Two things from our newspapers of record.

1. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on faith and science:

   What is at stake in these disputes is not a choice between following biblical authority on the one hand or science on the other, as the matter is often misleadingly framed. Rather, we see rival theological commitments, rival understandings of how to read Genesis.

   I think this puts it nicely, though Wilson goes on to understate the consequences of adhering to reading Genesis as a literal description of the origins of the world. Young Earth Creationists have to explain how the scientific community gets things so wrong, and so it seems rather common to consider the scientific establishment as mendacious, incompetent, or ideologically biased to a terrifying degree. If the scientists are so bad at geology, how could they do any better on climatology? So while Young Earth Creationism is not essentially a "disdain for science," such disdain tends to follow.
2. In the New York Times, an essay on David Foster Wallace's prose style, and those on the internet who learned all the wrong lessons from it:

   I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified.
   
   [...]
   
   How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely.

   That's a stew I like making more than eating. This is worth thinking about.

How influence works in Evangelical culture.

Ryan Lizza's New Yorker piece on Michele Bachmann set some bloggers to complaining about "strange inferences" and the occasional "stupid and dishonest" claim. My impression of the piece is that it's Lizza's well-intentioned but failed attempt to explain a subculture that baffles him.

The section on Francis Schaeffer is obviously the most egregious. For a Christian to express admiration for Schaeffer is not necessarily to endorse all of Schaeffer's ideas. Rather, it's to endorse his commitment to Christian engagement with culture, as contrasted with a fundamentalist shunning of the secular. That notion that a theologically conservative Christian could write about existentialism, hit movies, and art history was incredibly important for evangelicals in my father's generation. (I take a very negative view of the content of Schaeffer's contribution, and think his achievement consisted almost entirely in getting better thinkers to take up the issues he raised.)

Anyways, I'd say that neither the Lizza article nor Michelle Goldberg's related Daily Beast essay on "Dominionism" rings true when it comes to patterns of influence in the religious right, though my only reason for thinking so is personal experience with fairly conservative Christian schools, and with moderately conservative churches.

Though David Sessions is getting closer here, it's not just about the numbers:

Here’s the reality: Dominionism as a term or a school of thought is virtually unknown even to conservative evangelicals of the type who adore Bachmann and Palin. [...] It is difficult to overstate how fringe it is in its purest forms, how tiny the number of people who are aware of and embrace its arguments.

What's also missing in these articles is a solid analysis of the institutions of evangelical culture. Do these ideas have traction in the so-called flagship universities, like Wheaton? What about seminaries? Did Christianity Today take a position? How about the radio networks? Are the ideas popular in the Christian entertainment industry?

As an example of how that last question might be answered, Schaeffer's influence led Chuck Colson to push the notion of the "Christian Worldview," defined by Colson's organization as "a framework for understanding and interacting with the physical world, other humans, and the Divine." The Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline, in turn, included a song called "My Worldview" on their 1993 album Don't Censor Me. Listen at your own risk.

Does anyone sing about Dominionism?

Two from the League.

I've no idea if there is anyone who reads this blog and doesn't read the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, a group blog that is kind enough to let me post. But just in case there is such a person, I want to link to two of today's posts at the League:

• David Schaengold wrote a delightful little post about the Clinton marriage. He conjures up a not-entirely-impossible scenario in which the Clintons are “the secret representatives of genuine romance in our age.” It's a grand idea.
• Second, I dropped a link to this article in The Nation about the Templeton Foundation, which funds faith-and-science research. As a result of this article, I'm now deeply interested in how the Templeton Foundation engages with academia, and I hope to find out more.
  

Miniature conversions.

Eve Tushnet, in the context of encouraging cradle Catholics to stay Catholic:

“A broader point is that conversion-in-general is often a response to a two-part movement of the soul. First, you realize that you are painfully inadequate, that your knowledge is incomplete and your beliefs are flimsy. Second, you find something better than what you have -- better than what you are, at this point in your life -- and fall in love.

