting a little weary of hearing about Pope Francis. (I'm not; I'm getting weary of people complaining about how much they are talking about him.) Whose feet is he washing? What did he say about gay marriage? Is he talking to Kirill? How significant is his provenance? His order? His papal name? Etc. It is easy to forget in all this interpretive tumult that the pope is still the spiritual icon for one seventh of the world's population, one who has a message that is not hidden beneath layers of ambiguous action and mysterious origin. He offers these wonderful thoughts for the Easter Vigil:

Dear brothers and sisters, let us not be closed to the newness that God wants to bring into our lives! Are we often weary, disheartened and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won’t be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive if only we open ourselves to him.

Here is the essence of Easter, distilled and repackaged to meet the world's needs in this moment. The conquest over death is not merely a soteriological mechanism but a testimony to the efficacy of divine action. There is no recession that is more destructive than death, no sorrow which can match its permanence, no wound which can mirror its absoluteness. It is the content of our greatest tragedies and the aim and consequence of our most viscous sins. Yet God took it and transformed it, not into something marginally less terrible but into life itself. It is precisely because of this confidence display of power that we can turn to salvation, that we can expect our own deaths--the individual and the corporate deaths, the physical and the existential deaths--to be transformed ultimately into the eternal life promised for those who love him. In a world acutely aware of its own sufferings and dogged by its own perpetual inability to cure them through its chosen devices, the pope has echoed the psalmist who finds in the fidelity and potency of God the redemptive power of hope: "This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life."

The Cows, a Sequel to Hitchcock's the Birds

Photo by Ryan Thompson

Remember that cow that got shot outside the primary school in the UK? You know, the one that got shot, and then got shot again, and then got shot again, and then was finally killed? The one the police insist they definitely did not miss, because it is better to be inhumane than inaccurate? Of course you remember--unless you're from Oklahoma, in which case you're excused. Well, after promising to take seriously the "significant public interest" in the not-at-all-disproportionate response--four marksmen, one sergeant, five officers, four PCSOs, five patrol cars, and a police van--to a cow loose in a residential area, the Lincolnshire Police issued a statement:

"The animal's presence in a residential area posed a serious risk to safety. A significant amount of resources were committed to containing the animal. The intention was to safely remove the animal from the area without destroying it if at all possible.

"After more than two hours of working towards this aim, it became apparent that it was not achievable. Several options, including sedation, were considered. The RSPCA and the owner of the animal were consulted.

"As more members of the public turned up to watch the incident, prompted by online commentary on the situation, the animal became increasingly distressed and there were fears that it would jump further fences and re-enter a residential area."

A compelling argument.

Meanwhile, on the continent, the Austrians are dealing with a full blown cowpocalypse.

A police statement says the 43 steers defied attempts by police and volunteer firefighters to recapture them after wandering off Thursday and heading toward the Upper Austrian town of Freistadt. After being chased away from the railway station, they endangered motorists by stampeding onto a two-lane highway before running into a town suburb.

Two firefighters who tried to stop them were injured and needed hospital treatment.

The statement says 18 of the animals remain on the loose Friday. The rest have been corralled or tranquilized.

Oh, the humanity! Of all people, the Austrians should have a keen cultural awareness of the danger of appeasement techniques like corralling and tranquilizing. Lives are on the line, and the casualties are racking up. After two hours days of trying to control these stampeding menaces, surely it is time to take off the kid gloves and bring in the amateur marksmen with the seventy-two rounds necessary to fell eighteen cows. The real question for Americans is, if Austria solicits military aid in this time of crisis, should we send troops or should Obama just call in a drone strike?

The Wisdom of John Burroughs

An interesting thought from nineteenth century naturalist John Burroughs:

Truly, man made the city, and after he became sufficiently civilized, not afraid of solitude, and knew on what terms to live with nature, God promoted him to life in the country.

Cow Shot, Shot Again, Then Killed

In front of an elementary school, it would appear:

Police were slammed yesterday after shooting dead an escaped cow in a primary school car park. The Belgian blue went on the run for almost three hours after fleeing its field.

Armed officers eventually cornered the terrified beast outside a primary school. Marksmen were ordered to shoot to kill and opened fire with a high-powered rifle.

