But what do you do with all that knowledge?

Second things suffer, as Lewis was fond of repeating, when put first. Science is a good servant but a bad master, a good method for investigating and manipulating the material world, but no method at all for deciding what to do with the knowledge and power acquired thereby.—Michael Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, 33

And a bit more wisdom from Sirach

And later, in the same chapter:

13:20 The arrogant detest humility;
   so the rich detest the poor.
21 When rich people stumble,
they are supported by friends.
   But when the humble fall,
   their own friends push them away.
22 When the rich slip,
their helpers are many;
   they speak things that shouldn’t be spoken, and people justify them.
The humble slip,
   and people criticize them as well;
   they utter something sensible,
   and no one pays attention.
23 The rich speak, and everyone is silent,
   and what they say is praised
   to the heavens.
   The poor speak, and they say,
   “Who is this?”
   And if the poor stumble,
   others push them down all the more.
24 Wealth is good as long as it’s free of sin;
   the ungodly speak of poverty
   as an evil in and of itself.

And I would argue that wealth rarely, if ever, is free from sin! Especially in twenty-first century United Sates.

A different look at Adam Smith

I read an interesting review article over the weekend about Adam Smith on the New York Review of Books (via Libby from my local library). I haven't read any Adam Smith for almost 50 years (back in high school), but maybe I should take another look. Here's a brief little snippet that I found interesting:

Once we enter society and start trading with one another, Smith thought, material goods take on a social meaning. Now we are as concerned with how those goods make us appear to others as we are with the goods themselves. Once we enter an economy with others, which is the only economy there is, we cease to think and act in a strictly economic sense. When “everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself,” wrote Rousseau, “public esteem acquired a price.” Smith’s theory is an attempt to make sense of that price.

Seems there's a lot more going on than I remembered (and than most people talk about when they discuss Adam Smith). The above quotation should make the Chicago school of economists recalculate. They assume a Robinson Crusoe (article's words) approach: No societal pressure, therefore a person will make a logical decision. When's the last time someone did that!!? Right, Robinson Crusoe, but even he was influenced by his cultural background (I know, he's a literary figure, but the point stands).

If you can access the article via Libby, I recommend it; otherwise, try interlibrary loan (an independent scholar's best friend!).

By the way, the book reviewed is Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy, by Samuel Fleischacker, University of Chicago Press, 216 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper). The paperback is actually affordable!

Amen! Good preaching!

I don't know if you follow Roger Olson's blog or not. If you don't you definitely need to take a look at today's post, on economic theory and Christian ethics. Here's a short snippet, but you definitely need to read the whole thing (and the preceding post as well for context and indentifying the theorists):

Nozick’s theory of justice as entitlement has no way of guarding against price gouging even in a catastrophe. Nor has it any way to ameliorate the growing gap between rich and poor in a capitalist society. In fact, I will go so far as to say his theory of justice is unjust and evil. Nozick may not have been a Social Darwinist, but this I will say about it: If I were a Social Darwinist I would find Nozick’s theory of justice as entitlement an ally and I would use it to promote my Social Darwinist beliefs. As a Christian ethicist, I unequivocally condemn Nozick’s theory of justice as entitlement even if Nozick himself inconsistently with his own theory offered qualifications that make it appear as if his theory has “place” for compassion. In his theory, charity is left to individuals and organizations and government has no obligation to help the poor, the indigent, the vulnerable, the weak, or the helpless.

<idle musing>
Amen and amen! Good preaching!
</idle musing>

Truly counter-cultural

From yesterday's French Press

But the call to counterculture is much more comprehensive. When the world is greedy, you are generous. When the world is cruel, you are kind. When the world is fearful, you are faithful. When the world is proud, you are humble. How do you know we’re Christian, by our love.

Yes, we say. Yes to all of this. Right until the moment when we think that our kindness, our faithfulness, or our humility carries with it a concrete political cost. We think we know what’s just, and we can’t do justice without power.

And so, in our arrogance, we think we know better than God. We can’t let kindness or humility stand in the way of justice. Yet we’re sowing the wind, and now we reap the whirlwind. The world’s most-Christian advanced nation is tearing itself apart, and its millions of believers bear much of the blame.

Do take the time to read the rest of it; it's not very long and will reward you more than watching one more TikTok video!

