Leafsnap!

"Leafsnap" is the first thing I've ever seen that makes me want an iPhone. Seriously.

In the long run, though, it might be better for me to get handy with a field guide.

(Via Kottke.)

"(as our shadows still walk without us)"

From Shakespeare's Timon of Athens IV.iii.436-40:

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears.

Professor Charles Kinbote's re-translation of the passage from a Zemblan edition:

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea
and robs it. The moon is a thief:
he steals his silvery light from the sun.
The sea is a thief. it dissolves the moon.

I'm very much enjoying Nabokov's Pale Fire on my second trip through. Lolita might be the more artful/significant work (who am I to say?), but Pale Fire hits the sweet spot between it and what I've read of Pnin.

"Founding Gardeners."

There's probably a way to relate this brief review of Andrea Wulf's Founding Gardeners to Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiatives and then blast the Tea Party, but I don't have it in me. Instead I'll just quote my favorite sentence:

As seen with Washington in New York, the Founders' near obsession with horticulture seemed at times to obscure their judgment—almost no pressing issue could dissuade them from visiting another garden—but it also spoke to their commitment to the agrarian ideal.

"Discipline is not a mystery."

Via Meaghan Ritchey, an article on just sitting down to do it. Simple instructions for artists, which happen to line up perfectly with what Sertillanges recommended for aspiring thinkers:

Choose a time to make work and hold that time inviolate. If you lack inspiration, wait. Don't do anything else.

The work will come.

How not to sway someone toward climate change skepticism.

There's some good stuff in the new issue of First Things: Anthony Esolen and Alan Jacobs turn in solid essays, there's an overture toward dialogue with Muslim theologians, and George Weigel's essay about John Paul II might be interesting to people who haven't yet read Witness to Hope. But William Happer's attack on the global-warming consensus is . . . problematic. There are no fewer than five places where Happer compares his opponents to dictators or fictional authoritarians:

• "This damnatia memoriae of inconvenient facts was simply expunged from the 2001 IPCC report, much as Trotsky and Yezhov were removed from Stalin’s photographs by dark-room specialists in the later years of the dictator’s reign."
• "Global warming alarmists have something like Gadaffi’s initial air superiority over rag-tag opponents in Libya."
• "Skeptics’ motives are publicly impugned; denigrating names are used routinely in media reports and the blogosphere; and we now see attempts to use the same tactics that Big Brother applied to the skeptical hero, Winston Smith, in Orwell’s 1984."
• "We know from the Soviet experience that a society can find it easy to consider dissidents to be mentally deranged and act accordingly."
  
• "Not unlike functionaries of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in 1984, with its motto 'Ignorance is Strength,' many members of the environmental news media dutifully and uncritically promote the party line of the climate crusade."

Granting for the sake of argument that Happer is completely right, what we'd have is a case of massive funding skewing research results and leading to bad policy, with some scientists being unable to publish their legitimate research. Nobody is being tortured, murdered, or sent to the gulag. Comparing the climate change movement to Stalinism, as Happer does, is almost actively offensive; it certainly trivializes the moral horrors of the twentieth century.

Lady Baltimore.

Baltimore is a city that went crazy for civic monuments, and you find them in all sorts of places. When you find one of these old monuments in a neighborhood that’s going to seed, the effect can be almost overwhelmingly symbolic, concentrating all of the history, squalor, and hope of Baltimore into a big carved stone.

For a while, I thought that Baltimore’s Washington Monument did this best. Last fall, a van careened into the iron fence surrounding the monument, and now this grand monument in a historic neighborhood has fifteen feet of unsightly chain-link fence covering the gap. (It’s possible that this will get fixed soon.)

But walking to work this morning, I wandered by a Lady Baltimore statue, and I think this one really gets it. The Monument City blog describes it:

The Lady Baltimore loosely holds a sledgehammer in her right hand, while a shield, with the Battle Monument on it’s front, rests to her left. An anchor, gear, anvil and steam engine are represented around the base of the sculpture. Situated in a small park at the foot of Druid Hill, the statue sits inside the well-maintained Mount Royal Terrace Park. A plaque adorns the front of the structure, listing the Commissioner and Engineer of the Saint Paul Street bridge.