“This is a movement that can take place entirely within the Church. It's the experience of St. Francis. It's what we experience constantly, as we are abruptly made aware of our own sins and our own longing for God. I know it can be depressing to feel stuck in an endless cycle of confessing the same sins to the same priest, lather-rinse-repent, but if we are attempting to truly and fully acknowledge and turn away from our sin, each confession is a miniature conversion. (This is why I love the priest who often asks me to read a psalm as my penance -- the psalms capture every mood of David's conflicted, needy, bone-deep love of God.)”

To-read.

Based on Andy Crouch's review in Books and Culture, I'm putting James Davison Hunter's To Change the World on my to-read list. (Also, Books and Culture is on my to-subscribe list.) Hunter, apparently, is calling for Evangelical Christians to aim at “faithful presence” — which is to say, “fully participating in every structure of culture as deeply formed Christians who also participate in the alternative community of the church.” — rather than actively political culture-capturing.

And I'll be curious to re-read Chuck Colson's quite reasonable defense of his work with Prison Fellowship after I've read Hunter's book, to see how close Hunter really is to what Colson calls “quietism.”

Revelation.

“In some strands of evangelicalism, especially in fundamentalism, God's revelation is depicted as a static deposit of truth that is directly accessible to man's reason. But this subverts the idea that God is sovereign even in his revelation, that God remains hidden until he gives himself to be known. The knowledge and grace of God are not simply available to man even in the Bible, and this means that God remains the Master and man the servant even in the area of the knowledge of God.”

-Donald Bloesch, in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, Vol. I: God, Authority, & Salvation

I'm only about fifty pages in, but I'm enjoying this book. It's succinct, highly readable, and the author draws on a wide variety of sources. It's got to be good for me to take occasional tours across the wide domain of evangelical theology. One should know one's tradition.

Karl Barth / public faith.

"Faith means choosing between faith and unbelief, wrong belief and superstition. Faith is the act in which man relates himself to God as is appropriate to God. For this work takes place in a stepping out of neutrality towards God, out of any disavowal of obligation towards Him in our existence and attitude, out of the private sphere, into resoluteness, responsibility and public life. Faith without this tendency to public life, faith that avoids this difficulty, has become in itself unbelief, wrong belief, superstition. For faith that believes in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit cannot refuse to become public."

-Karl Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline

Tourists and pilgrims.

I am always impressed by Matthew Milliner. Here's something he had to say about tourists and pilgrims:

“The tourist seeks interesting places. The pilgrim seeks to realize the way that a particular place freshly articulates the truths of faith. Hence the pilgrim, like the tourist, can be deeply impressed by the scale of the Parthenon, but equally overwhelmed by Mars Hill just below, where Paul's message, then mocked, would soon make of the that Parthenon a church. The pilgrim, like the tourist, will be awestruck by the Roman forum, but struck all the more - looking out at the mushrooming church domes over the Eternal City skyline - that the forbidden religion overcame imperial might. Pilgrims, like tourists, can’t help but be affected by the pyramids, only to then sense the shattering contrast of the Sinai wilderness, where the man-made pyramids are dwarfed by far larger natural ones, and where Pharonic splendor is both tempered and judged.”

If I kept quoting the good stuff I'd just steal the entire post.

Reverence.

I really have no clue whether the David Foster Wallace short story in the New Yorker was intended as a stand-alone piece or if it's part of that novel he was working on, but I was glad I got to read it anyway. It includes this line, which satisfies my yen for Rudolph-Otto-style typographies of the numinous:

“This was the year, at five or six, that I learned the meaning of ‘reverence,’ which, as I understand it, is the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena, the same way that ‘respect’ and ‘obedience’ describe the attitude one takes toward observable physical phenomena, such as gravity or money.”

-from “All That” by David Foster Wallace, at The New Yorker

Two quick thoughts.