About plagiarism, and more…

Via Publishers Weekly, some very good thoughts that start w/plagiarism, but go into the whole process of writing and publishing. Mainly relevant to fiction writing, but transferable to writing/publishing in general.

Brutal truth

The early liberal attitude to nature is most famously summarized in the words of the Englishman Francis Bacon, a seventeenth-century philosopher, scientist, and statesman. Bacon not only objectified nature but saw nature as an object to be brutally interrogated and raped. So the scientist “must force the apparent facts of nature into forms different to those in which they familiarly present themselves; and thus make them tell the truth about themselves, as torture may compel an unwilling witness to reveal what he has been concealing.” Another line, with which feminists have had a field day, advised that “man” should “make no scruple” of “penetrating into [nature’s] holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his sole object.” As Sheldon Wolin encapsulates it, nature for Bacon was “an object of organized assault.”— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 148

Exploit it! (But at what cost?)

Both those now commonly designated “liberals” and those designated “conservatives” have roots in a historical, encompassing liberalism. As such, attitudes toward nature—or what I would prefer to call creation—are widely shared across today’s partisan political lines. “Liberals” and “conservatives” alike have a heritage of humanity separated from the rest of nature and the reduction of nature to a mere source of “natural resources” to be reaped for human gain.

Karl Polanyi, writing in the mid-twentieth century, warned against the liberal propensity to reduce land to a commodity. Land, he protested, becomes “only another name for nature, which is not produced by man.” Such a reduction is in fact “entirely fictitious” But this fiction determined a world picture that set up liberal humanity to exploit land and nature—now, we see in an age of climate crisis—to our own detriment.— Naming Neoliberalism: Exposing the Spirit of Our Age, 147–48

It's a matter of priorities, really

As they say, presented without comment, which is really a very strong comment!

I cannot say that I feel complacent about our chances for peace. Our terrible sin is in not giving peace absolute priority and in failing to realize that to attain peace, we have to make sacrifices. We are ready to make sacrifices for the sake of war, but not, apparently, for the sake of peace.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 255

Outrage!

To destroy the illusion that man is his own center cannot be done easily. In order to understand, and to cultivate an openness to transcendence, many prerequisites are necessary, prerequisites of the mind and of the heart. However, our society, our education, all continue to corrode men’s sensibilities. I am not optimistic; we are getting poorer by the day. To give you an example: Man does not feel a sense of outrage anymore, even in the face of crime. We are getting used to it. We are getting accustomed to evil. We are surrendering to that which we call inevitable. That is fatalism; it is pagan. The message of the Bible is that man is capable of making a choice. Choose life—but instead we choose death, blindness, callousness, helplessness, despair.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 251

<idle musing>
Well, he got part of it wrong. It seems all we sense anymore is outrage! But other than that, he got it right. We still are choosing death, blindness, callousness, helplessness, and despair. We think the person who can prove to be the most victimized is the winner. That's not the sign of a healthy society!
</idle musing>

Maybe not! But you are still responsible!

The more deeply immersed I became in the thinking of the prophets, the more powerfully it became clear to me what the lives of the prophets sought to convey: that morally speaking there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. It also became clear to me that in regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible. I did not feel guilty as an individual American for the bloodshed in Vietnam [or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or …], but I felt deeply responsible. “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor” (Leviticus 19:15). This is not a recommendation but an imperative, a supreme commandment.https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374524951 —Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 225

Chaos, waiting at the doors

One of the lessons we have derived from the events of our time is that we cannot dwell at ease under the sun of our civilization, that man is the least harmless of all beings. We feel how every minute in our civilization is packed with tension like the interlude between lightning and thunder. Man has not advanced very far from the coast of chaos. It took only one storm to throw him back into the sinister. If culture is to survive, it is in need of defenses all along the shore. A frantic call to chaos shrieks in our blood. Many of us are too susceptible to it to ignore it forever. Where is the power that could offset the effect of that alluring call? How are we going to keep the demonic forces under control?