But the cow survived the first two shots and did not die until it was hit by two further bullets 15 minutes later. Horrified locals accused police of animal cruelty...

"It kicked its back legs for another five or 10 minutes.

“The so-called marksman was less than 100 yards away. It was a joke.”

I'm not sure what about the cornered cow was so threatening. Or why they needed to take a coffee break between shooting it the first couple of times and finally killing it. I'm not sure why they don't have tranquilizers. I thought the police weren't as trigger happy in the UK as they are here. So much about this doesn't make sense to me.

Almost as tragic was the decision of the journalist to caption the picture in the article "Udder disgrace."

Should Vegans Drive Cars?

It's the question that never needed to be asked, and Rupert Read of Talking Philosophy has answered it. In reviewing Craig Taylor's Moralism: A Study of a Vice, Read explores a number of philosophical and ethical quandaries that inspire critical reflection, in addition to a desire to find Taylor's book. In line with Read's assessment of Taylor, my own assessment of Read is that he is largely but not universally correct. Take for instance the titular question, posed by Read in response to Taylor:

On p. 147, Taylor criticises an SUV-driver with a “No blood for oil” bumper-sticker. An easy criticism to make, but perhaps too easy. There seems a tacit danger at this of Taylor descending into moralism here towards individuals. For: It is a perfectly legitimate move for an individual to make under many circumstances to say that they would do something as part of a collective that they are not obliged to try to do merely as an individual. To think otherwise is to think in a way that is naïve or insufficiently politically smart. . . . An example is that it may well be legitimate to continue to fly and to enjoy the subsidies that are given to flying, while campaigning against those subsidies. To insist that this is hypocrisy and that one should instead have to go by train even when the train is far more expensive (and thus drains away funds that could otherwise be used for campaigning with) is moralistic and anti-political. (A more extreme example is roads, which were often made with some ingredients taken from non-human animals. Does this mean that vegans should refuse to use roads? An absurd conclusion.)

Like so many authors and thinkers, Read is kind enough here to answer his own question, thus saving the readers from the onerous task of formulating the answers for ourselves. Nevertheless, I wonder what precisely is absurd about the conclusion that someone who is principally opposed to the commodification of sentient life, someone who not only does not eat meat or animal product but who does not wear wool or decorate with ivory or use cosmetics tested on kittens should also not drive on roads made out of animals. The implication of Read's logic, both with the example of veganism and the choice between planes and trains is that inconvenience (on an existential level) and utilitarianism (on an ethical level) collaborate to justify various incompatible moral choices. Because we cannot conceive of the absurdity of some people refusing to use roads, we assume that there ethics must be sufficiently sophisticated to handle the dissonance created by the common sin of killing animals for food and clothes and killing animals for transportation infrastructure. That hardly seems a necessary conclusion. Rather, the burden is on vegan to demonstrate such a sophisticated ethos to justify the apparent hypocrisy. The nasty thing about ethics is that they demand difficult action, if they are worth their philosophical weight in gold. When life and ethics collide, the responsible solution is to either change your life to suit your ethics or to change your ethics to suit your life. The latter is the more common course, naturally, but Read seems to prefer a third path wherein people continue to live in the self-delusion that they are consistent moral actors while behaving in morally inconsistent ways.

Vegans Organize Protest on top of Dead Animals [photo by hughesdk]

 

The distinction between individual and collective action seems equally problematic in that it assumes different standards of conduct for individuals and societies. Societies, unfortunately, have no real existence, not in the way that individuals do. (I realize that this is a ideological judgment on my part, but I trust it is one that will be widely shared.) A society is an abstraction, something constructed which has neither real existence nor uniform existence in the diverse minds in which it is conceived. As something which exists more in the realm of language than actuality, it cannot be held to ethical standards and therefore cannot be a separate ethical realm of action. If it is wrong for me to kill Bob, it is wrong for Rick and I to get together and kill Bob. It is wrong for Rick and I to round up a posse to kill Bob, and it is wrong for Rick and I to vote Barry in to office to kill Bob with a remote control stealth bomber being operated by some marine on an Xbox. My actions do not suddenly become more or less moral based on the number of people complicit in them. It is, of course, possible to construct certain teleological systems of ethics that oppose certain behaviors on a national scale by virtue merely of the scope of those actions, but those strike me as rather blatantly self-serving. Nations cannot do anything any more than societies can. Only people, those free rational agents Read is critical of (perhaps not unreasonably), do things. Whether they do them alone or in concert seems less significant than what they are doing. And if what they are doing is personally contributing to the demand for oil which has prompted the nation to collectively decide to invade oil rich companies, then in some infinitesimal but real way, they condemn themselves with their own critique.

