Time Magazine: 100 best Novels

TIME Magazine's 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present

I've read 23 of them, and I'm glad that most of them made it, although I'm not quite sure about Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I'm glad that William Faulkner and Graham Greene each got two novels on the list. And there's a few that I'd really like to read in the near future, among them: Joan Didion's Play it as it Lays and maybe something by Saul Bellow.

Also worth reading are the original reviews of many of these books. Some of them, such as Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, were at first reviled. Others were immediately recognized as masterworks. My favorite, however, is the 1966 review of The Lord of the Rings, which describes what was evidently a major Tolkien craze on college campuses:

The hobbit habit seems to be almost as catching as LSD. On many U.S. campuses, buttons declaring FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF—frequently written in Elvish script—are almost as common as football letters. Tolkien fans customarily greet each other with a hobbity kind of greeting ("May the hair on your toes grow ever longer"), toss fragments of hobbit language into their ordinary talk. One favorite word is mathom, meaning something one saves but doesn't need, as in "I've just got to get rid of all these mathoms." Permanently hooked Ringworms frequently memorize long passages from the trilogy and learn how to write Tengwar or Certar, two peculiar and ancient-looking scripts that Tolkien invented on behalf of his mythical creatures. The most ardent readers of all are likely to join the nation's fast-growing Tolkien Society of America, which publishes magazines containing learned disquisitions on the elaborate genealogies and intricate rules of grammar that the author attached as appendices to the trilogy.

The Undemocratic High Church

I went to this morning's 9:00 service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue. It was a step out of reality, into some other, older world. Perhaps it was a taste of what Tolkien's hobbits felt upon their arrival in Rivendell. The church itself is a beautiful Gothic building, dark and immediate when compared with the light, wide-open glory of St. Patrick's Cathedral, just a few blocks away. Upon entering St. Thomas, one sees at the far end of the sanctuary a solid wall of beautiful statuary: Christ Jesus surrounded by the saints.

The service used the old, beautiful language of pre-modern liturgy. There was a small choir, consisting of little kids with angelic voices. But the musicians were mostly hidden from view; organ music flew out and over from the chancel. An acolyte swung the incense at the offering: something I had heard about but never before seen. And taking the Eucharist there was unforgettable. As we processed up the aisles toward the alter, I felt ever smaller and ever more unworthy. Kneeling only feet from the back wall, I had to crane my neck to glimpse the statue of Jesus high over my head. I took the wafer and wine, prayed, and made my way back to my seat, blinking my eyes and holding my face in my hands.

In short, this was the opposite of all the seeker-sensitive services I have ever attended. The recent Willow Creek revelations - that market research and focus groups somehow failed to yield authentic discipleship - almost seem to belong to a different planet. Indeed, after the service, I found myself reluctant to walk back out to Fifth Avenue, which is again styling itself as Christmastown, USA. So-called contemporary services, on the other hand, always seem to be of one mind with consumerism.

But a high-church mentality is also somewhat opposed to the democratic spirit itself, or at least to its overly individualistic manifestations. At St. Thomas there are vestiges of the old aristocratic culture, not in the sense that anyone is excluded, but in the sense that there is an emphasis on order and beauty, and there is a King at the center of all things. It's an ancient conception of authority: power derived, not from the people, but from above.

I suppose there's not much of a political point to this, except to say that we in a democracy probably need a few undemocratic institutions to help us along. When we know something of the alternatives, we can better evaluate our own democracy. Modern democracy, as well as several Protestant denominations, are rooted in opposition to this sort of aristocratic spirit. I'm not qualified to remark on the theological implications of this opposition, but I will say that encountering the old world can be refreshing to the soul of the beleaguered and wandering democrat.

Listening Plans

I've been using Pandora and last.fm to find new music. So, for no particular reason, here is a short list of musicians whose albums I will buy as soon as I have a large amount of money and nothing else to spend it on, which is to say, several years from now. It's all the exact same kind of thing, I suppose.

-Bonnie "Prince" Billy
-Richard Buckner
-Smog
-Iron & Wine

This is how I turn into even more of a boring indie-folkster.

Mr. McCaughan Goes to Washington

Have you heard of Mac McCaughan? He's a hero.

Mr. McCaughan spent the 1990s as the frontman of Superchunk, a rock band from Chapel Hill. At the same time, he helped found and build Merge Records. Merge began by releasing albums by Superchunk and some friends of the band. Over the years, some of their bands got pretty famous: Merge handled big releases for Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, M Ward, and The Arcade Fire, among others.

Do you know these bands? Spoon and The Arcade Fire both had top-ten albums on the Billboard charts this year. But you probably didn't heard them on the radio; they don't get much play.

Anyway, the Senate Commerce Committee invited Mr. McCaughan to talk about non-commercial radio at a hearing on "The Future of Radio". And his argument made sense to me.

Low-power, college, NPR and other non-commercial broadcasting enterprises are extremely important today, especially as local information and entertainment options become scarcer. Commercial radio is about aggregating the largest possible number of listeners in a targeted demographic. Community-based radio is about serving its audiences. It has the unique power and the desire to be a conduit for news and culture, and is essential to the diversity that defines cultural life in this country.

Commercial radio is an entirely artificial market. The government takes a narrow slice of bandwidth and allows people apply for licenses to use it. "Deregulation" of the airwaves is not a free-market measure. The government can easily price small operations out of business. But this is emphatically not in the public interest. It's not just music that suffers when the large conglomerates take a larger market share. Local news, opinion, sports, and culture also suffer.