This is the decision which we have to make: whether our life is to be a pursuit of pleasure or an engagement for service. The world cannot remain a vacuum. Unless we make it an altar to God, it is invaded by demons. This is no time for neutrality. We … cannot remain aloof or indifferent. We … are either ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil. The only safeguard against constant danger is constant vigilance, constant guidance. Such guidance is given to him who lives in the reality of Israel. It is a system in which human relations rest upon two basic ideas: the idea of human rights and the idea of human obligations.—Abraham Joshua Heschel in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays, 75

It's not us vs. them

I do not seek to pontificate about what particular issues Christians should support or oppose today in the so-called culture wars. In fact, I want to do precisely the opposite. We need to extricate ourselves from these wars, which are predicated on an oppositional dualism of “us versus them” (or “in-group versus out-group”), since this dualism is antithetical to the gospel of the kingdom. The Christian gospel understands the true antithesis between good and evil (between the kingdom of God and the powers of destruction) to run not between groups, but rather through every human heart. Therefore, as an antidote to unthinking involvement in the culture wars, Christians need to have their imaginations grasped by the radically holistic vision of redemption that the Bible teaches, and to engage their world, at individual and communal levels, with daily acts of courage and love on behalf of those in need, even if—especially if—they are different from us.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 280–81

That's not enough!

The point is that the transition from otherworldly salvation to a holistic understanding of the kingdom of God is impossible without personal transformation. The shift to a truly biblical understanding of salvation cannot be limited to head knowledge without moral responsibility. To put it another way, we cannot separate eschatology from ethics.

If we omit the ethical challenge of the kingdom, our newly found this-worldliness will simply confirm our selfish consumerist/materialistic, upwardly mobile, late—modern lifestyle; that is, our affirmation of the world (our holistic vision of salvation) will be construed to benefit us (whoever we are), while we ignore the needs of the wider world, especially the concrete needs of people who are different from our favored in—group. The tragedy is that many upwardly mobile North American Christians today often hoard and guard their religious identity and economic privilege, with little concern for the poor or for immigrants, or those of other nations, cultures, or religions. This problem is, of course, not limited to North Americans or even specifically to Christians. But, given the primary audience of this book, and the extraordinary religious and economic privilege of those living in North America, we need to take this challenge seriously.—J. Richard Middleton, A New Heaven and a New Earth, 273

the guy is deranged

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Trump turns around and assaults the only guy in the administration that the public trusts: Dr. Fauci! What is wrong with this guy? His sense of reality is warped; you can't make up your own facts and pretend they are real ones. Thousands are getting sick every day because the president refused to acknowledge the reality of a pandemic. Now he has the gall to attack the person who has been telling the truth.

Read this, and think about it for a few minutes. Bottom line: do you want a leader whose only line is "trust me"? If so, then at least choose one who has a moral compass! Hint: Donald Trump isn't that guy! How many lies has he told? And for you Christians who support him, who does scripture say is the father of lies? Hint: it's not God!

Read this article!

Yes, it's a bit long, but well worth the read: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/trumps-collaborators/612250/

Like Hoffmann, Czesław Miłosz, a Nobel Prize–winning Polish poet, wrote about collaboration from personal experience. An active member of the anti-Nazi resistance during the war, he nevertheless wound up after the war as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassy in Washington, serving his country’s Communist government. Only in 1951 did he defect, denounce the regime, and dissect his experience. In a famous essay, The Captive Mind, he sketched several lightly disguised portraits of real people, all writers and intellectuals, each of whom had come up with different ways of justifying collaboration with the party. Many were careerists, but Miłosz understood that careerism could not provide a complete explanation. To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” Miłosz is one of the few writers to acknowledge the pleasure of conformity, the lightness of heart that it grants, the way that it solves so many personal and professional dilemmas.

We all feel the urge to conform; it is the most normal of human desires. I was reminded of this recently when I visited Marianne Birthler in her light-filled apartment in Berlin. During the 1980s, Birthler was one of a very small number of active dissidents in East Germany; later, in reunified Germany, she spent more than a decade running the Stasi archive, the collection of former East German secret-police files. I asked her whether she could identify among her cohort a set of circumstances that had inclined some people to collaborate with the Stasi.

She was put off by the question. Collaboration wasn’t interesting, Birthler told me. Almost everyone was a collaborator; 99 percent of East Germans collaborated. If they weren’t working with the Stasi, then they were working with the party, or with the system more generally. Much more interesting—and far harder to explain—was the genuinely mysterious question of “why people went against the regime.” The puzzle is not why Markus Wolf remained in East Germany, in other words, but why Wolfgang Leonhard did not.

Why do you do it?

