Sometimes a story is just so heart-warming that you have to share it.

Book Notes
Reading my very first Tom Clancy book now. First impressions are that he is overly fond of military and political jargon. It's not at all incomprehensible, it just seems that he gets a kick out of saying ". . . POTUS said . . ."

Reading the Arabian Nights was kinda fun. The intoductory story was quite a bit racier than what followed, so that was a bit of a let down; not a bad way to get just a peek into arabic culture though.

Reading Mesopotamia and the Bible reminded me that I'd rather be vivisected by aliens than read about archeology.

The Golden Age was really one of the most amazing and inventive sci-fi novels I think I've ever read. I think there was more plot in the first 15 pages than in the whole 1st Matrix movie.

For a guy who never finished a college class, PKD always astounds me with both his knowledge and his thoughtfulness, not to mention the humor and fun plot lines. A Scanner Darkly is about drugs and dual personalities (caused by taking the drugs), and about the ability of people into institutions to sabotage themselves. The main character is both a drug dealer and a drug enforcement officer, never realizing that he's in fact tailing himself.

Reading Aquinas is a bit odd, since it consists of watching someone who lived over 700 years ago have a conversation with someone who lived over 1200 years before he did. He has lots of good things to think about, but a great deal of it seems, at least to me, to be superfluous. I'm in the section now about virtues, which is good since it talks about how to live well, but I can't say I'm all that interested in exactly how each virtue is related to ach other virtue and which are the cardinal ones and the principle ones and which can exist without the others, etc.

Of course, in the age of google, to ask a question of a certain type is the same as finding the answer. an excerpt from a book on the ethics of eating by Stephen Best, a philosphy prof from UTEP:

"...[W]e have duties not only not to interfere with animals and not to eat them, but also to come their aid and defend their interests; it is not simply enough not to harm, we have an active duty to assist. Which epitaph would you prefer: 'here lies Mr. Bland, he did no harm and minded his own business,' or 'here lies a citizen of the world who served others with passion and conviction'? There is some truth in the stewardship ethic: our unique status as conscious, self-aware, ethical, rational beings gives us unique duties and responsibilities. Among our duties is the negative duty to avoid flesh and to boycott the meat and dairy industries; when we buy their products we are saying: 'yes, I approve of what you are doing to the animals and the earth; here is my money to support your venture'! But the positive message of both Christianity and a secular rights standpoint is that ethics demands compassion, love, sacrifice, and service. How corrupted do our sensibilities have to be to think that this message applies only to human beings? Do love and compassion have boundaries? Of gender, race, tribe, or nation? -- or species? We are to serve all those beings who need our assistance; the least among us have the greatest claim to our service, and thus the animals have a mighty claim indeed; they do not have a voice and so they must rely on the voice of human reason and compassion...."

So here I the questions I have about vegetarianism. Is it wrong for anyone to eat meat? Under what sort of circumstances might it be allowable? When was it discovered that eating meat is morally wrong, and by whom was it discovered? Can ethics be discovered? Was eating meat always wrong or just recently?

I wonder if someone has already published something thorough on these issues?

I think if I were a smart philosopher type, I might like to write a paper on the ethics of vegetarianism. AKMA pointed me to this blog started by a second grade teacher for her class. It looks fascinating so far. I certainly think children's questions can lead to lots of interesting reflections.

Don't you hate it when you loan your car to someone and then the car dies on them?

I think all of us old folks will get a kick out of this, at least those of us who had an atari at home.

Today is our tin anniversary. If you want to know how to stay married this long, I'd be happy to tell you the secrets.

If you have not yet read Mark Helprin's Memoir From Antproof Case, go out, buy it, read it, then read the rest of this post.

Ok, welcome back. Good book wasn't it. Now, tell me if this story is real or not.

All of these quotes can be found through this page, in case you are interested in reading more online.

And, of course, this:

What about John Calvin do you like and dislike, and what imbalances do you think a college that attempts to be Calvinist would suffer as a result of that emphasis?

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve read straight through the Institutes, so I can’t pretend to be up on Calvin. But, Calvin has always been influential in my work because he was a sanctificationist. People often times don’t notice that in the Institutes Calvin treats sanctification prior to justification. And in that sense, I think Calvin offers a real alternative to Lutheranism, which over-determines the notion of justification by faith by grace as the center of the gospel, which oddly enough took – and it shouldn’t have done it – emphasis away from the Incarnation and why it is that Jesus’ whole life is part and parcel, and crucial, for our understanding of what it means to be a Christian, and so I think Calvin is terrific on how he thought about those kinds of things. I think Calvinism in places like Calvin [college] can too quickly become an end in itself and forget that it’s not about being Calvinist; it’s about being a Christian in a manner that we identify with the Church across time, and that Christianity did not begin in the Reformation. And I know there are people at Calvin who remember that all the time and who are committed to connecting Calvinism to the great catholic tradition. But I think that’s absolutely crucial.

