The unifying telos of the entire cosmic, animate creatures and inanimate bodies alike, is the worship of YHWH. Where William Paley imagined the world as if a finely designed timepiece and more modern thinkers may regard it as a temporary emergence born of random fortuities, doomed to collapse under entropic forces in its time, the psalmist invites us to think of the world as if an unfathomably vast liturgical assembly. Transcending and traversing the vast reaches and divisions of time and space, gathering together the stars in their courses and the movement of subatomic particles, creation is united in expressing the glory of its Maker, YHWH, bound together in its beautiful and joyful witness to his greatness.
Within such a world, humanity is, as Alexander Schmemann has observed, not primarily homo sapien, homo faber, homo economicus, or even homo politicus, but homo adorans. Our knowledge, creation, economics, and politics are all subordinate to the greater end of the worship of YHWH.
Advent continually returns us to the posture of vigilant and expectant watchers, looking for the coming of Christ in our lives, communities, and world. Christmas calls us to spiritual perception, to be those who see the import of the signs when they appear, recognizing and rejoicing in them.
For many, Advent may be a time associated with the experience of doggedly waiting in the darkness of personal pain, abandonment, loss, or tragedy, eyes hungrily seeking out the smallest indication of divine arrival to relieve a terrible night. For others this Advent, the darkness may be a political one, anticipating a year with threatening and troubling prospects on the domestic and international stage. Wherever we find ourselves, Advent recalls us to our fundamental way of being in the world as Christians: to being an expectant people, a people who perceive the darkness as their eyes are ever watchful for the coming Light.
Every Christmas we are presented anew with a first century Jewish peasant infant, the great Sign of the world’s salvation. The Advent season connects the expectant waiting for the first advent of Christ with our expectation of his great and dread final appearance to judge the world and restore all things, and connects both of these Advents with the Christian expectation of Christ’s coming to our lives and communities. From the faithful watchers of the gospels and their evocation of passages such as Isaiah 52, we learn to recognize the latter disclosed in the sign offered by the former.
Merry Christmas, everyone! As a special Christmas episode—and our final episode of 2016—this week Derek, Matt and I discuss the Incarnation. In particular, we ask whether, if humanity had not sinned, Christ would still have come. Much theological nerdiness ensues.
There is an article of mine in the latest edition of Ad Fontes, in which I argue that Luke’s account of the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 offers us an ecclesiology in nuce. You can subscribe to the digital edition of the publication for free, or receive a print edition by supporting the worthy work of the Davenant Trust. For more information see here, which will probably have a link to my article fairly soon.
The events of Pentecost come at the fulfilment and culmination of a long history that precedes them. With the sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, the Church is set aflame by the power of the Word of God and equipped to declare this Word to all of the nations. The countless expectant whispers of an Old Testament choir of witnesses, their disparate voices drawn from throughout the canon, now combine and swell by the Spirit into a glorious and triumphant declaration of the fulfilment of divine pledge and purpose. Against the backdrop of this history we see more clearly who we are as God’s people, and are driven on a wave of redoubled promise towards the future furnished for us.
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It has been some time since I last posted links on this blog, even though I still regularly post links on a Twitter account dedicated to that purpose. I also haven’t had an open mic thread for some time.
This post is me toying with reviving both.
I don’t have the same time to engage consistently with comments nowadays, although there clearly was an expectation from some that I ought to. Rather than having to deal with this common expectation, I simply stopped producing links posts and open mic threads. If readers and commenters here are patient with my entirely arbitrary and occasional contributions, or lack thereof, in the comments and don’t expect me to answer any queries or questions, I might continue producing links posts. If not, they will be more bother than they are worth and I’ll have to stop.
It is important to stress that I have disagreements—often extremely strong disagreements—with or profound uneasiness about certain of the things that I will link here. I link to pieces that merit thought and engagement, some of which are seriously misguided, wrong, or even possess a dangerous attraction. I may also occasionally raise socially taboo issues or link to direct challenges to prevailing orthodoxies. It is important to bear in mind that many falsehoods are ‘politically correct’ precisely because there is strong reason to believe that a great many people won’t handle the truth responsibly or will fall into far more dangerous error, and that this assumption is often justified by the words and actions of those who break with the orthodoxies. Please exercise caution with some of these posts accordingly.
Once you’ve built a robust pattern-matching apparatus for one purpose, it can be tweaked in the service of others. One Translate engineer took a network he put together to judge artwork and used it to drive an autonomous radio-controlled car. A network built to recognize a cat can be turned around and trained on CT scans — and on infinitely more examples than even the best doctor could ever review. A neural network built to translate could work through millions of pages of documents of legal discovery in the tiniest fraction of the time it would take the most expensively credentialed lawyer. The kinds of jobs taken by automatons will no longer be just repetitive tasks that were once — unfairly, it ought to be emphasized — associated with the supposed lower intelligence of the uneducated classes. We’re not only talking about three and a half million truck drivers who may soon lack careers. We’re talking about inventory managers, economists, financial advisers, real estate agents. What Brain did over nine months is just one example of how quickly a small group at a large company can automate a task nobody ever would have associated with machines.