The Necessity of Redefining Marriage

Ben Witherington has recently commented on a CNN article which lays out, in my opinion, perhaps the strongest case against gay marriage from a strictly secular standpoint. I mention Witherington rather than going directly to the article because he includes many theological considerations which readers here are likely to find interesting. My main concern, however, is the argument of Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis.

Marriage is far more than your emotional bond with “your Number One person,” to quote same-sex marriage proponent John Corvino. Just as the act that makes marital love also makes new life, so marriage itself is a multilevel — bodily as well as emotional — union that would be fulfilled by procreation and family life. That is what justifies its distinctive norms — monogamy, exclusivity, permanence — and the concept of marital consummation by conjugal intercourse.

...All human beings are equal in dignity and should be equal before the law. But equality only forbids arbitrary distinctions. And there is nothing arbitrary about maximizing the chances that children will know the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond. A strong marriage culture serves children, families and society by encouraging the ideal of giving kids both a mom and a dad.

The authors make a compelling observation that, legally, marriage does much more than standardize a primary relationship (e.g. defaulting who ought to be your medical proxy or to whom your possession belong in the event of your death). If this was its sole function, there would be no need for the legal structure which has been built up around marriage, one which institutionalizes matters of monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence. If it were about formalizing a person's primary affective attachment, it should be as easy to change as a will and open to the possibility of multiple equal levels of attachment. Which it isn't; at least not legally.

In fact, American culture has largely done away with these pillars of marital theory, particularly permanence. It is not quite as easy to change a spouse as it is to change a beneficiary in your will, but it is done with strikingly more regularity nonetheless. Sexual exclusivity is eroding with a startlingly rapidity, so that primary relationships which have not yet been formalized are rarely assumed to be sexually exclusive and even married persons have a wealth of ways to violate the bounds of sexual exclusivity with impunity. (Someone care to look up statistics about the use of pornography by married men?) Only monogamy remains largely uncontested both legally and culturally, although the authors do point out the swelling phenomenon of polyamory.

The solution seems to me to require a redefinition of marriage rather than a feigned conservative defense of the grand old institution. The heterosexual marriage characterized by monogamy, fidelity, and permanence exists more as a convenient fiction than a staid bulwark against social decay. If we care about a definition of marriage that includes these principles than a cultural redefinition of marriage is in order, one that would accord with and allow for the revitalization of marriage laws. If, however, we recognize the cultural shift behind which the law has lagged, then the legal redefinition of marriage seems to be in order, not only to exclude the heterosexual requirement, but also all laws which are artifacts of a time when marriage was permanent, monogamous, and exclusive.

My preference has, traditionally, been for the latter, but only because it divorces what is legal from what is ethical in a way that neatly accords with my view of the world. More to the point, short of a spontaneous, universal, and enduring cultural revolution that recaptures the historic conception of marriage, changing the law to reflect culture seems to be the prudent course.

(None of which, of course, comments at all on the permissibility of homosexuality in Christian ethics.)

The Question of Extraterrestrial Life (less than) Definitively Settled

I am inclined to think that there is no life on other planets. I have heard repeatedly the statements about the sheer size of the universe and the correlative theoretical quantity of planets, among which it is as near a statistical certainty as possible that many can support life and consequently that one does. Yet precisely this mathematical certainly disinclines me to believe that there is life beyond Earth. I am not saying that there isn't or that it would bother me if there were; only that I am choose not to suppose that there is.

The reason is, therefore, clearly not rational. It is not, however, strictly speaking irrational, which would imply a failure to rationally derive an argument for a proposition. Instead, it is contrarational. Having divined and accepted the rational argument that there is life on other planets, I formulate my belief in conscious opposition to that. What justifies such a contrarational position? It is precisely that beauty, joy, sublimity (or some other vague and subjective term) exist in contrast to rationality.