1.) Two of my favorite songwriters are John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and Phil Elverum of Mount Eerie. Neither of them are Christians. Yet Darnielle is surely the most Christian non-Christian songwriter on the planet. Obviously, he just released an album about the Bible, but his entire catalog is suffused with a yearning for redemption and an eschatological hope that comports very well with my understanding of the Gospel. I don't know whether Darnielle believes in souls that can be redeemed, but his art (giving eloquent expression to the emotions of characters who would lack such words in real life) seems to presuppose such a notion. With Elverum, on the other hand, it's like Christianity doesn't exist. I don't recall a single instance of him borrowing a Christian term or theological concept to use in his rich mappings of his quest for insight.

2.) Regarding those Bud Light “The Difference is Drinkability” ads, I'm not sure that “drinkable” even admits of degree. No beer is any less drinkable than Bud Light unless it's frozen or something. However, I do have to admit that “drinkability” is a difference between Bud Light and, say, hamburgers.

Inferential projects.

The observation I'm about to make isn't groundbreaking in any way, but I'm going to try to put it in terms that are sort of new to me.

Reihan writes about a function of political parties:

“To recognize that our two parties represent two broad worldviews isn’t to suggest that one of both have always been faithful to them. Rather, it is a way that we negotiate a landscape that in fact includes as many worldviews as there are individuals. Andrew and I both have highly idiosyncratic takes on the world, and so we both bristle at the excesses of partisanship. But in my case, I tend to think that being part of an extended conversation among like-minded people has some value. At the same time, I think it’s very valuable to also have conversations with people who don’t share the same premises, which is why I strive to be careful and fair-minded and empathetic. Having known Yuval for a while, I think he operates in much the same way, though perhaps he has a little more faith than I do in the Republican leadership.

“There is also, I stress, a place for clear-eyed loners. We’d all be far worse off with Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan and other writers and thinkers who adhere closely to Orwell’s vision of the public intellectual. But there is also a place for movements, and those who seek to repair them and guide them.”

What is the value in conversations with those who think like we do and in conversations with those who don't?

So let's say we're all usually engaged in making inferences from positions to which we're already committed. Sometimes we will have to examine some of those basic positions, but, short of a complete epistemological crisis, we'll have to do it on the basis of inferences from other basic positions.

People who reject your basic premises will help you by questioning your inferences at or near the root level. They don't usually have an interest in following your project to its outer bounds. On the other hand, people who share your commitment to some basic principle will be interested in those limits, though they will be much less likely to challenge you on a basic level. Engaging with both groups leaves you most likely to emerge from the process with only the strongest inferences left standing. If you stick with only one group, you'll end up with shoddy commitments.

That's how I would initially translate Reihan's paragraph. But then I have to move a little bit further, since I don't think all of our inferential projects should be individual endeavors (and Reihan isn't saying this either). A group with a common project—a tradition of enquiry, let's call it—should expect to see some returns from a division of labor. Furthermore, a tradition doesn't have to die like people do.

What am I talking about, anyway? This, like so much of what I write, is so abstract as to be nearly meaningless. I've wandered far from what Reihan was talking about. And I've slipped into MacIntyre-speak again. Alas, my fallen nature.

Anyhow, I guess I like the idea of “inferential projects” because they don't require anything but “secular reason,” whatever that is. You don't have to buy the premises to criticize or investigate someone else's arguments, though you might have to invest a good deal of time figuring out how those argument really work, particularly if the premises to which that person is committed are complex.

We'll see how all of this looks in the morning. If you know of a thinker who's been over all of this long before I have—and I'm sure there's tens of thousands—let me know in the comments.

And now, off to see Jandek.

Are Mormons Christians?

E.D. Kain asks: are Mormons Christians? It's a question worth discussing, but it takes a long time, since it hinges on what it "really means" to be a Christian, and it's hard to come to any agreement on exactly where to draw that line. Some Catholics still believe that Protestant churches are full of idolators, and you can still find Protestants who believe the reverse. You can't determine whether Mormons are "really Christians" until you know what it means really to be a Christian. There's a lot of self-interest in that question, since many people want to draw the real-Christian line so that a particular someone falls inside of it.