We do not behave in the right way because we covet or fear the final consequences of this in terms of going to heaven or being cast into hell. To behave in this way is a betrayal of our relationship with God. Reasoning in this fashion, we don’t care about God, and we don’t care about the good either. We are behaving selfishly, and if we behave correctly for this reason we still sin. We should behave in the right way because we love God and want to do what pleases him. He has shown us what the good thing to do is and we want to do the good thing to please him. Christian ethics is covenantal because it flows from personal relationships—our personal relationship with a loving God—and we must hang on to this, earnest religious ethicists notwithstanding.

In sum: to be covenantal is to be ethical in the deepest possible way. To be contractual, supposedly on ethical grounds, is to weaken ethics drastically. So I am going to stay covenantal and read Paul in that way too, not least because I think he was so ethical.—Paul: An Apostle’s Journey, 143

around the web

Welcome to the first 2020 look around the web from my viewpoint. Perhaps you'll find something of interest, perhaps not. But at least enjoy the ride...

You aren't paranoid; you really are being followed! And not only that, frequently you are paying for that questionable privilege. This article has all the juicy details. By the way, I started using Jumbo and was surprised by how many things I had failed to set on my privacy settings. I'm usually pretty strict, but it caught some I didn't even know existed. Highly recommended.

Meanwhile, the reaction to the Christianity Today editorial has been strong from the pro-Trump team. Michael Bird has some good insights; here's a small snippet:

Now I understand how pro-Trumpers can say, “Hey, he’s no Mother Theresa, but he’s effective, he’s appointed conservatives to SCOTUS, and he’s our bodyguard protecting us against the pathologically Christian hating types in the Democratic party.” I get it, I don’t agree, but I get it. But for Grudem to say in effect that Good Policies = Good Man is morally blindsided and sets a dangerous precedent.

I’ve never liked liberal theology because it produces a God without wrath who brings men and women without sin to a kingdom without judgment thanks to the ministrations of a Christ without a cross [that’s from Niebuhr]. Yet I fear Grudem’s Trumpology because it presents a God with partisan mercy, who expects men and women to ignore their moral compasses, to call the wicked good and the good wicked, in order to keep themselves positioned in the court of earthly power.

And John Hawthorne, an evangelical sociologist has some good thoughts:

It must be noted that most evangelical churchgoers may not be paying any attention to these conflicts. They are happy to go to their Sunday Services and worship Jesus in song and word. Emma Green had a great interview with former head of the National Association of Evangelicals Leith Anderson. He argues that evangelicalism is about faith and not about politics. Emma tries valiantly and compassionately to get him to address the conflict therein, but he never gets there. Sarah McCammon interviewed a pair of Southern Baptist pastors (note: lots of evangelicals are not Southern Baptists!) on Saturday’s Weekend All Things Considered. The pastors argued that while there are broad social conflicts, people “at the level of the pew” don’t experience that division.

It needs to be recognized that the privatization of faith is what has allowed a public political stance that is largely divorced from deep theological insight. If we ever need serious work on political theology, it is today. Even though it runs the risk of causing short-term discomfort within local congregations, it would create a more healthy body of Christ as it interrogates matters of politics and public policy.

But don't look for that to happen anytime soon. Discomfort means a possible budget shortfall in the church building program, or that the megapastor won't get his million dollar bonus, or something like that. Besides, who wants to think? That's hard work. Nope. Keep the bread and circuses coming and everything will be fine. Except it won't.

Take a look at John Fea's blog. He's been following the Trump phenomena closely since 2016 and is quite insightful. Here's a recent sample:

Would a non-college educated factory worker in the Midwest who claims the name of Jesus Christ think that racism, misogyny, nativism, the degradation of one’s enemies, and lying are moral problems? Wouldn’t any Christian, formed by the teachings of a local church and the spiritual disciplines (as opposed to the daily barrage of Fox News), see the need to condemn such behavior? What does social class have to do with it? Shouldn’t one’s identity in the Gospel and its moral implications for living transcend class identity?

For those who are lamenting disunion in the church, I have another question: Shouldn’t the church be an otherworldly, counter-cultural institution that finds some unity in the condemnation of immoral behavior in the corridors of national power? Or should we take our marching orders from the divisive, class-based identity politics of Donald Trump?

