A Shot of Whatever You've Got

A little dalliance into Venn magic on the matters of the day, because sometimes you just need something to get you through the ride:

  

Aslan, the Racist Lion

I've always sort of assumed that the Narnia Chronicles - while fabulous and fun to read - are a bit on the racist end of literature. I'm open to people disagreeing - which is part why I post this - because I don't think I've ever "talked this one out", except with a rather disagreeable young man who thought that Lewis was probably right to "stick it" to the darkies because Islam (particularly) is something to fear, abhor - and perhaps even assail. This has not become a fruitful relationship.

Throughout the Narnia stories a race of avowed enemies (the only comparable/consistent nemesis would be the Witch, Lewis' devil) are the Calormemes of Calormen, a region of desert people who wear turbans, baggy trousers and pointy shoes. They arrange marriages, put the symbol of the crescent on their money, fight with scimitars and - in The Last Battle - are even referred to as "darkies". Friends, with a little poco-muscle there are oodles of dissertations buried here.

I think this is pretty clear, but I'm not sure it takes away from my love of the stories themselves, though I wouldn't want my children to read The Horse and His Boy. After all, I love and revere writers, thinkers and public figures who had far from enlightened racial perspectives - among them Abraham Kuyper. But should we be more attentive how we read - what are obviously very broken and sinful racial constructs - through our history and literature?

They that have ears to hear

"The Israelites at this time were, and for a long time to come would be, what Walter Ong called a “hearing-dominant” culture. Think of the rabbis in the synagogues that would develop in the aftermath of the overthrow of both kingdoms, reading the text aloud and then commenting on it. And of course to this day Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worship all feature the oral reading or recitation of sacred texts to an audience — even if members of those audiences, instead of actually listening to the reading, are following their own copy of the text with their eyes."

Alan Jacobs reads a passage from 2 Kings where Josiah finds the Torah and comments on the importance of speaking the word.

York U vs CUPE: What is the Public Responsibility of the Academy?

It seems a crescendo of bad faith negotiations at York University has finally been reached. The government of Ontario is being forced to step into a dispute which has been marked by a public rhetoric of dispute so disturbing I cannot fathom how students could still want to voluntarily subject themselves to what is surely becoming one of the most broken institutional examples of administration/faculty relations in Canada. Irrespective of responsibility the damage this process has done to York’s image, relationships and community leaves me feeling profoundly sad – and not, even more sadly, for the first time in York’s history.

The relationship between university administration and academic faculty has been of enduring interest to me, ever since years ago while in student government I cracked the archives on the apocalyptic admin/faculty disputes that once rocked my alma mater.

The question which always seemed to be at the heart (or very close) to these debates is: what is the responsibility – or if you prefer, relationship - of the academy to the public? I have had fellow grad students wax about the academy as a kind of ecclesial (maybe even priestly?) community, one which must be absolved of direct responsibility, because of the privileged epistemological and cultural status it has in society. Society cannot hope to govern it – or find it responsible, at least in the mundane ways a public could imagine. For these observers tenure is the feather in the academy’s cap – it insulates intellectuals from the market, from the cult of efficiency, and from utilitarianism.

Of course those fatly endowed chairs still need a generous public to endow them (at least in the American system), who are sometimes not at all pleased about the course that this academic freedom takes. Indeed – as the endowment wars heat up – those bestowing the money are trying to tie more and more accountability to how university administrations spend their money. The horror of academics could not be more pronounced. Stanley Fish even calls this era that of The Last Professor. In this apocalyptic vision liberal arts programs will be driven under by market forces, which don’t see generous bottom lines at the end of history, philosophy or literature degrees – in the same way they might at the end of engineering, biology or chemistry. Privately, I have had more than a few former liberal arts graduates confess to me that their university Bachelor of Arts was of “limited use” because it did not prepare them for a professional career. It was all very interesting, but they had no employable skills.

So what of this relationship between faculty and administration? – between scholars who recognize, as Fish does, that education for its own sake is a public good from which society and culture genuinely benefit – and between administration constantly pressured to produce learned students capable of performing the promised return on private and public investments.