This may be a moot point, as broadband wireless may soon enable people to listen to internet stations. But as long as the government has control of the available bandwidth, it needs to make room for the little guy.

The Rambler

I needed a break, so I stopped by the magazine store on 35th Street. I suppose my idea was to look for something with a CD in it, so I could find some new music (I've become hermetic in my tastes). Nothing looked interesting; everything was glossy and popular. You can't sell a magazine about unpopular bands, but that's what I wanted.

So I went back to the magazines about writing. And I saw the Rambler.

Last year, it caught my eye because it featured an article by a professor I knew in Chapel Hill. Sure enough, it's published in my favorite University town.

The November/December issue's cover shows a woman with an upside-down umbrella leaking rain on her. And the magazine isn't about much more than that. It's got articles about small things: old stories, food, fatigue, airplanes. No commentary on current events, no policy articles, no strategic national institutions. There are some very pretty photographs. It's evocative of real life, which is what we have left after our ambitions are spent, on the other side of dreams, when we can see the work of our hands and tell others how it came to be.

You strive, strive, strive, and need a break. Here is a place for small stories, inconsequential to big missions, but absolutely necessary to the good life.

Global Warming as a Noble Lie

In The Republic, Plato's Socrates argues that the citizens of his city-in-speech will never accept the class system that they need unless they are made to believe a myth about its origins. The founders of the city know that the story is false as can be, but they can’t allow the citizens to question the established order. In other words, sometimes you need a whopper of lie to get things done.

Could global warming be such a lie? It depends on what one means by “global warming.” If you say that human activity has changed the composition of the earth’s environment, and that this could potentially have unforeseen consequences, then there’s no argument. But if you say you know exactly what those consequences will be, then we have a problem.

As far as I can tell, the scientists know exactly what is going on. They know that very few systems are more complex or unpredictable than the weather, and they have done an excellent job showing that the earth’s atmosphere has indeed changed over time, going through both long and short cycles of heat and cold. A good scientist knows that mathematical models are approximations, often useful, but certainly prone to error.

These models are the source of all predictions of increasing global temperature, changing weather patters, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and, finally, the submerging of Manhattan. All of these models must account for a staggering array of variables; they must balance effects that may work against each other – for example, the warming of the air and the melting of the ice caps both would simultaneously heat and cool the ocean. That’s a simplified example, but it illustrates the difficulty in any kind of prediction. And we don’t even know what would be happening to the environment even if humans never existed.

So all our predictions are in some way contingent. If one model proves to be accurate over time, then perhaps we could really start to trust it. For now, though, we should all be aware that something gets completely lost between the scientific papers and the headlines.

Why, then, are there so few vocal dissenters in the science community? Why don’t more scientists speak out against the blatant misinterpretation of their work?

Because the poisoning of our atmosphere is a real problem, but nobody will care unless there’s a catastrophic consequence around the corner. The real case – that we are making radical changes to our environment which may or may not be irreparable – would never be listened to by a population that is just fine with a national debt up in the trillions and a creakingly damaged social security system. Who cares if it might go wrong? No, to get anything done, you have to be able to show that there’s an impending crisis: in other words, people will die unless we do something.

So maybe global warming is a noble lie. We let the media trumpet its disaster-movie version of the truth, hoping that it will spur some kind of change.

But for those of us who aren’t comfortable with lies, no matter how noble their purpose, there is no other course besides a deep reexamination of our culture’s consumption mentality. And that, my friends, is a topic for another time.

Karzai asks US to Stop the Planes

I'm watching 60 Minutes right now. It's a segment on bombings in Afghanistan: specifically, a bombing that killed nine civilians in a small village. Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, asks the United States to roll back its bombings. He believes that the bombings hurt more than they help.

The resurgence of Taliban forces in Afghanistan is usually overshadowed by the bigger problems in Iraq. But it should be troubling to us nonetheless. According to a Wall Street Journal article from October 14th, Tangling with the Taliban, there are still over 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, with many of them working to stop Taliban forces which number between five and twenty thousand - it's hard to tell.
NATO forces have to pick up a lot of slack when the Afghan government can't provide basics, often taking up police duties in troubled areas.


A New York Times article from August 12, How a 'Good War' In Afghanistan Went Bad, quoted a high-level American commander in Afghanistan who argued that the US has failed to provide the proper sorts of experts to help build the Afghani infrastructure. For example, the official says that there are only a handful of American agriculture experts helping in agriculture, which is 80% of the Afghan economy.

A former CIA official, Robert Grenier, contended that the CIA shifted its best counterterrorism agents to Iraq. It's hard to question the article's logic: if not for the war in Iraq, our most qualified people would all be in Afghanistan. But things looked pretty good in spring of 2005.

Except for one thing: the Taliban forces weren't defeated; they were in Pakistan. And they came back in spring of 2006.

It's not as bad as it could be; it's not as bad as Iraq. Still, just looking through the news reports, it's not hard to see that, if not for the war in Iraq, things could be much, much better. There were a few of us, at the time, who said that the United States should make sure it takes care of the one country it took over before it tries to take over another.

It's far too late for that now. As long as we're tied down in Iraq, we will have to rely on blunt measures like air strikes is because our troops and special forces are in Iraq. So here's another reason to create Kurdistan* and balance our forces. We still owe a lot to the people of Afghanistan.

*I know this isn't realistic at the moment.

Good Sentences from Esolen and Spengler

Wandering about on the Internet, I found some good sentences, both a bit polemical, enjoyable nonetheless.