And long-time pacifist/activist/theologian/seminary professor Ron Sider chimes in, citing Christmas, urging Christians to look at the bigger picture:

Christ has chosen the church as the place where his reign is to become most visible and powerful. And that means that Christians must live and promote biblical values about truth, justice, freedom, life and peace both in their personal lives and their political decisions. It also means that no matter who wins elections or what politicians do, God’s reign continues to take shape on this earth. When politicians are at their worst, defying Christ and promoting evil, Christ’s kingdom can still advance. (Although when people who claim the name of Jesus join evil politicians, God’s kingdom suffers serious setbacks.) And when politicians are most sympathetic to biblical values, they are still a mixed bag of good and evil, and everything they do is less important than proclaiming the gospel and living as Jesus’ new redeemed body of believers.

OK, one last look at this and then we'll move on to other things. Righting of America takes a look at a defense of Trump written by a Jack Graham, senior pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas. I have to agree with the final paragraphs of the critique:

I am not calling into question Rev. Graham’s sincerity because I have no doubt of his sincerity. I am sure he is a very serious and sincere Christian. What I don’t recognize is the Christianity he represents. I am convinced that the Christianity represented by the evangelical defenders of President Trump is in fact not Christian. It is not shaped by the gospel but by the secular political philosophy of evangelical leaders. It is an “Americanized” faith that has faith in the USA, in “Make America Great Again,” in a false patriotism that excludes dissenters, in a greed-infested idolatry of wealth, in an ignoring of the teachings of the prophets and especially of Jesus.

This version of Christianity no longer knows how to recognize idolatry. It exists in an atmosphere of fear, nostalgia, and a deep-seated desire to have the power to control others (John Fea, Believe Me). Pulling no punches, Stanley Hauerwas concludes that churches identified with the “church growth movement” are nothing more than paganism in disguise” (In Good Company: The Church as Polis, Kindle ed., 4).

What Rev. Graham defends is not historic evangelical faith, but a Trump evangelical understanding rooted in secular political power and wealth. Graham’s argument in behalf of President Trump represents just another example of the church and her preachers failing to take the radical good news of Jesus to heart and apply it to all of life.

Violence! Everywhere violence! Whether church or synagogue shootings, or drone attacks, it seems our society is addicted to violence. What's a Christian to do? The ReKnew blog takes a look:

If Jesus is Lord, we are commanded to renounce violence as a way of resisting evil. We renounce the violence of evil men (it’s always men right?) and we renounce the cycle that so easily ensnares our sanctified minds. Fear of death corrodes our ability to imagine a faithful response beyond full participation in the cycle of violence. Death, and the fear of it, are signs that God’s good world is not as it should be. We are not as we should be.

Jesus entered our world of violence and lived into a story that contradicted the lie that death is in charge. Jesus saw reality the way God saw it; he could see something deeper than our collective human experience and conviction about death. He proclaimed this message and invited us to live into it. Therefore, we must resist the pull to live into a false narrative of retribution and heroic violence. We must resist the story death proclaims by grieving its widespread acceptance and condemning it as vanity. We resist death by taking up arms of communal prayer, self sacrifice, lament, and gospel hope, but never with weapons of worldly means. Churches that use guns for self protection acquiesce to the spirit of this age.

If we begin to accept armed protection as a legitimate means we deny the One we claim to follow. By accepting armed protection, we move into a false narrative that says self protection, even at the expense of taking life, is compatible, justifiable, and reasonable with enemy love. We deny the very story that has changed the world, and we live as if the new has not come and as if the old is not already passing away.

And what is a posting on this blog without mentioning books?! Here are a pair: Wade Burleson on the value of books and reading. He takes special aim at television, but I would include binge-watching in that category.

But, be careful about setting a goal of XX books this year, as this person discovered:

Finding myself in the middle of a book I never want to end is among the greatest joys of reading. I live for the desire to finish a book in one sitting, and the competing desire to slow down and make the pleasure last. Sadly, I robbed myself that pleasure this year. I blew through everything I read, including books I would’ve dragged out for weeks just to live in their worlds a little longer.

Today’s habit-happy productivity culture advocates for setting measurable, attainable goals. Finishing what we start is considered a victory. But our reading lives shouldn’t depend on filling in a Goodreads progress bar. That’s because reading isn’t just any old habit to track.

Yep. I've never really measured how many books I read each year. I've also never felt bad about abandoning a book that didn't interest me. I've also been wrestling my way through some books for a few years. For example, I'm about 2/3 through an introduction to cognitive linguistics that I started over 3 years ago. By the time I finish it, I'll need to go back and read it again!