What's easier to determine, as a matter of history and institutional continuity, is the degree to which someone is an orthodox Christian. As I've argued before, orthodoxy has to do with the history of the church you're a part of, not the objective, eternal correctness of your beliefs:

"To put it simply, your denomination's relationship to the Nicene Creed will tell you a great deal about the sense in which you can call yourself an orthodox Christian. If your denomination rejects it entirely, then you probably can't claim orthodoxy. This is not necessarily a matter of eternal salvation, just a matter of the sensible application of a label. Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He attended church, but he never joined one as an adult. So I think it's safe to say that there's not much of a positive case for calling him an orthodox Christian. Am I 'casting him out'? Not at all. I really have no way of knowing whether or not Lincoln was 'actually a Christian,' and it's probably fruitless to try and pin it down.

"Unfortunately, and as usual, there is grey area. One can be a member of an orthodox denomination and yet be publically heterodox in one's beliefs, or one can adhere to a different theological tradition than that of one's church."

Does anyone object to the claim that we can look at church history and figure out some loose boundaries for orthodox Christianity, and that Mormonism falls outside those boundaries?

For a fuller discussion of Mormon theology and its differences with orthodox Christian theology, see the articles by Bruce Porter and Gerald McDermott in the October 2008 First Things.

Stout on authority and authoritarianism.

Required reading for any discussion of religion and democracy:

“No ethical community could sustain a discursive practice without imposing on each of its members the necessity of keeping track of the normative attitudes and entitlements of their interlocutors, because without this there would be no communication—and therefore no exchange of reasons—among them. But, as we have seen, ethical communities have different ways of going about their discursive business. […] Where the default position in a given community is that the ethical judgments of those in ecclesial or political office are correct, we have a pattern of deference to one kind of authority. The authoritarian extreme is reached whenever such a position is treated as indefeasible and the authority is treated as self-interpreting. As one approaches this extreme, ethical truth is reduced in practice to what the highest authority says. When the reduction is total, it no longer makes sense to claim that the highest authority says P, but P might not be true.

“One should not assume, however, that all religious communities are huddled near the authoritarian extreme of the spectrum. Many religious traditions and movements have developed relatively flexible structures of authority, and even those best known for their official rigidity are rarely able in practice to stamp out critical questioning of allegedly indefeasible authorities. […] Many Protestants, Jews, and Muslims who begin by attributing indefeasible and unique authority to a revealed law end up interpreting that law in a highly flexible way. All of these traditions have been more pluralistic and less authoritarian in practice than some of their officials and intellectuals have wanted them to be.”

-Jeffrey Stout. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2004. (280)

I ellipse'd out his brief discussion of the Roman Catholic church. Of course, “papal infallability” is one of the rare explicit cases in Christianity where a religious authority literally maintains that if the highest human authority “says” P, then it cannot be the case that P is false. But I've learned that what it means for the Pope to invoke the doctrine is kind of complicated. Furthermore, infallability is only invoked rarely. And I'm a Presbyterian, so I'm under no obligation to defend it Roman Catholic doctrine. So I think we can skip the RC wrinkles for now.

Now, I believe most Christians would hold that if God says P, then we shouldn't suspect that P is false. But we can always suspect that we didn't understand what God was saying. Interpretation is difficult. (But nothing worth doing is easy.)

I'm trying to imagine how you could plausibly level a charge of authoritarianism towards Presbyterians. We've got a General Assembly, so issues are decided by committees, representatives, and votes. Perhaps a current general assembly could start acting unilaterally—but it would only be a matter of time before their replacements arrived.

The same thing is true for denominations with stronger ecclesiologies. The turnaround just takes longer. The channels for change aren't as speedy (on paper, at least) as those of a democracy, but they exist. This keeps most religious traditions of any size from approaching the authoritarian extreme. A group that closes off these channels will eventually find itself an isolated sect, or even a cult.