Again, this is not to say that the rational cannot be beautiful or incite joy or embody the sublime. It merely acknowledges what has been a well recognized feature of art and literature and romance and life. The human spirit is enlivened more by the unpredictable, the unexplainable, and the impossible-but-actual than by the reasonable. Serendipity and providence. Mad, stupid, consumptive, doomed love. Fantasies and phantasmagoria and psychosis.

I believe in a beautiful God, one Who transcends and can therefore contradict reason. The notion that this foolish Deity could have created a world which by its very nature speaks to the mathematical certainty of life on other plants and then refuse to populate any planet but this one fills me with an inexplicable joy in the mere possibility of it. I will rejoice in a God who creates and saves the inhabitants of other worlds as well, but until I know otherwise I prefer to be seized by the sublime belief in a universe that must and a God who flouts such necessity.

In Other News

Continuing to bring you the latest from the Orthodox world, this offer from the Orthodox Church of Cyprus is rightfully making waves:

The head of Cyprus' influential Orthodox church, Archbishop Chrysostomos II, says he will put the church's assets at the country's disposal to help pull it out of a financial crisis, after lawmakers rejected a plan to seize up to 10 percent of people's bank deposits to secure an international bailout.


Speaking after meeting President Nicos Anastasiades Wednesday, Chrysostomos said the church was willing to mortgage its assets to invest in government bonds.


The church has considerable wealth, including property, stakes in a bank and a brewery. Tuesday's rejection of the deposit tax has left the future of the country's international bailout in question.

Whether or not anything will come of the offer--and whether or not the church's assets are enough to make a substantial difference in Cyprus's financial crisis--it strikes me as precisely the right move for the church, which has been roundly and rightly criticized from all corners and in most developed countries for being inexcusably wealthy. I wonder what kind of dent the US churches could have made in 2008 if they had made a similar offer. Of course, they didn't and lack the institutional unity to make such a gesture. No longer living in an age when the apostolic heirs can honestly say "Silver and gold I have not," the Cypriot church has made a gesture that powerfully displays the way sacrifice on a church-wide scale can influence society.

Even so, there are many who would argue that the world is becoming an increasingly churchless place no matter what denominational bodies do. This "none" movement is constituted in part by those postmodern Christians enamored of the idea that Jesus never went to church, so why should they? Launching off of a quote from Toby Mac (“Jesus didn’t hang out in the church") that appeared on the Huffington Post, Revelation rock star Rick Oster has thoroughly debunked the notion of a church-free Jesus:

Since everyone knows there was no Christian church in existence in the days of Jesus’ earthly ministry, this statement is designed for its rhetorical impact, rather than its historical accuracy. Sometimes, though, rhetorical statements have a life of their own, and hearers forget the limitations of rhetoric. More probably the rhetoric of this statement was meant to emphasize the viewpoint that Jesus did not spend time associating with religious/Jewish organizations or hanging out in Jewish meeting places or chillaxing with the officialdom of Jewish religion. A fact-check of this viewpoint led me to conclude that it did not represent the whole story of Jesus.

This anti-institutional view of Jesus has a long history, but it stands in stark contrast to the picture of Jesus given us by the major writer of the New Testament, Luke, and also by John the prophet.

...To be sure, the validity of Christian ministry is determined by the authenticity of its message and accompanying lifestyle and not by its location. Bars and brothels are certainly within the purview of modern Christian ministry, but we need to be clear that this was not the fundamental approach used by Jesus. Most of Jesus’ time was spent in synagogues, in travel through the Jewish countryside, and in Jewish homes. It does not seem to have been an erratic choice when Jesus decided to give his inaugural teachings in synagogues (Lk. 4:14-15).

...We contemporary believers just might need to reconsider whether we want to recapture apostolic belief by acknowledging and confessing “that Jesus is not a parachurch Messiah” ([Oster's commentary on Revelation] p. 89), but a churchy Jesus, notwithstanding all the abuses and heresies propagated by his ostensible followers, both past and present.