The first is from Anthony Esolen on the Mere Comments blog over at Touchstone Magazine. Perhaps it's been said before, but it's probably worth saying again. He's talking about California's gender-identity-neutral textbook legislation (on which I will decline to comment):

But school administrators know best, yes they do. Why, they've taken a three-hour seminar on sex, and some of them, it is said, have actually engaged in the activity. They can't be counted on to perform the modest but necessary tasks for which they have been hired. Our graduates can't tell us anything about Alexander Hamilton, or read The Federalist, or understand what simultaneous linear equations are all about, or identify the passive voice. If condoms were commas, we'd be in big trouble, because I never meet a college freshman who knows where to put one.

Next, we have Spengler commenting on Turkey and the Armenian genocide (the article itself is well worth your time, although I have my reasons for disagreeing with its final analysis), employing what writers often refer to as "vivid imagery":

America is not responsible for chaos in the Middle East. The Middle East has known nothing but chaos for most of its history. The colonial policy of the European powers after World War I left inherently unstable structures in place that must, one day, meet their reckoning. But America’s obsession with the surgical implant of democracy in the region forces it into a murderous game of whack-a-mole with a welter of armed ethnicities.

Wish I could have found something on the other side of the aisle from Esolen for this post, but nothing jumped out at me. (Spengler, interesting as he may be, isn't on one side of the aisle as much as he's in the viewing gallery, or perhaps in another room altogether...)

Primaries: An American Comedy

The New York Times has a Candidate Appearance Guide that by itself shows the problem with primaries. I shudder to about think what the Founders would say if they could see how this. With all due respect to Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire, which are probably wonderful states full of kind and gentle people, this part of the election cycle is rotten.

I wonder what it would be like to experience an election cycle as an Iowan. In North Carolina, we hardly ever had candidates eating in local diners or speaking at town-hall meetings. But I suppose I'm lucky; the attention lavished on South Carolina probably helps the candidates hear about at least some of our regional concerns. If I had grown up anywhere between Wisconsin and Washington State, I probably wouldn't have even had that luxury, as that geographical stretch appears to be a wasteland as far as primary campaigning is concerned.

Could we come up with something more rational? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could come up with some sort of rotation system? Every four years, a different group of states could get some time in the spotlight. That would better represent the spirit of our republic over time.

Unfortunately, that's not a workable solution. As Americans, it seems like we prefer an irrational grassroots system to a bureaucratically designed solution. After all, who could possibly come up with an impartial selection? New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina may be an arbitrary handful of states, but they assumed their importance by jostling ahead of the other states. Now that other states are pushing their primaries further forward, it's starting to get ridiculous, but at least it's a uniquely federal form of silliness which gives the states some individual importance.

It's a weird system, and I can't say that I like it, but I'll go with it for now.

What's Up With Ayn Rand

I found Ayn Rand disturbing from the moment I first read one of her novels. A post on the First Things blog does a pretty good job of explaining the feeling:

Rand’s Ideal Man could never be a schoolteacher, say, or a physical therapist, or a claims clerk in the Social Security Administration. He must not be short-winded or fat. He must be perfection in action—gifted and brave, uniquely talented, and utterly free of irrationality and fear. He must, like Roark, defend the premise that no man should ever compromise his individual will or submit to pathetic notions of “sacrifice”; he must recognize that men of genius like himself will forever fight the lazy, inferior parasites who seek to take what superior minds have made. He must, in short, look like Gary Cooper and think exactly like Ayn Rand.

. . .

What made Rand’s works controversial, then and now, was their unashamed elitism and atheism—their contept for the values and attitudes held by most human beings who must make their way through the real world with the usual sets of weaknesses and strengths.

Rand hated religion as much as she hated communism; for her Christianity was, of course, the religion of fools and slaves. Rand’s “marginalia,” culled from the books in her library and published in 1998, are particularly revealing: . . . [C.S.] Lewis, Rand averred, was a “driveling non-entity,” a “mediocrity,” and “scum.”. . .

The book’s big event—a national strike involving disgruntled industrialists and tycoons—might have made a good Preston Sturges comedy. But Rand turns it into an earnest melodrama touched up with nobody-can-stop-me arias, paperback sex scenes, and attacks on jack-booted Washington bureaucrats: It’s Tony Robbins meets Harold Robbins meets the Cato Institute.

Dr. Dobson's Threat

It's old news by now, but forgive me for playing catch-up. I've been busy.

On September 30th, the New York Times reported on a secret meeting of Christian conservatives that produced a resolution to support a third-party candidate if Rudy Giuliani gains the Republican presidential nomination. The group included Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, whose opinions are perhaps the most influential in conservative Christian circles. Dr. Dobson published some comments on the resolution in a New York Times op-ed on October 4th.

Dr. Dobson's threat is a big one. As we learned in 1992 and 2000, neither of the major parties can afford to have a large segment of its core voters defect to a third party. The mostly anonymous religious conservatives are serious here. Dobson argues that there are certain things on which Christians just can't compromise:

I firmly believe that the selection of a president should begin with a recommitment to traditional moral values and beliefs. Those include the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage, and other inviolable pro-family principles. Only after that determination is made can the acceptability of a nominee be assessed.

Social conservative disappointment with the GOP has been brewing for some time now. The pro-life movement expected some real action under the Bush administration. I remember the sense of excitement during the end of the Clinton administration: they really believed that the Republican Party would respond to their concerns. Socially conservative Christians responded to Karl Rove's famous (or perhaps infamous) mobilization strategy, but they wanted something in return.