To be authoritarian in Stout's sense requires the necessary force to stamp out opposition. And whatever power the Religious Right has in the United States, it doesn't have that. It's far from having it. And I suspect that almost nobody wants them to have it.

Athiests and ordinary gentlemen.

I never wrote about The Atheism like I said I would. And now I don't have my notes. In part, I just lost interest. But I read through the Ordinary Gentlemen's series on The Atheism and have decided to say something. To try to sum it up:

• Freddie questioned the efficacy of The Atheism's methods, asking why The Atheists are so often unwilling to have good-faith discussions with believers, resorting instead to mockery and ridicule.
• Scott wants to situate both science and religion as methods of personal inquiry that give meaning to individual lives, while relying more on social critiques of institutional religion than metaphysical arguments.
• Chris says that both sides in the current debate usually miss the point, since the Christian God is not some kind of chap. Besides: you've got to serve somebody. And questions of divine existence aren't the right questions anyway.
• E.D. Kain also argues that the existence of God is the wrong question. Try some empathy and humility instead.
• Mark tells us that the non-decidability of the God hypothesis should lead to separation of church and state.

Needless to say, the comments are piling up. There are few things that The Internet loves more than a good, sloppy, angry argument about The Atheism. Most of the expected points have been made (although, surprisingly, the C.S. Lewis mimic hasn't made his appearance yet).

To Freddie, I would say that much of the audience for the work of The Atheists gobbles up their polemical work for one of two reasons. First, there is a kind of pleasure that comes from seeing someone who is smarter or more clever than you eviscerate (or appear to eviscerate) arguments you despise. Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter appeal to their political readers for the same reasons. Second, there's a slightly more perverse pleasure to be had for believers in reading polemics you disagree with, slapping your head, and saying, “Dear me! This fellow is stupid!”

But there is another group of readers that finds intellectual liberation in reading these books. They find that their doubts can be expressed out loud and forcefully, and even supported by arguments, even if the arguments are not precisely original. They finally have something to say to their pushy religious friends. Testemonials to this experience are not hard to find. I think that The Atheists very much hope to reach such people, and to help them be happier. I have known people who found in Dawkins' work a key to a larger, richer world than they ever imagined possible. That they no longer needed the key after passing through the portal does not diminish the key's value.

That's what I have to say to Freddie. As to the claim from the others that the proper response to the question of God is Who cares?…

Well, that's certainly the right response when the question comes up on The Internet. But in real life, I care, and so do many others, and we care deeply. It is an article of faith for Christians that God exists and that He acts in history. If this is not true—if the only justification for Christianity is psychological-instrumental—if we Christians are just fowarding chain mail ad infinitum—then I would prefer not to be a Christian. The pure-reason undecidability of the question of God does not reduce its import.

What is needed for this discussion—more than a neuroscience of belief or a biology of belief—is a human psychology of belief. And until someone shows me a better starting point, I will begin with William James's essay “The Will to Believe”. If there are real truths that cannot be objectively decided—and the entire point of the avian fettuccine avatar is that science has nothing to say about such putative truths—then we can either cut ourselves off from such truths and remain secure in the fully justifiable, or we can leave safety behind, daring to know. James's contribution is the idea of the live option: that for any particular person, some ideas will be plausable and some ideas will not. The avian fettucine avatar is not a live option for anyone, as far as I know. For cultural and historical reasons, the Christian God is much more likely to be one in our place and time.

This language, of course, does not even begin to resolve things in one way or another, but I think it gives us a better vocabulary for why we believe than the language of logic and justification alone, which implicitly assumes that the best decision is to decline to take a chance on undecidable truths.

A final maxim: A person's fundamental beliefs have less to do with the questions she can answer and much more to do with the questions she can afford to leave unanswered.

Prison-universe.

Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration, published in 1967, is the most erudite work of speculative fiction I've ever read, beating out even the various books and short stories that I've read by Gene Wolfe. The book's narrator, you see, is a poet, and he casually deploys scores of allusions, some of which I recognized and others I couldn't follow. Disch is the only writer besides David Bentley Hart that I've seen use the word “chthonic,” which is, along with “phthisic,” one of my favorite words that starts with four consonants.

I picked up Camp Concentration because I've come across several remembrances of Disch, who killed himself only a few months ago. Joseph Bottum wrote of him quite fondly for The Weekly Standard, and an article in the Boston Review praised in his first book, 334.

Camp Concentration is set in a nightmare America, where President McNamara has embroiled the United States in another Vietnam-style war. The book is the journal of an imprisoned conscientious objector who finds himself stuck in a secret military human enhancement project. It really takes off from there. Themes include: the existence and nature of God, alchemy, the possibility of creating Hell for ourselves, science and ethics, human cruelty, the pathology of genius, and, inevitably, death's inevitability.

The book's question is summed up in this passage, where one prisoner explains his philosophy to the narrator:

“Well, I do what I can to bring alchemic procedures up to date, but my attitude to pure Science, capital S, was stated a century ago by a fellow alchemist, Arthur Rimbaud—Science est trop lente. It's too slow. How much more so for me than him! How much time is left me? A month, two. And if I had years instead of months, what difference would it make? Science acquiesces, fatally, to the second law of thermodynamics—magic is free to be a conscientious objector. The fact is that I'm not interested in a universe in which I have to die.”

“Which is to say that you've chosen self-delusion.”

“Indeed, no! I choose to escape. I choose freedom.”

“You've come to a splendid place to find it.”

[…]

“Why, this is exactly where my freedom is the largest. The best we can hope for, in a finite and imperfect world, is that our minds be free, and Camp Archimedes is uniquely equipped to allow me just that freedom and no other. […] Anywhere else one begins tacitly to accept one's circumstances, one ceases to struggle, one becomes hopelessly compromised.”

“Nonsense and sophistry. You're just trying on theories for size.”

“Ah, you see into my very soul. […] But there is, after all, a point to my nonsense and sophistry. Make your Catholic Gaud the warden of this prison-universe, and you have exactly Aquinas' argument, nonsensical, sophistical—that it is only in submitting to his will that we can be free. Whereas in fact, as Lucifer well knew, as I know, as you've had intimations, one is only made free by thumbing one's nose at him.”

Disch doesn't let the book close on this or any single perspective—he's too good for that—but it's wrestled with throughout.

The plot, by the way, is fairly close to pulp in its barest outline. It's written on the Philip K. Dick model, where fairly standard sci-fi tropes are elevated and warped into originality by the author's ingenuity—and perhaps a touch of madness.

EDIT: Fixed up some confusion about when the book was published—I had looked at a republication date.

Kierkegaard's “A” on tragedy and grace.

“If the individual has no guilt whatsoever, the tragic interest is annulled, for in that case the tragic collision is enervated. On the other hand, if he has absolute guilt, he no longer interests us tragically. It is, therefore, surely a misunderstanding of the tragic when our age endeavors to have everything fateful transubstantiate itself into individuality and subjectivity…

“…In the tragic there is implicit a sadness and a healing that one indeed must not disdain, and when someone wishes to gain himself in the superhuman way our age tries to do it, he loses himself and becomes comic. Every individual, however original he is, is still a child of God, of his age, of his nation, of his family, of his friends, and only in them does he have his truth. If he wants to be the absolute in all this, his relativity, then he becomes ludicrous…

“…Intrinsically, the tragic is infinitely gentle; esthetically it is to human life what divine grace and compassion are; it is even more benign, and therefore I say that it is a motherly love that lulls the troubled one. The ethical is rigorous and hard.”