A few things:

• So there’s symbols for the major industries: shipping, health, manufacturing, etc.
• The statue’s nose is broken off.
• The plaque has been removed. Presumably, it was stolen and sold for scrap.
• The nearby houses are beautiful, but they’re starting to fall apart .
• The park is gorgeous—the roses are in bloom—but the noise of the nearby interstate highway is constant. In this park, you can feel viscerally the problems of city expressways.
• At one point, a nearby hillside must have had a view down the valley toward the Jones Falls River, but, as I just mentioned, I-83 is in the way now.

As I described this scenario to some colleagues, a lifelong Baltimore resident told me I was totally wrong about this monument’s adequacy as a symbol of Baltimore. He argued that the appropriate symbol is actually Ravens Stadium, which represents power and year-to-year dominance. I leave it to the reader to judge.

Robot library.

This is really cool. I've never seen a reading room that didn't have any bookshelves in it; most of the special collections I've been to have had locked shelves or reference works in the main space. I'd love to stand in that room and see if it feels right for reading. Also interesting that, with this setup, “browsing” can only happen in the browser, so to speak. Everything but the reading has been pushed back behind a computer interface. Not that this is too different from non-robotic closed stacks from the patron's perspective.

(Via Alan Jacobs, of course.)

Seriously? BHL?

Say what you will about France, but their public intellectuals can get things done. This is so weird: philosopher/celebrity Bernard-Henri Lévy claims that he's the one responsible for convincing the French government to intervene in Libya, and that he did this by wandering into Libya to meet with rebel leaders to help them call up Sarkozy. I don't know how I missed this story, but I'm glad Ross Douthat referenced it in his latest blog post:

It is an extraordinary tale, about which neither the Élysée Palace nor the Foreign Ministry wished to comment, other than quietly urging a grain of salt. Mr. Lévy was in Egypt at the tail end of the Tahrir Square uprising, went to the Libyan border but had pressing business in Paris. But on Feb. 27, before returning to North Africa, he called Mr. Sarkozy, asking if he was interested in making contact with the rebels. He was, so Mr. Lévy rented a plane and flew to Marsa Matrouh, the Egyptian airport closest to Libya.

Accompanied by his oldest friend and longtime collaborator, Gilles Hertzog, and, of course, a photographer, Marc Roussel, Mr. Lévy walked across the border past hundreds of yards of refugees and foreign workers and flagged down a car, which was delivering vegetables every 20 miles on the way to Tobruk, the first Libyan city inside the border. He then went to Bayda, where he found Mustafa Mohammed Abdul Jalil, the former Libyan minister of justice and leader of the Interim Transitional National Council.

"Petrol" is British for "gas."

Want to be a little bit more depressed about the United States? Try this article from the Economist about our national transit policy. Highways grow ever more congested, passenger trains shamble slowly along freight lines, and flying gets more difficult and more expensive at the same time. And we fund projects stupidly:

The federal government is responsible for only a quarter of total transport spending, but the way it allocates funding shapes the way things are done at the state and local levels. Unfortunately, it tends not to reward the prudent, thanks to formulas that govern over 70% of federal investment. Petrol-tax revenues, for instance, are returned to the states according to the miles of highway they contain, the distances their residents drive, and the fuel they burn. The system is awash with perverse incentives. A state using road-pricing to limit travel and congestion would be punished for its efforts with reduced funding, whereas one that built highways it could not afford to maintain would receive a larger allocation.

Formula-determined block grants to states are, at least, designed to leave important decisions to local authorities. But the formulas used to allocate the money shape infrastructure planning in a remarkably block-headed manner. Cost-benefit studies are almost entirely lacking. Federal guidelines for new construction tend to reflect politics rather than anything else. States tend to use federal money as a substitute for local spending, rather than to supplement or leverage it.

It's hard to imagine transit funding structures becoming a popular issue, so I guess we have to offer this one up to the lobbying process. A friend recommended looking at Transportation For America, a transit lobbying group, for a comprehensive national transit program.

Woodward on the raid.