They haven't gotten it. President Bush spent all his political capital on the war effort, leaving him no room to enact any pro-life policies on the level that social conservatives desired. Yes, he got the votes he needed, but he had to make promises he couldn't keep. Of course, there are always excuses, and I suppose that the voters who would be most likely to be upset about a lack of pro-life progress will also be the ones who will be most forgiving of what I will generously call slow progress in Iraq.

But even if they are letting Bush off the hook, they still expect the GOP to follow through on its pro-life commitments, and they know Giuliani is not the man to fix the problem.

As for the Christian Right, now would be a good time to do some soul-searching. The GOP has gotten the votes and support it needed and generally gone about its business. What has the Christian right gotten in return? Money, power, scandal. . .

Dobson's move makes a great deal of sense from the social conservative perspective. If the GOP is not willing to recommit to the promises its made, the social conservatives will be right to bolt.

Avery Cardinal Dulles on Evolution

Avery Cardinal Dulles's article in First Things, called "God and Evolution," provides a thoughtful overview of an important contemporary debate. He takes Pope John Paul II's position as a starting point:

He [John Paul II] recommended a program of dialogue and interaction, in which science and religion would seek neither to supplant each other nor to ignore each other. . . . Science can purify religion from error and superstition, while religion purifies science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each discipline should therefore retain its integrity and yet be open to the insights and discoveries of the other.

Cardinal Dulles moves on to discuss the three common Catholic positions on evolution.

1.) Theistic evolution: "God initiates the process by producing from the first instant of creation (the Big Bang) the matter and energies that will gradually develop into vegetable, animal, and eventually human life on this earth and perhaps elsewhere." Francis Collins is perhaps the most notable proponent of this view.

2.) Intelligent design (ID): "[T]he development does not occur without divine intervention at certain stages, producing irreducibly complex organs."

3.) Teleological critique: "Becaues of the ontological gap that separates the living from the nonliving, the emergence of life cannot be accounted for on the basis of purely mechanical principles." Furthermore, "the forward thrust of evolution and its breakthroughs into higher grades of being depend upon the dynamic presence of God to his creation."

All three positions are "sustainable in a Christian philosophy of nature," yet the first two have significant weaknesses. Theistic evolution is often dangerously close to Deism, and Intelligent Design runs the risk of using as evidence things for which science may soon find an explanation. As Dulles wisely remarks, "[h]istory teaches us that the 'God of the gaps' often proves to be an illusion."

Notably, strict creationism hardly merits a mention.

I suppose that I should have guessed a Thomist/Aristotelian teleological position would appear in the article, but it actually took me by surprise. In Protestant circles, we seem to still be talking about creationism vs. ID vs. Theistic Evolution, a debate which goes in circles due to the aforementioned weaknesses. In public debates, Design too often comes off as a soft version of creationism, a sort of back door through which fundamentalists can get their world view back into textbooks. And, conversely, I suppose that opponents of Theistic Evolution see that as a back door through which Darwinists can get their world view into the church.

As usual, it's the Thomistic point of view that really illuminates what happens in our culture. It's philosophically sophisticated, and it certainly can't be labeled as soft modernism. Indeed, it takes us back to medieval thinkers. Yes, this looks to be the way forward.

Finally, Cardinal Dulles quotes Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, and I can't resist putting it here:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge is The Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. . . . If card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins [were asked] to pass judgment on the geopolitics of South Africa, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.

American Heroes: "The Wire"

I've never watched "The Wire." But as I read Salon's Sopranos vs. The Wire point/counterpoint, I realized that at some point I may try it out, and all because of critic Laura Miller's cultural insight.

Death, loss, enslavement, the ruination of all their hopes and dreams, and yet in the midst of the world's stony realities, as inevitable as the wine darkness of the sea and the rosy fingers of dawn, there can be heroism, courage, honor. Just don't expect things to change; all of this is part of the game, and in "The Iliad" the game is war.

The characters in "The Wire" inhabit such a world. The gods may have different names; instead of Apollo and Juno pulling the strings, it's the bureaucracy, party politics, the free market: all equally capricious and implacable. Anyone who tries to alter the system -- be it Stringer Bell aiming to turn legit businessman, Bunny Colvin experimenting with decriminalizing drugs in "Hamsterdam" or Frank Sobotka struggling to save his beloved stevedores union from its inevitable demise -- will be crushed. The best they can hope for is to clean up one little corner of their world; Bunny may not be able to save the neighborhood, but at the end of Season 4, he managed to save one kid. To thrive, you have to learn to fly low and kiss up, and if you're unfortunate enough to be afflicted with a sense of vocation, you play it like that smooth operator, Bunk Moreland, not like that perennial troublemaker, Jimmy McNulty.

In a way, it doesn't make sense to talk of "The Wire" as the best American television show because it's not very American. The characters in American popular culture are rarely shown to be subject to forces completely beyond their control. American culture is fundamentally Romantic, individualistic and Christian; when it's not exhorting you to "follow your dream" it's reassuring us that in the eleventh hour, we will be saved. American culture is a perpetual pep talk, trafficking in tales of personal redemption and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We don't do doom. "The Wire" is not Romantic but classical; what matters most in its universe is fulfilling your duty and facing the inexorable with dignity.

