Eco on Secular Credulity
Mon 05 Dec 2005 by Peter Edman
Novelist and agnostic Umberto Eco has a lovely essay in the London Telegraph a couple weeks ago. In “God isn’t big enough for some people,” he highlights Chesterton’s observation on belief.
It’s worth the time to read through.
Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.
They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms—yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious—to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest. . . .
We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.
Eco concludes with a comment that the Christian faith is an absurdity (albeit a logical and coherent one). And this is an essentially true statement. It just happens to be a true absurdity.
Dirda on Language
Mon 05 Dec 2005 by Peter Edman
Relating to the item below from Stephen Talbott on the potential decline of language, there is a fascinating piece from critic Michael Dirda in the Washington Post Book World.
W. H. Auden used to warn against those who read the Bible for its prose. Ignore this advice. The hoopla of the next few weeks should be interrupted from time to time with quiet moments when we reflect on our lives and the years past and to come, and one of the best ways to do this is by meditating on grave and noble sentences.
Dirda is highlighting a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer (1559). He offers a spirited defense of oratory, a rejection of the idea that efficiency in language is the only virtue. Even for those in business, leadership is more than decision-making; it is casting a vision for your organization, and that type of communication requires both practice and a deep well to draw from.
New Reading Lists
Mon 28 Nov 2005 by TTF Staff
We are adding a new category of resource to our Implications offerings.
Our new topical reading lists will help you sort through the masses of books and articles on different topics. We will be adding several over the next few months with selections by Fellows, Moderators, and staff. If you have ideas for topics you’d like to see us cover or if you would like to suggest an additional book or movie to a topical list we’ve already created, please .
Additionally, if you order books from Amazon through these links, the Trinity Forum will receive a small commission on each sale.
On Spiritual Resources
Mon 28 Nov 2005 by TTF Staff
We have a deep hunger for “spirituality,” but often little idea of how to meet it. Fortunately, the Christian faith has a deep tradition that addresses the need. The earliest versions of the curriculum now called Entrepreneurs of Life had a section on “Our Spiritual Resources” that dealt with the spiritual disciplines and practical advice for following Jesus. This list includes some of those selections as well as other related recommendations for moving deeper in your faith. These resources can help you direct your hunger toward constructive ends by focusing on the resources of the spiritual disciplines (like study, prayer, silence, and solitude) and the ways we can use them to become disciples of Jesus.
The introduction to that section included these comments, and the list below is assembled in this spirit:
Anyone who knows the modern world and discovers the compelling power of answering the call of Christ soon confronts the need for more than ordinary resources. As G. K. Chesterton quipped, the Christian life is not difficult, it is impossible. . . .
How then can we develop a spiritual life that leads toward spiritual maturity yet can be simple, practical, and regular? The readings in this session open up a view of the spiritual disciplines that is straightforward for those who are just setting out on the pilgrimage of faith, yet offers many possibilities of deeper growth for those who have been on the pilgrimage longer.
On Calling
Mon 28 Nov 2005 by TTF Staff
Resources on calling and discovering your calling, vocation, and life purpose.
From Os Guinness and the Trinity Forum
The Trinity Forum Study Series: Entrepreneurs
of Life- Os Guinness, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life
- Os Guinness, Rising to the Call: Discover the Ultimate Purpose of Your Life (similar to The Call; packaged for teens and college-aged people)
From other writers:
Here I Am: Now What on Earth Should I Be Doing? by Quentin Schultze- Designed for Life by Arthur F. Miller, Jr.
- The Power of Uniqueness: How to Become Who You Really Are, by Arthur F. Miller, Jr. (formerly titled Why You Can't Be Anything You Want to Be)
- Finding a Job You Can Love, by Ralph T. Mattson and Arthur F. Miller, Jr.
- Now, Discover Your Strengths, by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton
- Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life, by Michael Novak
- Creed or Chaos? by Dorothy L. Sayers (particularly the essay, "Why Work?")
On Friendship
Mon 28 Nov 2005 by TTF Staff
These are some books we recommend for further reading on the topic of Friendship, the subject of our Reading by Cicero.
- Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1974).
- Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics (books 8 & 9). One of the classic treatments of friendship.
Richard Lamb, The Pursuit of God in the Company of Friends (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003). An in-depth and practical contemporary handbook on spiritual friendship with annotated bibliography.- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harvest Books, 1960, 1971).
