The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Miscellaneous: Barbie

When American mothers objected to the Barbie doll, Matelle got to work to convince them that it was OK: “A shrewd ad campaign overcame maternal resistance by suggesting that daughters who dressed and groomed Barbie, with her vast collection of accessories and outfits, would learn how to become well-turned-out young ladies, rather than tomboys. It worked” (The New Yorker).

Miscellaneous: Against Christianity

For all you readers of Bulgarian, there’s a translation of my book Against Christianity here: https://againstchristianity.wordpress.com/

Miscellaneous: Interrogative Intonation

That hint of a slightly canceled question mark at the end of sentences? You know what I mean? Seems pretty innocuous?  Milbank doesn’t think so (The Future of Love: Essays in Political Theology):

“People who fondly imagine themselves the subjects of their ‘own’ choices entirely will, in reality, be the most manipulated subjects, and the most incapable of being influenced by goodness and beauty. This is why, in the affluent Anglo-Saxon West today, there is so much pervasively monotonous ugliness and tawdriness that belies its wealth, as well as why there are so many people adopting (literally) the sing-song accent of self-righteous complacency and vacuous uniformity, with its rising lilt of a feigned questioning at the end of every phrase. This intonation implies that any overassertion is a polite infringement of the freedom of the other, and yet at the same time its merely rhetorical interrogation suggests that the personal preference it conveys is unchallengeable, since it belongs within the total set of formally correct exchange transactions. Pure liberty is pure power – whose other name is evil.”

You’ll think twice before you talk that way again?

Economics Miscellaneous: Unschooling

A recent issue of the New Yorker had an intriguing profile of Paypal founder Peter Thiel.  Thiel’s current obsession is education”

“Thiel believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy. He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world, unable to free themselves even through bankruptcy. Nowhere is the blind complacency of the establishment more evident than in its bovine attitude toward academic degrees: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education has become a very expensive insurance policy—proof, Thiel argues, that true innovation has stalled. In the midst of economic stagnation, education has become a status game, ‘purely positional and extremely decoupled’ from the question of its benefit to the individual and society.”

He “thinks that young people—especially the most talented ones—should establish a plan for their lives early, and he favors one plan in particular: starting a technology company,” and so he is ”giving fellowships to brilliant young people who would leave college and launch their own startups.”

Miscellaneous Philosophy: Intrusive Others

Some reflections on the metaphysics and politics of marriage and pornography at http://www.firstthings.com/

Miscellaneous: PenultiMate

My son Sheffield and some of his friends have launched a YouTube program.  Also a dating service.  You can find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/greatgranduncletv

Miscellaneous: Tuning a week

We all know that the days of the week take their names from classical or Germanic gods.  But why the order?

The order of the week is not the order of the planets in the sky, which is, as we find in Dante: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.  The order of days starts in the middle, and the pattern is 4, 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7.

In his The Last Word in Prophecy, C. E. Douglas claims that the week follows the tuning method of a seven-string lyre.  Strings were named for gods, and the lyre had to be tuned from the “Sun” string, the fourth, which enabled the lyre to be strung as a chain of fifths (an octave above the “moon” is the same as the fifth above the sun string).  He adds, “It is not known when or where this curious and most intriguing application of mysticism to everyday life originated.  That it is of high antiquity is clear from the fact that long before the Christian era it was rooted in popular use to such an extent that no attempt was made to change the order in accordance with Alexandrine astronomical theory,” which knew that Mercury was closer to the sun than Venus.  He speculates that “the origin is to be sought among the builders of the ‘Tower of Babel’ or rather of those pyramids in Babylon, the seven stages of which were dedicated to the planetary gods.”

Our week is ordered so that terrestrial time harmonizes with celestial music.

Miscellaneous: Glory of Kings

To the right, you will see a picture of a newly published Festscrift for James B. Jordan, edited by John Barach and me.  It’s not yet available from Amazon, but is available from the publisher, Wipf & Stock.

If you don’t know James Jordan, shame, shame, shame on you.  But don’t trust me.  In the Foreword, First Things editor Rusty Reno says that Jim is “one of the most important Christian intellectuals of our day.”

Miscellaneous: Zombie invasion

A reader sends this older analysis of zombies: www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm.

Miscellaneous: Zombies Are Us

More reflections on the Zombie craze over at http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/08/zombies-are-us.