I think this question is at the heart of the nature of the post-modern (re: 21st century) university. I think it is also animating many of the disputes at York, where faculty work (rightly) to protect their autonomy and privileges to insulate against a market academy, and where administration works (also rightly) to present a saleable face to the important work that goes on at institutions of higher learning.

How do we strike this balance? On my mind particularly is how should a Christian university strike this balance? I suspect our theories on this are fairly well developed, but our practice is not – from what I see – all that great (and I do not suggest for a moment the forthcoming generation will do any better). I recently highlighted a book from the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar The Bible and the University. Is there anything comparable – either in consultations or publications – that draws together top level Christian university administrators and faculty to consider the market and the university?

If folks like Mike Goheen are right – and in this at least I think they are – that the market and its ancillary institutions in the global economy present the challenge of our generation, this deserves much more thought and action – much better thought and action than we see sadly unfolding at York University.

Writing in the Age of Distraction

For those who read this blog and are working on any kind of graduate work, the title of this post likely pulled you from your current dissertation chapter and holds you helpless like a newborn. We're all guilty of losing focus. Even with my greatest productivity villain slain - Outlook new message alerts - substantial work remains punctuated with links, articles, tweets and all kinds of other work day impurities. Even this short little post was interrupted. 

Cory Doctorow has a great little article in Locus Magazine on how to be a productive writer without disconnecting from the net, caging your children, and hiding in the basement. Sharing the same title as this post, he dishes out the goods. Straight and oh so tasty.

This is my favourite of his six tips: 

Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.

Click here for the full piece.

Bible and Literature

Just a short post to throw my good friend a bone (you know who you are!).

I was interested to hear that Q Prentice is working on a research proposal that examines literature in light of the Biblical story. I'm trying to tackle my research from the other angle--examining the Bible in light of literary theory. I'm particularly interested in the concept of closure in literature and if it helps to illuminate some biblical (well actually OT) narratives. I'm just a bit worried that I will get nailed on being anachronistic--using modern literary theory on ancient texts. It won't stop me from plowing ahead. I think where biblical scholars go wrong on this point is leveraging modern theories but then using them as a standard against which to judge the ancient literature.

The Lost Verses of "Hallelujah"

These are a verses to Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" that I had not heard before, as they are often left out of remixes or cover-versions of the song:

"You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well, really, what's it to you?
There's blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken hallelujah.

I did my best but it wasn't much
I couldn't feel so I tried to touch
I told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah"

As one who studies literature, I really resonate with the line, "There's a blaze of light in every word." And the last three lines of the second verse get me like few lyrics do. What else could you say standing before the Lord after failing at everything else? As to the line, "I couldn't feel so I tried to touch," I think Leonard might just be thinking like a dirty old man.

"Nothing to Be Frightened Of"

“I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” This is how Julian Barnes begins his latest non-fiction book on death entitled Nothing to Be Frightened Of. The work – a mixture of memoir, meditation, and meanderings in French literature and philosophy on the subject of death – is both humorous and serious, by times light-hearted but most often sad and melancholic. However, it is Barnes’ brilliant prose and his skill as a satirist that makes for a wonderfully engaging read.

He writes, “Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted with religious art” (53). Barnes writes of his frequent visits to cathedrals: for architectural reasons, rather than religious ones, or “to get a sense of what Englishness once was.” In this same vein he writes, “Missing God is for me rather like Being English: a feeling roused mainly by attack. When my country is abused, a dormant, not to say narcoleptic, patriotism stirs. And when it comes to God, I find myself more provoked by atheistic absolutism than by, say, the often bland tentative hopefulness of the Church of England” (77). It is this disarming honesty that makes this book quite different from much of Barnes’ other work: mainly satirical novels like England, England or A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters.

Though Barnes envies the sense of purpose that belief generates, he still admits to being unable and unwilling to extricate himself from his decades-old agnosticism. Early on he writes of his conversion from atheism (a staunch belief in the fact that there is no God) to agnosticism (what Barnes seems to describe as a reverence for ignorance): “If I called myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance” (22).

Throughout the course of the book, Barnes is by turns serious and sarcastic, gently provocative as well as caustically forthright. His most biting irony, however, is not applied to his discussions of Christianity but to his encounters with bombastic atheism. But Christianity does not escape his probing discussion. He outright attacks the popular liberal evangelical notion of having one’s own personal idea of God as “grotesque.”