- Lilian B. Rubin, Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). A psychological study.
- Caroline J. Simon, The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, & Imagination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997). Discusses friendship and other loves in the context of literature and philosophy. Accessible and insightful.
The Future Does Not Compute
Tue 15 Nov 2005 by Peter Edman
We’re getting ready for the revision of the forthcoming curriculum on technology after some very helpful feedback from our first pilot forum in September.
Coincidentally, Volume 75 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal arrived in my mailbox a few weeks back and its topics are salient to our revision work. In particular I found helpful a conversation that Ken Myers had with Steve Talbott, author of The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. They talk about the way the technology we use affects the way we talk, and then the way we think. This is a very difficult subject to talk about.
In particular, computers are (necessarily?) incapable of dealing with abstracts and metaphors, but the deepest things about us are in what we cannot directly express, what comes through in the spaces between the words, the realm of scientific discovery and the spiritual life. Talbott uses the example of the phrase “love your enemies,” which says a lot to a human but its metaphor is such that any attempt to subject it to a computer translation into another language would fail miserably. Do we, then, stop using such phrases? Technology can be wonderful, but we need to make sure we do not allow it to trample the full expression of our humanity.
Overall, the conversation was very helpful in shaping my own thinking on how to express what we’re trying to accomplish with our new curriculum. If we do not have a real vision for what makes us human, for what a human being is and should be, then the technologies we use will supply one for us by their very limitations, and it will by definition be less than fully human.
Unspeakable Review
Mon 14 Nov 2005 by Peter Edman
While updating our Online Store to include a few new items, including our stock of Os Guinness’s newest book, Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror (also available from Amazon in paper) I ran across a review of it posted this past May at Victor Davis Hanson’s website. “Lost Without Faith” by Bruce Thornton.
Loconte on Pacifism
Tue 08 Nov 2005 by Peter Edman
Senior Fellow Joseph Loconte had an article in the Friday November 4 edition of the Wall Street Journal that is worth noting.
In “Peace Now: Christian pacifists ignore the true ambitions of terrorists,” Loconte, ever the equal opportunity critic, addresses the theological and practical problems attending a certain current variant of Christian pacifism, which calls for peace at all costs. Unfortunately, its unconsidered costs include truth—and logic. In addition to being essentially futile, this position is fundamentally disrespectful to the enemy as well, suggesting that terrorists and others really don’t know what they want and would quiet down if we were nicer to them:
Any religious critique of terrorism that fails to acknowledge these ambitions is deeply impoverished. It produces a political theology that helps to rationalize terrorist rage. It refuses to distinguish between the acts of murderers and the use of government force to stop them. . . .
Christians have never viewed peace as the highest good. There are other goods: protecting human dignity and restraining evil, for example. A just peace can be the final result of these pursuits, God willing. But if peace is made the supreme goal, if it consumes all other virtues, it becomes an idol--and a snare to the statesman as well as the saint.
People interested in the topic will probably find much worth pondering in Loconte’s recent book, The End of Illusions.
Loconte on Robertson and Katrina
Tue 27 Sep 2005 by Peter Edman
I was away when this came out, so just posting now.
Moderator Joseph Loconte has an op-ed (September 16, 2005) on the Tribune News Service (link here at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review) discussing “Christianity’s Religion Problem.” He’s justifiably harsh on Pat Robertson, who has been serially irresponsible and demonstrably uncharitable if not unorthodox in his public views for decades. Loconte’s criticism is among the strongest I’ve seen, though I’ve not been following this debate as closely as I should. I hope he’ll get a wide hearing.
Religious leaders rightly worry about airing their dirty laundry. But Robertson has made himself a public figure—and a massive public relations problem for the church. Until more evangelicals make a visible break with him, they’ll be vulnerable to the crass caricatures that dominate media coverage of conservative religion in America.
In an intensely partisan era, with so much at stake politically, it’s tempting to simply ignore the failings of one’s allies in the culture wars. Yet without integrity, cultural influence is impossible. As the apostle Peter once warned, not so delicately, judgment begins with the family of God.
It certainly would do Mercy Ships and other positive CBN ministries good to be dissociated with their founder. Board members, please take note. The means we choose define the way we reach our ends. They shape our ends. They matter as much as any ideal future.