I can't argue that the classical view is superior to the Romantic one; to even introduce the idea that art is meant to nudge us toward moral improvement and social awareness is to concede to Romantic hope. But for some people, in some places, the classical view is more true, and in such cases, the artist's duty is to show us that these lives are no smaller for that.

A Point on Iraq

Beneath the rhetoric and (perhaps) hyperbole in this Salon.com article by Gary Kamiya is a completely valid point. I'm not endorsing the rest of the article, but the statement here is not very far off the mark.Of course, it's far too late to say these things now: the war is already in progress. Decisions like that can't just be undone. But let's still remember this for next time.

The angry bigotry that drove the war rings out loud and clear in the right-wing battle cry: "They attacked us, so we had to attack them." The recent TV ads run by war supporters repeat this theme: "They attacked us," a narrator says as an image of the burning World Trade Center appears. "They won't stop in Iraq." The key word here, of course, is "they." Just who is "they"? For Bush's die-hard supporters, "they" simply means "Arabs and Muslims." Cretinous rabble-rousers like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage play to this crowd, demanding that we nuke the evil ragheads. For the establishment, "they" is not quite so explicitly racist. "They" refers not to all Arabs and Muslims, but only to the "bad" ones. The "bad" guys include al-Qaida, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the militant Palestinians. And, of course, it used to include Iraq (and may again). Anyone who makes this list is eligible for attack by the U.S.

What makes these wildly disparate entities so evil and so threatening that we're prepared to attack them without cause? Simply that they reject the U.S.-Israeli writ in the Middle East -- and that they're Arabs or Muslims. They are clearly not on our side, but they pose no significant military or economic threat to the U.S. In realpolitik terms, they are no more beyond the pale than many other dubious countries we do business with, from Venezuela to Nigeria to Russia to Saudi Arabia. No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East.

Hauerwas on MacIntyre in First Things (!)

You have to be a subscriber to read it online, but it's almost worth the subscription price. First Things has an article by Stanley Hauerwas on Alasdair MacIntyre's career. It's almost too much. I printed it out and devoured it quickly. Fortunately, essays are better than sandwiches in the sense that once you've devoured an essay, you can go back and read it slowly and carefully.

In fact, it was First Things that first introduced me to the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre in an essay by Edward Oakes.

I wish I could write more, but it's been a busy week.

Religious Classics, brought to you by the Bureau of Prisons

This seems more like a bad decision than an unconstitutional one. There's a story in the New York Times about how prison chaplains have been given a list of acceptable religious books for prisoners. The dangers of religious extremism somehow make it necessary to allow prison libraries to stock only books on a list created by experts. As the spokesperson says: "We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts."

But there's no money to replace the books which are no longer allowed. The reporter interviewed an anonymous chaplain.

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

The common-sense solution, of course, is to create a list of inappropriate books and trust the chaplains to weed out other problematic works. However, from a bureaucratic point of view, a small list is probably much easier to manage. It's just wasteful, unwise, and possibly unbalanced:

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list."

Mr. Obama and the Political Machine

The New York Times has run two long articles on Barack Obama's rise to national prominence. The first (printed in late July) details his accomplishments in the Illinois State Senate, while the second (from the September 9th issue) tells the story of how Mr. Obama lost his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1999. Both are well worth reading.

What sorts of things did Mr. Obama accomplish during his time as a state senator? His first major achievement was in crafting campaign finance reform laws for Illinois's politicians. Later on, he pushed for legislation that would help combat racial profiling. Both of these tasks required him to negotiate agreements between antagonistic parties. In the words of the Times, "he turned out to be practical and shrewd, a politician capable of playing hardball to win election . . . a legislator with a sharp eye for an opportunity, a strategist willing to compromise to accomplish things.

Yet, throughout the story, Mr. Obama's ambition is ever present. Just a few years after his election to a state office, he tried to beat incumbent U.S. Representative Bobby Rush in a primary race. It was a strange race to enter; Rush had a high approval rating and no particular weaknesses on major issues.

Mr. Obama was a 38-year-old state senator and University of Chicago lecturer, unknown in much of Mr. Rush’s Congressional district. He lived in its most rarefied neighborhood, Hyde Park. He was taking on a local legend, a former alderman and four-term incumbent who had given voters no obvious reason to displace him.

Mr. Rush’s name recognition started off at 90 percent, Mr. Obama’s at 11. Then Mr. Rush’s son was murdered, leading Mr. Obama to put his campaign on hold. Later, while vacationing in Hawaii with his family, he missed a high-profile vote in the Legislature and was pilloried. (One Chicago Tribune editorial began, “What a bunch of gutless sheep.”) Then President Clinton endorsed Mr. Rush.

As might be expected, Barack Obama lost this one badly. But he gained valuable experience, and found himself positioned for a jump to the U.S. Senate soon afterwards.

Mr. Obama is smart, gutsy, and ambitious. He's extremely articulate, and has shown his ability to compromise when necessary. If he doesn't get the Democratic nomination this year, I'm sure that it will be in his future. Out of the whole field of Presidential hopefuls, I believe that he would be the most impressive on the world stage.

It's the ambition that worries me. When Mr. Obama took office in 2004, I had high hopes that he would become a leader in the Democratic Party. I thought it was fitting that Tom Daschle was out and Barack Obama was in. At the time, I believed that the Democrats had failed in their duty as an opposition party by voting for things first and complaining about them later. (At the time, I was reading some books about Victorian-era English statesmen, so I suppose my standards were a bit high.) I wanted Mr. Obama to rejuvenate the opposition party on a principled basis.