Hopefully everyone's already read Bob Woodward's article about the raid on the Bin Laden compound, but if not, here it is. As good as this one is, I'm still eager to read a longer telling of the story. Finding bin Laden has been a massive (and massively expensive) national project, and I'm curious to see what lessons we draw from the operation.

Interstates before interstates.

From the Baltimore Sun's Getting There blog:

“U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is pointing out that this weekend marks the 200th anniversary of what could be called the United States' first interstate highway: the National Road from Cumberland to what is now Wheeling, W.Va.

“Construction of the road was authorized by Congress in 1806 but didn't begin until May 8, 1811 -- setting a precedent of road project delays that persists to this day.”

The weekend in question, by the way, was last weekend. I'm always glad to hear that the people in Cumberland had something to do on a Saturday.

Why aren't you reading Alan Jacobs yet?

Alan Jacobs announces that he will be leading a faculty seminar at Wheaton next fall called “Christianity and the Book: Histories and Futures.” If patterns hold, the discussion will be spilling over onto Jacobs's excellent blog, Text Patterns.

For now, though, that initial post looks like a fantastic starting point for anyone interested in the history of Christianity or the history of books.

Sam Harris and the N.I.C.E.

I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis's science-fiction novel That Hideous Strength. The villains of the piece are members of a nebulous research group called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. The N.I.C.E. wants to use impartial science to rebuild Britain in a rationalized way, though its leaders admit to each other that the real point of all their work is that they get to be the ones running the experiments — a power grab in the name of instrumental reason.

I would have said that Lewis's take on the modern scientific project is overly pessimistic, that our scientists do not really think like that, and that in our society the democratic project has a salutary oversight of the scientific establishment. I would have said that, but just this morning I read a review of Sam Harris's books at The Nation which made me second-guess my position. (I've only read Letter to a Christian Nation, and the review is on point about that one, so I'm hoping the reviewer is right about the other two books.) The reviewer sums up Harris's political project, and it's chilling:

These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things they should do instead and how to make them abandon their silly and harmful practices in order “to live better lives.” Harris’s engineering mission envelops human life as a whole. “Given recent developments in biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution,” he writes. “Should we do this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of human well-being could guide us.” Harris counsels that those wary of the arrogance, and the potential dangers, of the desire to perfect the biological evolution of the species should observe the behavior of scientists at their professional meetings: “arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.” Scientists, in Harris’s telling, are the saints of circumspection.

Harris would fit right in at the N.I.C.E. — as long as he stuck with Frost rather than Wither.

(I found the article via David Sessions at Patrol.)

Phil Cook, a musician.

There's a great write-up in the Independent Weekly on Phil Cook, a member of Megafaun and one of the best rock stars. Phil has a solo album coming out soon on Trekky Records. Give him a listen if you like rootsy folk and blues.

This stuff makes my day.

Theological aesthetics: Lewis and Hart.

From the description of the eldils (basically angels) in C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength:

“In their eye s the normal [human] modes of being—engendering and birth and death and decay—which are to us the framework of thought, were no less wonderful than the countless other patterns of being which were continually present to their unsleeping minds. To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is ‘natural.’ From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible, for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention.”

-C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength. New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1965. (202)

Surely this passage came out of conversations with J.R.R. Tolkein, whose writings work out a theory and terminology for the aesthetics of sub-creation. I'm sure that someone out there has written about Lewis and Tolkein from the perspective of theological aesthetics after Hans Urs Von Balthasar, but I haven't yet found that work. There's clearly a sympathetic resonance between the passage above and this passage from David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite:

“It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. […] In Bach's music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement, even when the fittingness is deferred across massive dissonances by way of the most elaborate contrapuntal meditations.”

-David Bentley Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 2003. (283)

If anyone knows of an essay that compares Hart/Balthasar with Lewis/Tolkein, I'd love to read it.

Hysteria, and the morning after.

The AV Club's had two interesting essays this week that are at least worth a skim for anyone interested in rock music.

The first one is a long account of the pop-cultural role of Def Leppard's Hysteria. The essay kicks off a series of reflections on various number-one pop records, and, suitably, there's a long discussion of what number-one records used to mean back in the days when there was a single dominant distribution machine.