Miscellaneous: Zombies again

I knew posting about zombies would hit a nerve.  Ben Graber responds to my post about zombies.  The remainder of this post comes from Graber:

I would venture a guess that the current interest in zombies reflects a mood that’s been well documented over the last decade. First, the state of perpetual and potentially interminable warfare since 2001 has drawn a whole host of comparisons, both implicit and explicit, to the Vietnam era. In that respect, the basic theme of Night - the terror of being a small island of genuine personality amid a sea of voracious “consumers” – resonated once again with dissenters in the Bush years who felt oppressed by popular sentiment as well as threatened by their government (see Night’‘s ending). Related to this and, I think, more universal, is the fantasy of a conflict that is everything the War on Terror has not been. Zombies are dead; killing them generally involves no moral repercussions. They are not intelligent and thus unable to turn the war into a morass of guerrilla skirmishes with no endgame. It’s a war in which the only question is how to survive, not why we are fighting.

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Miscellaneous: Why Zombies?

I’ve asked myself that question a lot over the last few years, what with the spate of books and films featuring zombies.  Terrence Rafferty asks the same question in a recent NYT piece.  He points out that the insatiable, relentless zombies of today are relatively new: “The title creature of Jacques Tourneur’s weirdly lyrical 1943 movie, ‘I Walked With a Zombie,’ doesn’t eat flesh and is entirely unthreatening to the living beings around her; all that’s horrifying is the unnatural, unassimilable fact of her existence. That’s not enough anymore: nature isn’t what it used to be, after all. And to be repelled by a woman just because she has returned from the dead could be considered a tad judgmental.”

Since “Night of the Living Dead,” things have changed: “The thing about these newly empowered 21st-century zombies is that they keep coming at you, relentlessly, wave upon wave of necrotic, mindlessly voracious semi-­beings. According to the current convention, the individual reanimatee can be dispatched by shooting or stabbing it in the brain, but the strength of this inexorably advancing zombie population is in its numbers: the ambulatory dead are, you might say, a fast-­growing demographic. This sort of creature is an extremely convenient monster for low-budget filmmakers like Romero, who had the wit to realize that with zombies he wouldn’t have to break the bank on highly skilled professional actors. Anybody can shamble along looking vacant.”

But why the zombie craze now?  Rafferty has a theory:

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Miscellaneous: Anything but Peoria

Wise observations from Mead: “Perhaps the rarest thing in the United States today is to find a well-educated young American who sees earning the respect of ordinary Americans on an ordinary job as the necessary foundation to a strong personal character and valuable career.  Plenty of young Americans study abroad, precisely to acquire a sympathetic understanding of people different from themselves, but few venture from the citadels of privilege to learn about their fellow citizens at home: Tibet, yes; Peoria, no.”

And this: “Compounding this problem is a serious deficiency in the American academy: an almost complete neglect of the arts of rational persuasion.  Bright young Americans simply don’t get much training in learning to speak and, above all, to write in ways that the average, less-privileged fellows citizens find convincing.  Indeed, it is generally true in the United States today that the ‘better’ the schools one attends, and the longer one stays in them, the less ability or desire one has to speak or write in ways that will be persuasive to the great majority of one’s fellow citizens.”

Miscellaneous Psychology: Pornographic imagination

“The pornographic,” writes Paul W. Kahn in Putting Liberalism in Its Place, “is the ecstatic moment shorn of religion.  It stands in the antipolitical tradition of the hierophanic.  The sacred too can displace ordinary forms of language.  In both, we are rendered speechless, without even that most rudimentary form of speech – our own name.  In another age and another culture, this would be the moment of spiritual rapture and complete identification with the oneness of the universe: Freud’s cosmic feeling of unity.”  In our culture, that space is occupied by the pornographic imagination.

Porn is “a kind of entertainment,” Kahn continues, but “dead serious entertainment.

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Miscellaneous: Black Magic

WH Auden commented, “More deadly than the Idle Word is the use of words as Black Magic. . . . For millions of people today, words like Communism, Capitalism, Imperialism, Peace, Freedom and Democracy have ceased to be words the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee reflex.”

Miscellaneous: Rosenstock-Huessy

Readers with an interest in the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy should take a look at the ERH Society’s new web site:

http://www.erhsociety.org/

Miscellaneous: Seuss from the womb

David Brooks writes in a recent New Yorker piece: “Fetuses who have been read ‘The Cat in the Hat’ while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear it again after birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.”

Miscellaneous: Talent

In one of his entries in Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky makes this observation about talent: “almost all talented people have a bit of the poet in them, after all – even carpenters, if they are talented.  Poetry is, so to say, the inner fire of every talent.”

Miscellaneous: Infantile Airlines

Mind you, I enjoy flying for the most part.  Talkative seatmates apart, it’s a great time to get caught up on my reading, taking a little nap, and reading some more.  There are aggravations, but for the most part minor.   I like to complain when I travel, but it’s just sport, like complaining about cafeteria food.

I do not, however, enjoy being treated like a small child.  Neither does Willy Stern, who vents about inane FAA regulations in The Weekly Standard:

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Miscellaneous: Defending Constantine

At the right, you’ll find a link to the Amazon page for my forthcoming book on Constantine.  Take a look!

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