In many ways, he's tried to do just that. Still, he's been cultivating his image the whole time. I know that's how the system works, but my Frank Capra dreams don't die easily. The idealist in me still wants to believe that Mr. Obama hasn't spent the last four years carefully positioning himself for a Presidential run. Of course, political shrewdness does not entail bad leadership. I suppose that I am waiting for Mr. Obama to do something unexpected. I doubt that a Presidential candidate can get away with bucking the machine in this day and age, but I'd still like to see it happen.

I realize that I've neglected to discuss any of the substantial political issues here. Perhaps I'll get to that in a future date. But as a young politician, Mr. Obama must lean more on his leadership (dare I say - statesmanship?) than most of the other candidates. I'm watching him carefully; I've not yet made up my mind.

Sweater Weather: Now, Everyone Can Sing

My good friends in Chapel Hill have finally released their first LP. Here's the review, by the wonderful Grayson Currin, from the the Triangle area's Independent Weekly:

Chapel Hill octet Sweater Weather is nothing if not part of the fabric of orchestral, crest-minded indie rock that's been prevalent nationally and locally since the start of the decade. On its accomplished debut LP, Now, Everyone Can Sing, Sweater Weather climbs for the spiritual apogees of Michigan influences Anathallo, shudders through the emotional tremors that define Okkervil River, and emblazons pop with the textures that Grizzly Bear uses so subtly. Closer to home, the vulnerability of frontman Casey Trela owes flattered debts to Daniel Hart (who plays violin on one track here) and his Physics of Meaning, part of the Bu Hanan clutch that's largely responsible for the sound of swells in the Triangle.

Those referents are a broad swath through a rangy subgenre, though, and Sweater Weather carefully juxtaposes acoustic textures and electronic concrète manipulations from 24 contributors. At its best, Sweater Weather's eight members and several dozen instruments are joists and studs, building up and out instead of in or around. When they're least sure-handed, Sweater Weather crowds its middles, as with the overly didactic, Desaparecidos clang of "The Roots That Clutch." But nine-minute centerpiece "This Is an Owl as He Flies out of Himself" finds the band righting itself at the song's midpoint, the second half overcoming the jumbled first as a tense dirge of strings and horns becomes tinder beneath Trela's lonesome voice and guitar.

At nearly 56 minutes, Now, Everyone Can Sing lacks the sort of trenchant editing that could have trimmed the ornate frames to add focus to the bright picture in the middle. But broil-and-boil emotion, the thing Sweater Weather does so well over these 10 tracks, rarely cedes to restraint and reason, and—here, in the glow of a self-produced LP brimming with ideas and enthusiasms, if not focus or newness—such considerations are mostly an afterthought. A strong start.

I can't wait to get my copy in the mail.

Hidden Conflicts in Ethiopia, Kenya

It can be hard to keep up with events in Africa. But this one, from Slate, caught my eye. Ethiopia is trying to hush up Western journalists. Here's a summary of the last few years of Ethiopian/American relations:

The U.S. government considers Ethiopia an important ally in the war on terror, since it shares borders with Eritrea, Sudan, and Somalia, the latter invaded by Ethiopia this past Christmas with Washington's approval. Ethiopia has not been able to extricate itself from Somalia, and the military has been accused of possible war crimes there. Mogadishu even has a new nickname: "Baghdad on the Sea."

In addition to sending nearly half a billion dollars in aid money to Ethiopia every year, more than to any other sub-Saharan African country, the United States also supplies the Ethiopian military with funds, arms, and special forces training from Army Rangers.

Yet with all the recent negative attention focused on Ethiopia, it is easy to forget that the country had been on the right track. In 2005, poverty was down, growth was up, the local press was flourishing, and the capital, Addis Ababa, was brimming with hope and excitement about upcoming elections.

But then, it seems, the elections were rigged. Naturally, there were protests, but the police and military shut them down, jailing and even killing protesters. Will Conners, the journalist who wrote the article, was arrested and spent some time in an Ethiopian jail. Now, it seems, Ethiopia is becoming a terror state.

In order to fight rebels in the region of Ogaden, the government shut down access to the region and refused to let any journalists investigate. Conners tried to look into the situation, getting a glimpse of the tortured lives of ethnically Somalian residents of Ethiopia. He soon found himself followed by Ethiopian intelligence agents, and eventually decided to leave the country for his own safety.

The Kenyan government used similar terror tactics earlier this summer. It seems like the police in both countries are responding to legitimate problems by going completely overboard. And in Ethiopia's case, they're trying very hard to hide it from the West. I hope it doesn't work, although I have no idea whether greater awareness in the United States will really bring about any kind of change.

God of Numbers, God of Wonders

There's an excellent article by Amanda Shaw on the First Things blog about the true spirit of scientific inquiry. She contrasts "scientific positivism" with science itself. The scientific positivists, of course, are the popular intellectuals who pit (reliable, value-neutral) science against (irrational, untrustworthy) religion. Yet the true spirit of scientific inquiry does not shy away from what seems at first to be irrational or untrustworthy.

She uses the concept of imaginary numbers, which are the square roots of negative numbers, as an example. Imaginary numbers are wonderfully useful in many sorts of applied mathematics, yet there is an enduring weirdness about them. Shaw quotes the great Leonhard Euler: "they are neither nothing, not greater than nothing, nor less than nothing, which necessarily renders them imaginary or impossible."