OK, that's it for this week. Good reading!

In case you've been living under a rock this last week...

Christianity Today published an op-ed endorsing impeachment and removal of the current president. All that needs to be said was in that op-ed. Of course, the resulting onslaught of criticism is to be expected. When you put your hope in an idol, any idol, and that idol gets attacked, you fight back, right? That's what the Israelites did when Jeremiah confronted them. That's what happened to Amos when he confronted the Northern Kingdom. Of course, that doesn't make it any fun for the ones being attacked. Here's the final paragraph of the editorial:

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

Well said. Yes, I wish they had taken a stand years ago, but at least they did it now. Galli is well-aware that it probably won't make a difference in the general evangelical population. CT has always been a magazine for the evangelicals who tend to be more intellectually inclined.

Here's a couple responses that I would consider balanced: The Atlantic; John Fea has had numerous posts, but this one sums up the hypocrisy of certain "court evangelicals". I could link to others, such as Warren Throckmorton, but you get the idea.

The Anxious Bench reflects on Ron Sider and his influence. Summary statement at the end: "Ron Sider is still trying to evangelize the evangelicals."

Meanwhile, someone raised evangelical reflects on that heritage. Worth pondering. In my experience, people are always receptive to bringing up church history, the church fathers, etc. when explaining why a certain doctrine is the way it is, and why another one is incorrect. What they won't tolerate, though, is when I start drawing conclusions on how we should live based on those doctrines. In other words, keep it in the mind and you are fine. Touch my stuff, and you are in serious trouble. That seems to be a recurring theme, doesn't it? Genesis 3 anyone?

Speaking of that, remember the Wheaton professor who wore a hijab? Remember her name? I didn't think so; neither did I, but her life is slowly being put back together. A documentary is being made. Read the article for a small taste of what it must be like to be an Afro-American woman at an evangelical school who dares to say something less than acceptable to the alumni. Remember, for small evangelical schools, the alumni are what keeps the school afloat. As high as the tuition is at those schools, that doesn't pay the bills. Not even close. And the endowments aren't huge. I know; I went to one: Asbury College (now University). And over the years, I've watched the alumni at other small schools force those schools to give "the left boot of fellowship" to professors who said things they didn't like. Didn't matter whether what they said was true or not. Of course that shouldn't surprise us, should it? The Old Testament prophets wouldn't win any popularity contests, would they?

But the US evangelical scene isn't the only evangelical scene in disarray. Brexit, the never coming, never going away issue for the (un)United Kingdom has evangelicals there in disagreement.

And speaking of the UK, my favorite Classicist, who happens to have been born on my birthday (only a few years earlier), Mary Beard, reflects on the current status of higher education. Many good points there; do read it.

As long as we're in academia, how about a feel-good piece? Times Higher Education (THE) asks "Is there still a place for kindness in today’s harsh academic environment?" And then gives personal testimonies by academics on how little acts of kindness went a long way when they were just starting out. I'll have more to say on that next week (I hope) as I recount a couple from my past. Meanwhile, be sure to check it out; here's a taste:

This act of academic kindness occurred some years ago, but I only heard about it recently, from its beneficiary. She was teaching part-time at my university when, at short notice and in the middle of the marking season, she was shortlisted for a full-time post at another institution. Two of my colleagues—one a full-time lecturer, the other part-time herself—took all her marking off her so that she had time to prepare for her presentation and interview.

In their book On Kindness (2009), Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argue that kindness is now seen as “a virtue of losers”. They attribute this to the ascendancy of free-market individualism, which has cultivated competitiveness and mistrust and led to “a life of overwork, anxiety, and isolation”.

If they are right, then kindness should also be endangered within the university. The new managerialism urges us to see ourselves as hard-nosed entrepreneurs competing for awards, grants and research time, while also making us feel that no amount of success will ever appease the gods of compliance. It makes the modern university not so much a cruel as a callous place, one where feeling harassed and stressed makes us thoughtless and self-absorbed. We are rarely unkind on purpose, but being unkind by accident usually has the same effect.

What is remarkable, though, is the doggedness of our desire to be kind. There is still room in academia for what A.H. Halsey, in The Decline of Donnish Dominion (1992), calls “commensality”, which literally means sharing a table and which he uses to mean that intangible sense of collegiality on which we thrive. Universities would grind to a halt without these millions of small, inconspicuous acts of goodwill.