…we live in a culture where the terms “mainstream” and “underground” have become virtually meaningless, as practically every song by every band ever is equally accessible, frequently at no cost, to anyone with an Internet connection and the interest to seek it out. “Pop” is no longer short for “popular”; it’s simply one choice in a sea of genres that can be programmed into your music player in order to block out all other kinds of music. Music-related fame has been democratized to a greater degree than at any point in the media age, dramatically eroding the concept of fame as we once knew it.

I think this overstates the case, but we're definitely on this trajectory. It's exciting, in a way, that the importance of channels of production (record labels, radio) are fading: I'm almost hoping we'll get to see some kind of ultimate showdown between aesthetics and marketing for the soul of music.

The second essay is about Pete Yorn's musicforthemorningafter, an album that got many spins on my discman in 2001. It does seem like the major labels never really found anyone to take the torch from Yorn and Ryan Adams (I'm really surprised that Adams's Gold doesn't get a mention). Perhaps I just got embedded in indie culture too soon after those albums to know what I'm talking about. But, on that note, I'll probably buy the new Fleet Foxes album this week.

Notes on Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church (1)

Chapter 1: Scripture and the Divided Church

The first thing a non-theologian ought to know before getting into Ephraim Radner's The End of the Church: A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West is the definition of “pneumatology.” A pneumatology is something like a theory of the action of the Holy Spirit. That being said, I'll do my best to use common language, even though there's no avoiding "pneumatology" when the book under discussion uses that word in its subtitle.

One of the points of agreement for ecumenically inclined mainline Christians on the one hand and the sort of conservative Christians who rally around "mere Christianity" on the other is the notion that division in the church is to be lamented. Yet we often follow that acknowledgment with an affirmation of one of the many doctrines that sets our particular tradition apart from others. What Ephraim Radner is doing in this book is trying to linger on the problem of disunity. What does it mean to lament our division?

Looking back to the Protestant Reformation, we see that Catholics and Protestants rarely hesitated to label each other's churches false. For example, my edition of the Westminster Confession says: “In no sense can the Pope of Rome be the head of [the church]. Rather, he is that Antichrist, the man of sin, and son of damnation, who glorifies himself as opposed to Christ and everything related to God.” But, for all sorts of reasons, we're not so quick to do this anymore. Many theologically serious evangelical Protestants find comfort in the work of unmistakeably Catholic writers. The mainline ecumenical movement was built on the recognition of saving faith among parties to the dialogue.

So many of us are now in conflict with Reformation-era Catholic or Protestant theology. Reformation Protestants argued that the Holy Spirit acts in the hearts and minds of individual believers as they read scripture; Catholics of the time claimed that the Holy Spirit only comes to individuals through their involvement in the true community of the Church. If we hold to either view of the Holy Spirit, one party must be illegitimate. Radner asks, “If the Spirit works preeminently neither to guide our hearing of Scripture nor to forge the common space for that hearing, what are we to say about the Spirit at all in its relation to Scripture and the Church?” (23)

The ecumenical movement, in Radner's telling, saw this difficulty and tried to get around it, but the results were disheartening. “[T]he ecumenical path for resolving the post-Reformation pneumatological contradiction was to redefine the Holy Spirit's office into that of mediating visible disunity into an invisible unity. … Incoherence … becomes itself a pneumatic virtue” (25). It's a harsh verdict, and Radner offers his alternative.

Turning to Scripture, one finds that the New Testament is not helpful in this particular matter: “How one understands the Church as itself a divided entity is not a topic the New Testament openly broaches” (34). And so we look to the Old Testament, and see the “figure” of Israel divided into two kingdoms just after Solomon's death. The key teaching point is that “partitioned Israel is ‘abandoned’ Israel; and this Israel, separated among its members, is separated too from the Holy Spirit” (37). This is the frightening thesis of Radner's book: in our division, we as Christians are in a position of disobedience, and we, like divided Israel, lack the spiritual fullness that marked an earlier time. Is it possible that our disagreements are so persistent precisely because of the condition of our division?