I suppose that a real scientific positivist would say that science has its rational method for investigating things, whereas religious inquiry basis itself on muddle presuppositions derived from ancient texts. Yet when I read about the history of science, there is an undeniable exhilaration which can't be explained as simple satisfaction from the algorithmic application of the scientific method. The important point here is that reason, rightly used, chases joyfully after what is mysterious, knowing that the strangest facets of our reality can be only partially understood on this side of heaven.

Quick Anglican News

Remember last week, when the Kenyan Archbishop consecrated two American priests as missionary bishops? Well, Ugandan Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi consecrated another American today.

For some context, see Jordan Hylden's recent in-depth summary of the Anglican situation at First Things.

Christopher Hitchens: Three Iraq Wars, at the Same Time

Also writing in Slate, Christopher Hitchens explains why the "war in Iraq" is really three struggles.

When people say that they want to end the war in Iraq, I always want to ask them which war they mean. There are currently at least three wars, along with several subconflicts, being fought on Iraqi soil. The first, tragically, is the battle for mastery between Sunni and Shiite. The second is the campaign to isolate and defeat al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. The third is the struggle of Iraq's Kurdish minority to defend and consolidate its regional government in the north.

Hitchens judges the efforts against al-Qaida to be mostly successful, and the work in building the Kurdish regional government to be very worthwhile. It is the Sunni/Shiite subconflict that is, as we all know, almost impossible to deal with.

There are other clear and prudent ways to consider the multiple wars in the middle east. I recall George Weigel's April 2007 article in First Things:

• The first was the war to depose Saddam Hussein’s regime and create the political and military conditions for the possibility of responsible and responsive government in Iraq. It was quickly concluded at a very low cost in coalition military and Iraqi civilian casualties.

• The second—the war against Baathist recalcitrants and other Saddamist die-hards—erupted shortly after a decisive military victory had been achieved in the first war. Both coalition and civilian casualties increased significantly.

• As Jihadists such as the late, unlamented Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of “al-Qaeda in Iraq” flooded into the country, they deliberately created a third Iraq war, whose aims included not only driving the infidels from Mesopotamia but also destabilizing the fragile Iraqi democracy they regarded as an offense against Islam.

• The fourth war, between Sunni “insurgents” (terrorists, in fact) and Shia death squads and militias, broke out in earnest after the bombing of a major Shia shrine, the Golden Mosque of Samarra, in February 2006—a decisive event in which al-Qaeda operatives seem to have played a part. The second, third, and fourth wars continue to overlap.

Serious discourse requires an acknowledgment of the complex nature of the war, yet this is exactly what is lacking in calls for total withdrawal from Iraq. As Hitchens remarks:

The ability to distinguish among these different definitions of the "war" is what ought to define the difference between a serious politician and a political opportunist, both in Iraq and in America. . . . Sen. Clinton in particular has said several times in the past that we cannot, for example, abandon the Kurds as we once did before. Should she not be asked if this is still her view?

Unless the general discussion moves to this level, the successes of the war will be forgotten and the whole ordeal will be remembered as a total disaster. As of now, there's still time to preserve some of the good.

Briefly: The Challenge of Recruiting Teachers

There is an excellent article by Ann Hulbert at Slate Magazine on the challenges that public schools face in recruiting teachers. In the United States, teaching is neither a lucrative profession nor a particularly well-regarded one. This is not the case in other parts of the world.

The world's best educational systems—among them, Singapore, South Korea, Finland, and Alberta, Canada—cull their teaching forces from their top college graduates. The United States draws from the bottom third to staff a profession that, like many traditionally female-dominated pursuits, inspires reverence, at its best, but lacks social status. If there is one thing school reformers agree on, it's the importance of raising the caliber of teachers.

But there is no consensus on how to engineer the image upgrade that would help lure more of the best and the brightest. Look abroad, to the premier school systems, and a spectrum of tactics emerges. On one end is South Korea, where teachers get big paychecks—and big classes, which make the salaries affordable. On the other is Finland, where teacher salaries aren't high but social status is: Considered on a par in prestige with lawyers and doctors, teachers are well-trained and wield real influence over curricular and other school policies. Yet to judge by the behind-the-scenes view of American schools that Perlstein and Klein provide, teacher autonomy and authority are rare commodities in the NCLB era. And recruitment incentives and merit pay, while welcome, alone aren't likely to give the cultural boost the profession requires.

Jonathan Kozol on No Child Left Behind

Bitter complaints about the No Child Left Behind Act have been at least as common as gray squirrels in Central Park for some time now, yet I suspect that it would take at least a decade to say all the bad things that ought to be said about this wretched piece of legislation. Like several other efforts from the Bush administration, the No Child Left Behind Act began as a well-intentioned attempt at a new direction and ended up making things worse. My teacher friends tell me that the extra layer of bureaucracy has only added to the pressure to teach to the tests. But all of this has been said elsewhere with more vigor and clarity.

Salon.com has posted an interview with Jonathan Kozol, a man who managed to make Bernard Goldberg's big list of America-ruiners. Yet his criticisms of the status quo seem to line up with those of more libertarian critics, like John Taylor Gatto. I'm sure that Gatto and Kozol would find ways to disagree about what an ideal system would look like, but I'm amazed at the degree of agreement among the opponents of the plan. I found a few of his comments in the interview especially enlightening. (I've not read any of his books, so I can't vouch for his constructive suggestions.)