Barnes’ main argument with Christianity, however, concerns a contempt for embodied, temporal life, which, for an agnostic, is all there is since there is no heaven or hell. As far as Barnes is concerned, as a Christian, for one to even remotely desire “terrestrial immortality… would be an impertinence” (60).

What Barnes describes here as typically Christian is very much contra the Christian Reformed confession of the essential goodness of creation and embodied life on this earth. In this biblical worldview, to desire terrestrial immortality is not impertinent. Rather, it is how Christ commanded us to pray: “Your Kingdom come and Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

What is most moving in Barnes writing is his love for this earth and life on it, as humdrum as both may be most of the time. It is, I think, this love of life that makes his fear of death as consuming as it is throughout the book. He knows without a doubt that his life will end – “I'm afraid the mortality rate remains at 100 per cent,” he quips – as surely as every author will someday have one last reader. Fortunately, for Christians, our last reader is not someone who is going to die as we all are: He has already done that and risen again. So the book of life is never really ended but opened anew through redemption that is as much for this world as the one to come.

In the end, Barnes seems to conclude that without the Christian story there is little or no hope when faced with death’s finality. The closest thing Barnes has to hope is humor, and he definitely approaches his mortifying subject with plenty of that. But the laughter in this book seems hollow when compared with his other work – like a comic performing his act on an empty stage in the dark, hoping for a laugh but unsure if there is somebody even listening.

How to Use the Bible: Part 2

After several conversations and lunches with friends, colleagues and luminary sages I thought to add a few reflections to the below post.

First - as I was recently encouraged - a Christian scholar should never use the excuse of not being a Biblical scholar or a theologian when using the Bible in scholarship. The Bible is not an exclusively academic book, and not the domain of theologians or Biblical scholars to authoritatively pronounce on. Inviting an academic discipline to serve as such an authority suggests a kind of intellectual magesterium, an idea - I mused over lunch today - which may appeal to my Protestant-academic self; but which must surely be utterly rejected.

Second, I'm not quite sure what to make of what Oliver O'Donnovan does. Conversations with real stalwart academic Christians have swung from "the best thing ever", to "naive Biblicizing" (particularly in the topic of judgment). What I do know is O'Donnovan is not doing political science as such, although I think the act of trying to read contemporary life through the Bible is commendable. At least part of the way O'Donnovan uses the Scriptural text accounts for the problems I think we find in mapping it onto contemporary liberal democratic life. I am open (looking at you Oli'O) to generous debate on this :)

Third, although reading contemporary life through the Bible might be commendable, talking about the Biblical story is more than just so much grist for the worldview mill. It is very difficult, as I discovered recently, to make good sense of the Book of Joshua, without this larger narrative. Parsing the Bible, and readings its themes individually is a real danger - and hence the narrative reading is of utmost importance; not just for worldview'ish public engagement, but for understanding how to read the Bible.

Re: Joshua - I learned also of a story of a former RUC graduate who lost their faith from reading Joshua (friends, there is crazy stuff in that book). Having spent some significant time in Joshua, and on commentaries on it, over the last couple weeks I can appreciate why that might be. I have been recommended God is a Warrior by Tremper Longman on this.

Finally, the Bible is not a political science textbook, or a business textbook or... (etc). This may be simple, but is important to affirm. Scripture is a light upon our path, through which we discern and live, but cannot - itself - answer a-historically the questions of economics, politics, and more. Thus it is incumbent upon the Christian - and upon his or her Church and community - to dive deeply into that Word and so wrestle with it until, like Jacob, we have secured meaning and ways of living which are wise. This process is necessarily subject to epistemological fragmentation, but it remains no less important.

Sometimes I find that my academic and spiritual journey is a process of rediscovering the same place over and over again...

We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot

Ten Business Resolutions for 2009

Mary Neumeier maintains a great (and free!) online resource called Neutron which deals with marketing and business strategy issues. In addition to his day job, Neumeier has also written a couple of very visual books on brand development - The Brand Gap and Zag. I recommend both.