The imposition of P.C. has no logical end because feeling better about one’s self by confessing other people’s sins, humiliating and hurting them, is an addictive pleasure the appetite for which grows with each satisfaction. The more fault I find in thee, the holier (or, at least, the trendier) I am than thou. The worse you are, the better I am and the more power I should have over you. America’s ruling class seems to have adopted the view that the rest of America should be treated as inmates in reeducation camps. As Harvard Law School Professor Mark Tushnet argued earlier this year in a blog post, this means not “trying to accommodate the losers, who—remember—defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War.”
When McLuhan invites us to ask what a new technology renders obsolete, we may immediately imagine older technologies that are set aside in favor of the new. Following Borgmann, however, we can also frame the question as a matter of human labor or involvement. In other words, it is not only about older tools that we set aside but also about human faculties, skills, and subjective engagement with the world–these, too, can be displaced or outsourced by new tools. The point, of course, is not to avoid every form of technological displacement, this would be impossible and undesirable. Rather, what we need is a better way of thinking about and evaluating these displacements so that we might, when possible, make wise choices about our use of technology.
The Diversity Tax. A very controversial case that, on a great many fronts and in a great many contexts, cultural and ethnic ‘diversity’ seems to be far more of a cost than a benefit (or, we can at least acknowledge that it seems that way to far too many people to ignore). What is the future of the West’s massive experiments with diversity? As the body of research unsettling sacred values of cultural and ethnic diversity builds up, whither societies that have irreversibly thrown in their lot with this?
What is the opposite of diversity? University. It is interesting to ask what counts as ‘diversity’ and why, especially as some evidence suggests that the most innovative settings are diverse in values, but not in ethnicity.
These findings point to a causal effect of marriage patterns on the proper functioning of formal institutions and democracy. The study further suggests that the Churches’ marriage rules – by destroying extended kin-groups – led Europe on its special path of institutional and democratic development.
Of course, HBDchick has been arguing this position for some time.
Civilizations or movements with a diminished concern for ritual have an overwhelming concern with sincerity, which we can see in forms as widely varied as those Puritan sermons and the Buddhist concern with uncovering the Buddha nature hidden within each of us. In some sense, then, sincerity works as the social equivalent of the subjunctive, which we discussed earlier. If there is no ritual, there is no shared convention that indexes a possible shared world. Instead, social relationships have to rely on a never-ending production of new signs of sincerity (though of course there can be ritualized forms of the search for sincerity).
Wilfrid Sellars once defined philosophy as the study of how things, in the most general sense of the term, hang together, in the most general sense of the term. We’re doing pretty abstract work, and we’re often trying to see how things fit together at a very general level. What makes us different from conspiracy theorists, or people who claim to see Jesus in their toast? Or what stops us from just making stuff up and believing it? I really think that the only thing keeping us tethered to the world is the disciplinary culture, and the fact that we have to defend ourselves, in a room full of people who have spent decades listening to arguments and identifying bad ones.
Thomas Hegghammer, The Future of Jihadism in Europe: A Pessimistic View: ‘continuing as we do today, with small, incremental policy adjustments, arguably has a predictable outcome. It is a Europe with much larger intelligence services, an entrenched Muslim economic underclass, and more anti-Muslim sentiment.’
A guest post of mine has just been published over on the Theopolis Institute. Within it, I explore themes of Exodus in the beginning of 1 Kings. I argue that Solomon is a new Adam and a new Pharaoh.
Within this world, Solomon is like a glorious new Adam. He is the wise ruler of the world, who is able to name the trees and the animals (4:29-34). Indeed, when the Queen of Sheba comes to him, it is akin to Eve being brought to Adam, the moment when the story of the first creation arrived at its zenith of glory.
Unfortunately, just as in the account of the original creation, it is at this point that things all start to crumble. The rest of the story of Solomon is a tragic story of the fall of the new Adam and of being removed from the peace and rest of the new Eden. Just as it appears that Israel is experiencing a golden age, ugly cracks start to appear in the grand edifice of Solomon’s kingdom.
On this week’s episode of Mere Fidelity, Derek, Matt, and I return to our discussion of C.S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves, this time joined by Andrew. Our topic this time is Eros.
Hays’s exegesis is frequently scintillating, not least in its vindication of the evangelists’ citations of the Scriptures against those who accuse them of haphazard, opportunistic, or careless misappropriation. Rather than treating the Old Testament as a grab bag of predictive prooftexts, Hays demonstrates that the skilful interweaving of citations and allusions in a text like Mark 1:1–3 establishes a scriptural matrix within which the mystery of the Messiah will be disclosed to those who have the ears to hear. Matthew’s more overt citations, which are also often subtly blended quotations, accomplish something similar, illuminating the deep correspondences between Christ and his precursors and the manner in which ‘he gathers into himself the significations imbedded in their stories’ (189).
In contrast to figural readings that focus narrowly on a one-to-one relation between types and antitypes, for Hays significations and motifs routinely overlap, recur, and coalesce in a more musical fashion. The literary artistry of Luke, for instance, manifests a world that is richly redolent with scriptural memory, reverberating with its expectant whispers. Each fleeting appearance of a variation upon a given scriptural theme affords the attentive hearer an enlightening foil against which to understand the evangelist’s story of God’s salvation in Jesus. John presents a more transfigural reading of Scripture, summoning his readers ‘to recognize the way in which Israel’s Scripture has always been mysteriously suffused with the presence of Jesus’ (289).
Read the whole review here. I highly recommend that you buy the book.
Merry Christmas, everyone! As a special Christmas episode—and our final episode of 2016—
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