On that same hopeful note, here is a nice advent meditation. A small excerpt, but it's a short enough piece you should read the whole thing:

Instead, Jesus completely disregarded the idea that the woman or himself were defiled, inherently capable of defiling others, or needed separation from others. The woman wasn’t an obstacle to overcome on his way to arguably more important tasks, nor was she an object of defilement he had to protect himself from. Jesus instead acknowledged and blessed her publicly then went on his way unflustered, undeterred.

Paranoid? Think you are being followed? Well, you probably are, but it's that smartphone in your pocket that's doing the following. And the data are being monetized to target you with ads for stuff you don't need, but probably think you want. Read this. Of course, I doubt you'll give up your phone (I won't), but at least consider turning off tracking on as many apps as you can. And, remember that the ads you see are designed to own you. You read that right. They aren't just trying to part with your money; they want your soul. They want you to buy into the lie that without stuff you are less a human.

OK. This is getting long, but I have three more links, all tied to bad practices by the current administration (and in one case, the past two administrations):

You've been lied to about the war in Afghanistan. OK, you already knew that, or at least suspected it. But the real crime is

The lack of accurate statistics should bother us, just as the misrepresentation of them should disturb us even more. But the greatest outrage over these numbers is the fact that the United States never seriously considered that they needed to document the loss of Afghan lives in the first place.

We need to stop and pause at this reality because within it is the entire reason why the war has become the disaster that it is today. The United States never cared about counting the bodies of dead Afghans caused by the war they started. They didn’t count the dead, they didn’t count the wounded, and they didn’t count the displaced or traumatized.

They didn’t count the Afghans because the Afghans didn’t count.

As Christians, that should bother us. 'Nuff said there. Next, the new rules about sexual assault on campuses. What? I can't even begin to describe how wrong that is. Ask any rape counsellor about that idea. Want the number of reported assaults to go down without actually doing anything to prevent them (and possibly even encouraging more!)? They just wrote the ticket.

Final link. The FCC is stealing part of the radio spectrum set aside for improving car, bicycle, and pedestrian safety and giving it to, wait for it, Facebook and other commercial entities. As if you don't already check your Facebook status too much! Here are the bullet points, but read the whole article for more details:

The FCC recently announced it was reducing the airwave spectrum for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in cars.

This technology is supposed to reduce the amount of car wrecks by communicating from car to car things like speed, acceleration, hard braking, and red lights.

The move could set back the forward movement of vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in the U.S.

On that note, I'll end. This world is a mess, but Jesus is the hope. Someday, he will come back and set things straight, but in the meantime, we are called to live in love to our neighbors, praying for them and assisting them. All this can only happen by the power of the Holy Spirit living within us and through us. Don't forget that and fall into self-righteousness and pride—or despair that you don't reach some goal.

A thought experiment

Riffing on the theme of the $11 billion that Amazon had in tax-free profits last year, and adding the couple of thousand that they received in tax rebates, I decided to see what would happen if they lowered their target quotas for the warehouse by 10 percent. According to the information that I could find, they have about 125,000 full-time warehouse employees. That might not be totally accurate, but we're doing back-of-the-envelope type of estimates. That means they would have to hire another 12,500 warehouse employees to make up for the lowered productivity.

Now, we're not going to include the cost savings they would incur from not having as many injuries, replacement training time, administrative savings, etc. Those are real, but too hard to calculate for our purposes. So, based on 12,500 new employees, at $15/hour, 40 hours/week, 52 weeks/year, they would incur an extra $390 million in wages. Now, for a normal corporation, that would be a burden, but all we did with Amazon is wipe out their tax credits. They still make $11 billion in profit. Probably more, because, as I said, the hidden costs of injuries and replacements would be minimized.

Now, just for the sake of "what-if," suppose they raised the wages of every warehouse employee by $5.00. What would that cost them? Well, around $1.5 billion. Again, for a normal corporation, that would be the difference between profit and loss. But for Amazon, it would lower their tax-free profits to a cool $9.5 billion. I think they could survive on that, although it might be tough. . .

Perhaps with that $9 billion, they could next consider being humane to their "last-mile" providers? I know, I'm asking for them to be human, and their algorithms aren't human. But, every algorithm has its original in a human presupposition. Algorithms aren't amoral. Think about that for a while and then buy local when you can.