We already have resources for understanding what Radner means by “abandonment.” Both Protestants and Catholics have thought a great deal about how spiritual deadness functions in the individual life; what is needed now is to consider whether this deadness has a communal analogue. Radner considers St. John of the Cross's mystical writing as well as Puritan perspectives on spiritual “aridity.” Radner suggests that to explore how a negative condition can work to our betterment and God's glory, we should recall Pauline accounts of the “negative function” of the law as described in Romans and 2 Corinthians. Though spiritual deadness isn't discussed in this way, he thinks we can draw the analogy.

What's especially interesting is the model Radner ends up recommending as an alternative to division. Without endorsing any of their doctrinal claims, he points to the Jansenists, who would allow themselves only (as Pierre Nicole put it) a “simple and negative separation, which consists in the refusal of certain acts of community, without however involving positive acts of separation against the community from which one separates” (47). This might have been Luther's original intention; what might have happened had he stuck to it?

All of this would be very depressing if Radner hoped for some institutional process to overcome division. But, observing how divided Israel hoped for the coming Messiah, we must put our hope elsewhere. “Bodies,” Radner says, “especially bodies laid out with the pallor of insensibility, bodies of the dead, await not medical specialists, but Creators” (56).

I don't know if I'm able to endorse Radner's argument here, but I'll be reading with interest and posting my notes from future chapters as I get through them.

Monarchy, cont'd.

Josh has written more on monarchy, and the first thing to note is that he pulls off a footnote trick that, to my knowledge, not even David Foster Wallace ever tried. Well done!

Anyway, I think Josh is right to get away from the question of whether a "yearning for monarchy" is in some way natural to humans. Beyond that, I don't have much to say. Of course there's no way to introduce a powerless monarchy in the USA, and the political problem that makes monarchy attractive (unlike Colin Firth in The King's Speech, all of our leaders want the job) has do be addressed by more democracy — more activity on the local level.

What's "detraction"?

Alexander Pruss has just written about the sin of detraction. It's a term I'd never heard. "In detraction," says Pruss, "one discloses, without sufficient moral reason, the faults of another and one speaks the truth (or what one thinks is the truth)." This is different from slander, in which the speaker lies about another person.

He goes on to consider the puzzle of how refraining from speaking truth could be a good thing for Christians, who consider themselves people of Truth, and comes up with a number of reasons for refraining from detraction. I'm interested in the second and fifth points:

We are all sinners. By disclosing a hidden fault of another, we make it seem like this person is worse than all the people whose hidden faults are not disclosed. Frequently, the person is made to seem worse than the detractor. There is, thus, an injustice when there is no special reason to disclose the sins of this individual.

[...]

When the faults of another are disclosed to sinful humans, these humans will be tempted to take an inappropriate attitude towards these faults, an attitude of judgment rather than forgiveness. Thus, detraction is not only a sin against the person whose reputation is being unjustly tarnished, but also a sin against the listener who is being tempted into sin.

It's good to have a word for this thing I do too often.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

If anyone reads this blog, lives in New York, and didn't hear it from me in person last weekend, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is another treasure of a documentary, and should be seen in the theater. I'll spare you an attempt at a description of the quality of the limitedness I felt when staring at resonantly beautiful art made by humans who lived in Europe three hundred centuries ago.



Here's hoping the 3D projection takes a trip through the rest of the USA.

And the release of a new Herzog film brings gifts beyond the film itself: we always get a new round of Herzog interviews. For example, here (via Kottke):

"The Polar explorations were a huge mistake of the human race, an indication that the twentieth century was a mistake in its entirety. They are one of the indicators.

"Adventure doesn’t feel right anymore. And something doesn’t feel right with artists anymore, the whole term. If you look at contemporary figurative art, you can tell there is a crisis of the term there."

And here:

"Sounding deep into the abysses of time, and into the origin of the modern human soul. It’s strange, I’m now doing a film with death-row inmates, and as a general umbrella title, I thought about “Gazing Into The Abyss,” and then I thought that would have been a fine title for the cave film. It fits for almost every film I’ve made. Bad Lieutenant, Aguirre, you just name it.