For example, when asked about his suggested provision to the No Child Left Behind Act (that students at bad schools be allowed to transfer to other, better districts), Kozol responds:

The idea of the provision is that a child's parents should be able to transfer the child to a successful school in their district if the child's school has proven to be a hopeless failure. The trouble is, there aren't enough schools in overwhelmingly poor and minority inner-city districts to which a child can transfer. So less than 3 percent of eligible kids have transferred during the years since No Child Left Behind came into effect.

I proposed that the transfer provision be amended not only to permit but to require states to make cross-district transfers possible -- so that a student in the South Bronx could be transferred to Bronxville, which is, I have tested in my car, only about a 12-minute drive. It would be a very simple amendment to add and it would drive a mighty blow against the deepening re-segregation of our urban schools, without making any reference to race. Justice Kennedy, in his partial concurrence, pointed out that strategies like these, which are race-neutral, would certainly be constitutional.

What sort of thinking could possibly block such a hopeful provision? The most likely answer is that it's the same "neighborhood school" thinking that is helping to re-segregate public schools in my hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. Politicians know that they can gain middle-class votes and campaign money if they can protect the wealthier school districts from the less desirable students. In the long run, however, this strategy is terrible: unbalanced school districts end up with some good schools while others turn into money pits which can hardly retain teachers or even move a majority of students through to graduation. The situation must surely be worse when an entire school district is struggling. De facto segregation - not strictly by race, but rather by class - is returning before our eyes. I hope that when the next wave of education reformers moves beyond No Child Left Behind, they will find a way to reverse this awful trend.

St. Paul, Mars Hill, and Cultural Engagement

The new issue of Touchstone is out and, as usual there are several exciting articles in it. The first one to catch my eye was by Russell Moore and entitled "Retaking Mars Hill." Unfortunately, it's not up on the website yet. Check out the print edition if you can.

Moore begins by discussing the two common modes by which Christians engage popular culture. At different times in my life, I've participated in both. "Off-brand" engagement replicates what's going on in the mainstream with "people slightly less talented but more in love with Jesus." The other model ("South Park Evangelicals") tends to sneer at the more obvious Christian subculture while falling into a cooler and more stylish version of what they clearly deplore.

The article contains a dig at Derek Webb, who was one of my long-time favorite artists and whose music I often find to be powerful and challenging. I will quote from the article:

The younger, cooler wave of Evangelicals would never fall for a Christian version of the Backstreet Boys. . . Instead they consume anti-consumerist acts, such as Derek Webb.

Webb has traveled the country with religious leftist Jim Wallis preaching against the "market-oriented" and "legalistic" tendencies of contemporary conservative Protestantism. He sings songs mocking an Evangelical subculture in which "they'll know us by the T-shirts that we wear."

Of course, Webb is making a killing selling CDs, downloadable songs, and, yes, Derek Webb T-shirts. One has to work a little harder for his nickel among the soul-patched Evangelicals, but the market is still there.

I think this diatribe is a bit unfair to Mr. Webb, who is indeed a talented musician and whose intentions have always seemed good to me. His album She Must and Shall Go Free is on my short list of truly worthwhile Christian rock albums. However, Mr. Moore is certainly correct about the attitudes of a segment of the fanbase and its ineffective attempts to break out of the Christian subculture.

From this point onwards, Moore's article really shines. He examines Paul's speech on Mars Hill, so often used as an example of culturally relevant missions work, and concludes that Paul had a completely different purpose in mind.

Paul did not start speaking in Athens with a "common ground" idea of a generic god, and then reason along to Jesus. He started with the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, proclaiming among the Gentile philosophers exactly what he had proclaimed among the Jewish rabbis: that God had raised him from the dead.

. . .

Moreover, the very nature of Paul's message was an affront to the ideological underpinnings of Athenian culture. He constantly returns to the resurrection of the body. Nothing was more alien to Epicurean and Stoic thought, both of which sought to combat the fear of death by separating the prison of the body that dies from the spirit that survives.

Thus, "cultural engagement" is not primarily about "building bridges." Moore affirms that pop-culture is ubiquitous, but argues that we must also acknowledge that whatever common grace we find in it is "twisted and perverted by human rebellion." This perversion cannot be subtly manipulated into classical Christian doctrine; rather, the gospel of Christ always stands in contrast to the gospels of popular culture. In Moore's words, "[w]e connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn't anymore, but whom we'll all meet face-to-face in judgment."

Moore's central concern in this article is that attempts to emphesize the "cultural relevance" of the gospel so often tend to downplay its otherworldly strangeness. It is a call to remember to "preach beyond the cool."

Yes, it's terribly easy to sneer at the unsophisticated attempts of well-meaning Christians to create family-friendly copies of mainstream cultural phenomena. But equally well-meaning Derek Webb fans or readers of Relevant Magazine must keep in mind that a firm commitment to the full gospel story is their only defense against becoming the very thing which they so consistently protest.

Welcome Statement

This blog exists because certain posts will be graded for a class I am taking. The posts which I intend to submit for grades will receive the label "American Political Thought and Practice." However, if I'm going to create a space for my voice on the Internet, I might as well make use of it. Therefore, I will be submitting other thoughts for the consideration of the casual internet user who has little to no authority to grade my work. These posts will be labeled appropriately.

I suppose I ought to say something about my general perspective on significant events. I believe that human cultures are the foundations upon which all political systems must rest. A sick or unstable culture will be unable to sustain even the most well-designed government. On the other hand, a strong and vital cultural identity can withstand brutal tyranny from any quarter. I hope to expand upon this thought in the future, but I mention it now because it is the lens through which I tend to view most other issues.