Gleanings Quick Links

Lessons From the Great Books Generation: ‘The volumes included Adler’s “Syntopicon,” an index compiled at enormous cost that tracked the 102 great ideas, pointing, for example, to how different thinkers addressed concepts like virtue and obligation. These great ideas were criticized as arbitrarily chosen, but at least they were important ideas. A Google research project is now bringing massive computing power to data-mine quotes and ideas across one million digitized books, updating this approach to tracking ideas.’ (L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal )

Sun 07 Dec 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

The Left Wing of America’s Civil Religion: ‘Quinn’s confusion comes from having ignored the most important basis of pluralism that the United States offers. Precisely by distinguishing the political community from many faith communities, the US Constitution opens the public arena to diverse faith communities, all of which are free to be exclusive in their membership while being included on equal terms in American society. Quinn, by contrast, wants to hold onto an American community of faith. And to do that she needs to find a “church” that is so all-inclusive that it can serve as the “sacred space for the nation,” as “a place the nation looks to in critical times.” But such a “church” can, by definition, no longer be an institution of Christian faith, for it has to serve the whole nation. Therefore, it has to be a place where the American civil religion can be celebrated, a religion distinct from all other religions even if it claims to include and encompass them all.’ (Jim Skillen, on one columnist’s recommendation of a church for Barack Obamas. “Root and Branch,” The Center for Public Justice )

Thu 04 Dec 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Beauty of Soul: Oscar Wilde & Anton Chekhov: Stephen Fry has released two new audio books of himself reading the short stories of Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov. But the essay that he wrote to describe them is well worth reading on its own for its evocation of what being human is. And its helpful connection between “imagination” and the virtue of “sympathy”: “Imagination is the ability to enter someone else’s mind. To penetrate another’s experience. To feel what another feels: to see the world as they see it, to suffer their pain, participate in their sins and in their triumphs, loves, fears and hopes. Imagination is a product of memory and sympathy. Some have it, just as some have perfect pitch or athletic hand-eye coordination. Or maybe some can be trained to have it, I don’t know. A paradox is that it seems harder to penetrate one’s own mind, participate in one’s own experience and discover one’s own feelings than those of another.” (stephenfry.com )

Tue 02 Dec 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Children’s Books, Lost and Found: “The trashy bestsellerdom of the lowbrow may be shared, but it gives us nothing to talk about. The glossy unbestsellerdom of the highbrow may give us something to talk about, but it isn’t shared. Once a middlebrow book reaches a certain number of readers, however, it begins to feed on its success to gain even higher success. Add in the even greater hunger of middlebrow parents for their children to have shared literary references, and you have an appetite ravening for something like Harry Potter to feed it.” (Joseph Bottum, First Things )

Fri 21 Nov 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

John Piper explains Why Calvinists are so Negative: This, with the item below from Frederica, offer two timely perspectives on appropriate humility—which could also be approached with profit from the perspective of strategy. “I must tell you that whenever I have had a profound experience of God through reading his word or encountering God in worship or community, it tends to just humble me, and make me want to say something like what Joni Mitchell said about love—‘it’s love’s illusions I recall; I really don’t know love, at all.’ I have barely touched the hem of the Master’s garment, I hardly know him though I long to know him better. In the face of the divine-human encounter, even Barth’s Dogmatics appear to be little more than a good start to understanding God.” (New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III )

Wed 19 Nov 2008 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Confessions of an Obnoxious Orthodox: Salutary. “Most people like to be polite and get along, so they highlight our commonalities. But every church must have its distinctiveness, or we’d all be in the same church. At the time, I was so occupied with comprehending this strange thing called Orthodoxy that I emphasized the differences, and was impatient with kindly big-tent suggestions.” (Frederica Mathewes-Green, Beliefnet )

Wed 19 Nov 2008 from Peter Edman • Link & Comments

Finding Home: A worthwhile meditation on place: “My parents have moved a lot in their lives, and view towns and cities as places to go for opportunities, not places to live for love of the place itself. They still pressure us occasionally to move closer to them.  Maybe someday we will; as I said above, I know I would find things to love wherever we lived. But after all the moves of my childhood, I find myself warmly grateful to this city for being a place where I can send my roots down deep, grateful that I have at last found my home.” (Veronica Mitchell, Toddled Dredge )