Meanwhile, will Pope Francis go to Moscow? It's hard to care when you consider the momentous event that just occurred in Melfort, Saskatchewan:

Wally and Kerry LaClare raise cows on their farm near Melfort, and have seen hundreds of calves born. But last week when one of their cows gave birth, they witnessed something they've never seen before.

"Kerry came into the barn, and noticed the cow was straining a bit," said Wally LaClare. "I checked the cow and there was another calf, so we delivered it. We figured that was it, you never imagine triplets. When I came back in an hour later she was delivering her third,” he said.

The chances of a cow giving birth to triplets are so rare, about once in every 105,000 births, that a person has a better chance of hitting a hole in one.

I wonder how the chances of Orthodox-Catholic reunion stack up to that.

Two Men Go to Church Together: What Could it Mean?

Big things continue to happen in the Orthodox world, this time less comic and more significant than the Russian equivalents of Westboro Baptists demanding Alaska back. For the first time in nearly a millennia, the Ecumenical Patriarch will Catholic Mass for the installation of the new bishop of Rome:

The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople will be present for the installation mass for Pope Francis on Tuesday. This is the first time an Ecumenical Patriarch has been present for this Catholic mass since the Great Schism of 1054, when the Eastern and Western Church cut ties with one another.

In an interview with a television network in Istanbul, Turkey, Bartholomew explained that the decision to attend was a gesture to showcase improving relations between the two Ancient Churches.

"It is a gesture to underline relations which have been developing over the recent years and to express my wish that our friendly ties flourish even more during this new era," said Bartholomew.

Other faith leaders, including other Orthodox Church officials, are expected as well. Metropolitan Tikhon, the head of the Orthodox Church in America, will be present. The Russian Orthodox Church's Patriarch will be sending his envoy.

Archpriest Leonid Kishkovsky, chairman of the Department of External Affairs and Interchurch Relations for The Orthodox Church in America, told The Christian Post that the attendance was "a significant gesture."

Fr. Kishkovsky's cool diplomacy probably rightly touches the limits of reasonable optimism, but who wants to be reasonable when the irrational optimism is boundless? It is hard not to be hopeful that such a substantial gesture is not the beginning of a quickening toward communion, toward the greatest stride toward Christian unity since...well since Christians started fracturing in earnest in the fourth century. Can you imagine the implications of the Catholics and Orthodox reestablishing communion? Neither can I. Of course, Kishkovsky is probably right when he says that union is "not in prospect at this time," but I confess I have never wanted a priest to be so wrong since the sixth century condemnation of Origen's doctrine of apocatastasis.

Fingers crossed.

Clean Monday: Straightening Out Alaska

Normally my Clean Monday thoughts tend more toward the devotional side. (I've already had some lagana this morning, have you?) But as I was perusing news from the Orthodox world, this little tidbit struck me as too delicious not to share.

US President Barack Obama must have known that his support of gay marriage would bring him trouble. But of all possible repercussions, a demand to roll back Alaska’s 1867 sale to the United States was one he was unlikely to have seen coming.

And yet that was the very claim that an ultraconservative religious group made in a Moscow arbitrage court, citing the need to protect fellow Christians from sin.

Obama’s alleged plans to legalize the “so-called same-sex marriage” threaten the freedom of religion of Alaska’s Orthodox Christians, who “would never accept sin for normal behavior,” the nongovernmental group Pchyolki (“Bees”) said.

“We see it as our duty to protect their right to freely practice their religion, which allows no tolerance to sin,” the group said in a statement on their website.

The groups charges that the contract for the sale of Alaska is null and void because of a technicality about the method of payment. Ironically, this lawsuit is only coming to light now because of the group's own inability to abide by the legal technicalities of their own system.

Something tells me this isn't the kind of cleanliness Clean Monday is supposed to be about. It's a shame that Lent starts so much later for the Orthodox this year than for Catholics and Protestants--my preference would always be to observe them simultaneously--but, if nothing else, let those observing the Western fast season allow today serve as a reminder of the purity you committed yourself to back in February. Your Orthodox brothers and sisters around the world join you today in offering themselves as living sacrifices. If only for two weeks, Christians everywhere will be united in a period of self-reflection, purification, and anticipation of the resurrection.