Or especially things like this:

I’ve always thought of myself as a theologian, because what I’ve wanted to do is show how theological language works to tell us the way things are and how it shapes us to be the people we need to be to know the way things are. I want to remind us that learning how to become a creature is every bit as complex as learning what justice is. It’s a way of reminding us that theological claims are practical down to the very bone.

ZH – Why is that important?

SH – As a matter of fact, it turns out to be very important. The way disciplinary divisions work within the modern university and seminary is intellectually corrupting. For example, theologians think that students learn to read Scripture in Old Testament and New Testament courses, and therefore we theologians don’t need to use Scripture as part and parcel of the way we do our work. I try to defy that in every way I can. And I refuse to accept the assumption that you need to know all the historical, critical scholarship behind the text to know what the text means.

ZH – Say more about that in terms of the work of people such as John Crossan or Marcus Borg.

SH – Yeh, I have very little use for the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar’s idea that somehow or other through the use of historical methodologies they’re going to get to the “real Jesus” is absolutely crazy. The real Jesus is the resurrected Jesus, and the idea that somehow, since these Gospels were produced later and therefore are not newspaper accounts, and therefore they’re not getting the real Jesus, is just absolutely conceptually crazy. It’s crazy! So, I think that the Crossan- and Borg-like presumptions that they are quasi-scientists reconstructing the real Jesus that we can somehow believe in is a sign of the intellectual corruption in modernity that assumes that historians know what they’re talking about.

I don’t think historians know what they’re talking about at all.

Also things like this:

I sometimes think that there is a conspiracy afoot to make Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the manager in After Virtue empirically verifiable.

That the manager has become characteristic of liberal politics should not be surprising, but I continue to be taken aback by the preponderance of such character types in the ministry. Of course, I should not be surprised that a soulless church produces a soulless ministry devoid of passion. The ministry seems captured in our time by people who are desperately afraid they might actually be caught with a conviction at some point in their ministry that might curtail future ambition. They, therefore, see their task to "manage" their congregations by specializing in the politics of agreement by always being agreeable. The preaching such a ministry produces is designed to reinforce our presumed agreements, since a "good church" is one without conflict. You cannot preach about abortion, suicide, or war because those are such controversial subjects-better to concentrate on "insights" since they do so little work for the actual shaping of our lives and occasion no conflict.

I confess one of the things I like about the Southern Baptists is that they have managed to have a fight in public. Fundamentalists at least believe they are supposed to have strong views, and they even believe they are supposed to act on their convictions. The problem with most of the mainstream churches is that we do not even know how to join an argument-better, we think, to create a committee to "study the issue."

Here's part of the reason I find Hauerwas so congenial to reformed (in this case, vantillian) ways of thinking:

Michael J. Quirk: Your Gifford lectures contain critical appraisals of both William James and Reinhold Niebuhr, as well as the astonishing claim that Karl Barth is the most successful natural theologian of the twentieth century. One usually finds Barth depicted as the resolute enemy of all natural theology. Could you explain how you came to this understanding of Barth?

Stanley Hauerwas: It fits as part of my larger argument that a natural theology is unintelligible separated from a full doctrine of God. And of course what a full doctrine of God entails is an understanding, first of all, that God is not part of the metaphysical furniture of the universe. What many of the Gifford lecturers have assumed is what Nicholas Wolterstorff has called an "evidentialist apologetic" that tried to show that God, as an empty signifier, must exist. And I'm trying to show that if you could successfully show that that God must exist then you would have evidence that the Christian God does not exist. Because the Christian God is the God who created gratuitously. So there can be no necessary relationship between creation and God from the Christian point of view. Accordingly, the whole modernist enterprise that the Gifford lectures named was based upon a decisive metaphysical mistake vis-а-vis the Christian doctrine of God.

If anyone is curious, Quicksilver is much better than the majority of amazon reviews would suggest. Not AS good as Cryptonomicon, but good nonetheless. It is odd to read a book that long and realize that it is only the first part of a trilogy. It does feel incomplete.

Interview for Josh:

1 Have you seen the new Luther movie yet?

2 What is your favorite religiously themed movie?

3 If you could change one thing about all the calvinists you know, what would it be?

4 Did you participate in "Talk Like A Pirate Day?

5 If you were stranded on a desert island with plenty of food annd water and came upon a brass lamp with mysterious markings of the letters a though d all over it, and you rubbed the lamp and a genie came out and said, "CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLOWING", which would you choose:

A. A generator, big screen tv, DVD player and a magical subscripttion to Netflix,

B. Magical acccess to any books from the library of Congress whenever you wanted,

C. A Beautiful woman, or,

D Transportation back to your normal life?

streblo! (HBWVF(my new acronym for high bandwidth video file))

It really seems lie you are not a responsible computer owning Christian unless you take advantage of this.

Reason number 257 not to live in South Africa.