Tue 18 Nov 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

The Obama Dilemma: “Which of these factions in evangelicalism’s divided house is more reflective of its essential character? In truth, both have a strong claim. Evangelicalism has always been centrally concerned with social reform as the necessary expression of spiritual regeneration. It is not merely a religion of inwardness. Nor is it a religion devoted to maintaining the status quo and propping up social elites. Instead, it challenges settled arrangements and champions the lowly and the marginalized.” (Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay, The Wall Street Journal )

Sat 01 Nov 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Stephen Fry in America: “Such Britons hug themselves with the thought that they are more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than Americans because they think they know more about geography and world culture, as if firstly being cosmopolitan and sophisticated can be scored in a quiz and as if secondly (and much more importantly) being cosmopolitan and sophisticated is in any way desirable or admirable to begin with. Sophistication is not a moral quality, nor is it a criterion by which one would choose one’s friends. Why do we like people? Because they are knowledgeable, cosmopolitan and sophisticated? No, because they are charming, kind, considerate, exciting to be with, amusing … there is a long list, but knowing what the capital of Kazakhstan is will not be on it.” (Stephen Fry’s blog post about his new book and BBC series. )

Fri 10 Oct 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death: ‘I still cursed God, as we all do when we get bad news and pain. Not even the most faith-impaired among us shouts, “Damn quantum mechanics!” “Damn organic chemistry!” “Damn chaos and coincidence!”’ (P J O’Rourke, Search Magazine )

Tue 30 Sep 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Give Me That Old-Time Religion: ‘This week revealed that when real money is on the line, even the left starts screaming for old-fashioned standards. Thus rose a shout for regulatory “oversight” of markets, and they don’t mean some vague, Googlie “don’t be evil.” They want tough, punishing rules. This won’t wash. You can’t claim, as holier-than-thou politics is now, that sending an army of regulatory storm-troopers into Wall Street will ensure integrity in mere bankers who themselves come from a broader, anything-goes culture.’ (Daniel Henninger, The Wall Street Journal )

Mon 29 Sep 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

The Real Digital Revolution: Social networking is changing the marketing landscape: “Brand advertising can’t stretch the truth anymore or try and gild the lily. Because if it does, we’re going to find out about it, find out that you’ve been lying to us all along about extras that don’t work and specials that aren’t special. And our reaction is not going to be pretty.” (Alan Wolk, AdWeek; h/t: Ryan Moede )

Wed 27 Aug 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Après Lewis: ‘As it turns out, Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” (2008), the book recommended by my friend, is the best of the “Mere Christianity” wannabes. Mr. Keller argues that the usual objections to Christianity—that it is a straitjacket, that there cannot be just one true religion—are themselves the product of a particular (secular Western) point of view. He then builds an affirmative case for Christianity, suggesting that the Big Bang and our appreciation of beauty are clues pointing to God and that Christ’s resurrection was so unlikely both to Greeks and Romans (who viewed the material world as weak and corrupt) and to Jews (who expected any resurrection to come at the end of time) that it cannot be dismissed as the clever marketing strategy of a new religion. If this sounds a little like N.T. Wright, it isn’t accidental: Mr. Keller draws liberally from him, as well as Lewis, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (a professor at Notre Dame) and others. “The Reason for God” is as sensible and winsome as one would expect from the pastor of a latticework of churches that draw more than 5,000 attendees in New York City every Sunday, most of them young, single, urban professionals. But it too is no “Mere Christianity.” It does not have the original arguments or the magical prose of Lewis’s classic.’ (David Skeel, Wall Street Journal )

Fri 15 Aug 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: the line within: ‘Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system. This is the remarkable message that Solzhenitsyn, crawling from the death-machine, carried pressed to his heart.’ (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, in openDemocracy )

Mon 11 Aug 2008 from TTF Staff • Link & Comments

Atheism and Evil: Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance. Few atheists seem to be as rigorously honest as Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that if God is dead, it is wishful thinking to hold that reason alone can confer “meaning” on life. Reason has been outmoded by chance. (Michael Novak, First Things: On the Square )

Tue 29 Jul 2008 • Responses: 1 • from Mark Meador • Link & Comments