-Kierkegaard, writing as “A,” in “The Tragic in Ancient Drama,” a section of Either/Or vol. 1. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987. (144-145)

How is tragedy gentle? It is absolution without repentance. Oedipus is filled with infinite sorrow, but he does not repent. How can he? It was fate that maneuvered him to ruin. In the tragic, the hero has guilt, but still he lacks responsibility. But the individualist that A (the unnamed aesthete who “wrote” most of the first volume of Either/Or remain.) attacks has rejected fate because he wants to be his own man. And without the consolation of fate, only judgment or mockery remain. “Divine grace and compassion” arrive on the other side of ethical guilt, after the judgment has been made, and require, I think, an understanding of original sin if the analogy is to be complete.

Currently reading.

From a section where Glory Boughton thumbs through the family Bible:

“What a strange old book it was. How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance. ‘I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.’ Yes, there it was, the parable of manna. All bread is the bread of heaven, her father used to say. It expresses the will of God to sustain us in the flesh, in this life. Weary or bitter or bewildered as we may be, God is faithful. He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home.”

-Marilynne Robinson, Home (page 102)

When I read Gilead, I had this feeling that I had been waiting for the book without knowing it. And it's happening again with this book. Theory: after so many years of reading Catholic novelists, finding a writer like Robinson is like, well, coming home.

C.S. Lewis and science fiction.

Noah Berlatsky has written a fine article on C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy for Culture11. It's been quite a while since I've read them, but I've always thought Perelandra was Lewis's best work of fiction. Out of the Silent Planet seemed cold to me, and That Hideous Strength was too much a shift in tone for me to handle.

“The future does not create the sci-fi writer; rather it is the sci-fi writer who creates, in his or her own image, the future.

“Lewis created The Space Trilogy too, of course. But it’s not a romantic or agonistic creation; it’s an imaginative extension of truths which, for Lewis, apply to man, but don’t originate with him. The future doesn’t have to be about us; we don’t have to be there to make it matter. Science fiction is just a dream, after all; the twisted gothic face it sees in time’s mirror is just a phantom. […] Lewis waves his hand, and the whole genre dissolves, leaving instead the universe.”

Yet another signal that appreciation of Lewis is shifting away from his apologetics and towards his hope of revitalizing the Christian imagination, which is where the best stuff is. Although I'm not sure it's the genre that's disappearing when Lewis waves his hand: the greatest thing about science fiction is its imaginative malleability, its ability to play out all kinds of human beliefs on a mythological level.

Religious, not spiritual.

Finished Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins yesterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Percy chapters in Peter Augustine Lawler's Postmodernism Rightly Understood made sense of everything, so I didn't feel slightly lost like I did with The Last Gentleman.

Down to business: this short passage gets at something I've been thinking about for a while now. Sometimes you will ask someone whether she is religious, and she will say, “I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.” Which is fine, and probably true for many people these days. But I'm more the other way around: religious, not spiritual, for reasons something like these (in the context of taking communion in some small church miles away from the major road):

“What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.”

Religion protects me from the kind of spirituality that my brain would process into abstract nothingness. The history and weight of the Presbyterian church and, more broadly and better, the Church universal—this is an anchor to people and places that keeps people like me from floating off into abstraction.

How is he so good at this?

Sometimes Alan Jacobs is such a good writer that it almost makes me angry. This happens when I've tried to say something, and then he comes along and says it the right way. For example, my convoluted mess on Christianity, secularism, and public reason is supposed to mean the same thing as this single paragraph from The American Scene:

“If your primary concern is to influence public policy, then of course you should use the arguments that are most likely to persuade people whose support you need, which may mean keeping some of your own distinctive convictions in the background. But some Christians believe that something is more important that influencing public policy, and that is bearing public witness to Christian faith and practice. And if that’s your primary goal, then coming up with ‘adequate secular reasons’ for your beliefs is pretty much the last thing you’ll want to do. But then of course you shouldn’t complain if people find your arguments puzzling or even repulsive.”

I mean, that's pretty much it. All you can add is that the Republican Party is an organization hoping to persuade in a secular environment, and therefore should (and almost always does) take the first path.

EDIT: Looking over my other post, I did have some stuff in there about political honesty, so maybe my words weren't a complete waste.