The diseased minds and continued despicable actions of the members of a small ‘Baptist’ church in Kansas get them into the news again. This time they plan to picket the Amish funerals. How this wicked cult can spout such venomous hate in the name of the Christian gospel is simply beyond me. [HT: Jim West]
Michael Liccione is now hosting discussions of Pontifications posts over on Sacramentum Vitae.
John of Confessing Evangelical writes on the subject of infant communion from a Lutheran perspective.
I have only skim read some parts of it, but, from my first impressions, there is some superb Sunday School material here for any church that wishes to encourage its children and young people to engage with the Bible on a more than superficial level. It also draws heavily on the scriptural insights of James Jordan and Peter Leithart.
It is important to understand the emergence of the individual in Israel historically, but equally important not to succumb, as we have said, to ‘Whig history’, supposing that the trend from community to individual could simply be extrapolated to authorise any kind of radical individualism as its final term. For what Israel affords is a strong concept of the individual on a quite different basis from the individualism of the West. The community is the aboriginal fact from beginning to end, shaping the conscience of each of its members to greater or lesser effect. But when the mediating institutions of government collapse, then the memory and hope which single members faithfully conserve provide a span of continuity which can reach out towards the prospect of restructuring. The fractured community which fashioned the individual’s conscience is sustained within it and renewed out of it. And from having been preserved through single members’ memory and hope, Jeremiah anticipates, it will be the stronger, for it will incorporate that direct knowledge of Yhwh’s ways which each has won by his, or her, faithfulness. (We add the words ‘or her’ at this point without gratuitousness; for Esther is one of the models by which this faithfulness was commended.) The distinctive strengths of a voluntary community have been grafted on to the racial stock.
To generalise, as we have done before, we may say that the conscience of the individual members of a community is a repository of the moral understanding which shaped it, and may serve to perpetuate it in a crisis of collapsing morale or institution. It is not as bearer of his own primitive pre-social or pre-political rights that the individual demands the respect of the community, but as the bearer of a social understanding which recalls the formative self-understanding of the community itself. The conscientious individual speaks with society’s own forgotten voice.
Taken from The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, p.80.
Ligon Duncan implies that I am a conspiracy theorist. I am surprised that my post on Wright’s critics is still getting attention.
For my thoughts on conspiracy theories, see this post.
[And on the subject of Wright and his critics, I hope to finally get around to posting the next part of my audio treatment of Wright’s theology tomorrow evening.]
In a perfect world such a state of affairs would never exist. Gentle blog reader, may I encourage you to visit one of my all time favourite blogs, a hidden treasure in the blogosphere. Add it to your links on Bloglines (or whatever feed aggregator you use), link to it in your sidebars and tell your friends about it. The blog speaks of many of the issues dealt with on this blog, albeit in a far more imaginative, erudite and informed fashion.
…that I have entered into my second year of blogging on alastair.adversaria. I first started blogging on 40Bicycles in the middle of September 2003 and moved to my present blog after moving up to study in the University of St. Andrews. Altogether I have posted almost 1,100 times, about 700 times on my old blog and approximately 400 times on this one (admittedly, longwinded as I still am, I am probably not as bad as I used to be). I have had over 2000 comments on each blog, which isn’t particularly high, when you think about it. At the moment I receive between 400-1000 hits a day, and average around 550. Sadly rants still attract the most visitors.
Blogging has been a tremendous blessing for me. I learn by writing and blogging has given me the opportunity to sound out some of my ideas on older and wiser heads than my own. There are more than a few posts that I regret; looking back through the archives can be a humbling experience on occasions. More than almost anything else, it is those who comment who make this blog what it is. They challenge me to probe more deeply, to recognize that which is flawed or lacking in my thinking and to sharpen the way in which I express my position.
Group dynamics are both enjoyable and troubling to observe. It is interesting to see some groups where each person ends up doing things that they would never do and being a sort of person that they would never be if left to their own devices. On occasions the group can exert a power that is almost entirely autonomous from its particular members. No one is really leading other people to perform particular actions and, left to themselves, none of the group members would perform them. However, in the group these actions happen quite spontaneously. All the members end up submitting to the power of the group, but no person really creates it. Peer pressure is a power that can exist independent of particular individuals, but particular individuals increase its power by failing to resist it. Often the people who most powerful channel peer pressure are those who are most subject to it themselves.
There is no single person who serves as a mimetic model for everyone else. Rather, the mimetic model is some ideal that is in fact quite different and distinct from any of the particular members of the group. Some people are more resistant to the mimetic pull of this model, but once one or two have capitulated to the model, they increase the power of the snowballing mimetic spiral. Take the individuals out of the group and they become quite different people. This is one reason why groups of people are capable of performing the most abominable acts that every person in the group would be utterly repulsed by and incapable of performing as an individual. Group dynamics can lead to forms of expression of our depravity that far exceed the crimes of individuals. The source of the wickedness is also too complicated to be reduced to the hearts of particular individuals.
Anyway, all of this is just a long way of getting around to saying that, for some strange reason, I allowed myself to be talked into running into and immersing myself in the North Sea by the light of the stars a couple of hours ago.
n. pl.
A miscellaneous collection of notes, remarks, or selections.
Alastair's Adversaria 