Anyway. His last newsletter had ten problem/response style resolutions to help you with your business woes in 2o09. Here they are:

2008 Problem

2009 Resolution

Overcoming reduced budgets

Think more, spend less

Protecting profit margins

Increase your “onliness”

Safely extending brands

Avoid the four Cs of extension

Repositioning the company

Harness the “competition cycle”

Fostering broad-based loyalty

Tune up your ecosystem

Finding profitable new markets

Analyze powerful new trends

Predicting returns on innovation

Screen for “good and different”

Increasing brand efficiency

Integrate your marketing team

Collaborating across silos

Start an internal brand program

Communicating our value

Create a messaging hierarchy

Each of the resolutions link to their article and I'd recommend spending a few minutes skimming the ones that interest. I think resolution #1 is especially sage and shouldn't be reserved for times of recession. 

Enjoy!

Keep that shit coming

I came in this morning to find a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers waiting for me on my desk. Besides the usual reasons to love new books (they're pretty, create more jobs in forestry, can be used to prop up computer screens), this new book gives me a sense of expectation. 

Gladwell's work has always inspired in me the importance of nuance and good strategy. Good gifts. There are underlying patterns to a lot of the weird stuff that happens in business. And you can exploit them. Giddy up. For those who have never read him, I highly recommend both of his other books - The Tipping Point and Blink. 

I'll post something a touch more thoughtful in the next week or two. I hope to find time to put this little number down in a hurry.

Martin Luther King Jr.

"Abernathy says that as a boy he was aware of racial segregation, but to him and other blacks in Alabama it was no big deal if the white folks wanted to have their own drinking fountains and a separate entrance at the post office. What did rankle is that white folk wouldn’t call his father “Mister.” The demand for white courtesy, and respect for the dignity that black folk knew they possessed—that was the issue in what came to be called the civil rights movement. That was the issue when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a refusal that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott to which Abernathy recruited Martin Luther King, Jr., thus launching them both on a tumultuous course that they could neither anticipate nor control."

From RJN's remembrance of MLK on MLK day in the US. (italics mine)

What is missing too often in contemporary accounts is how this movement, for all its ecumenism, was started by those who took seriously the gospel of Jesus Christ. At the Crossroads conference I was able to talk to Mike Goheen who recounts a visit he took with Leslie Newbiggin to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama. He told of how Newbiggin and Marnie were walking together and a sermon of King's was being played. Newbiggin stopped and listened to the whole thing. "I never got to hear that sermon," he said. The reason he never got to hear it is that so many people showed up to the event at which he and Dr. King were preaching that they had to be split up into two seperate rooms. They only saw each other as they passed in the tunnels under the hall to go speak to the room which had just heard the other speak. They exchanged greetings, but never heard each other's sermons. The gospel was at the heart of the movement.

Mike recounts how, after touring the museum, he asked Newbiggin "how could it be that people didn't realize that this was such a fundamental injustice?" Mike then asked the audience a more challenging question: "What examples of injustice are in front of our noses today that are being overlooked and unrecognized?" (quotes are from memory).

Mike offered the global economy as one such example, and says that Newbiggin is behind him. What are the thoughts of the readers of this fine blog? I have begun to develop my thought, at some length, but will wait to hear the crowd before I tell you.

"Some blunt place where excuses stop"

If you are used to reading what my fellow bloggers "religiously" contribute, you may find this post esoteric at best. As one who believes wholeheartedly in being a culturally-engaged Christian and literary critic, I recently went through a period of self-questioning while reading a book by John Steffler (Canada's current poet laureate) entitled The Grey Islands.

You see, the book's narrator and I have a little in common: we've both been dissillusioned with contemporary life and are looking for "A way to corner [ourselves]. Some blunt place [we] can't go beyond. Where excuses stop" (13). For Steffler's narrator this involves a summer-long trip to the Grey Islands, abandoned fishing outports off the coast of Newfoundland. For me, it has involved a move to Newfoundland, away from the academic urban centers of southern Ontario.

When I'm honest with myself, I wanted to move out this way to be somewhat secluded: in a way to see if my reformed convictions will still burn in high winds of rigorous academic scrutiny and engagement, without the sheltering fellowship of like-minded, believing friends and fellow academics. This is not to say that I think I can "go it alone" - if it were not for my wife and a loving church family here, I would be in a bad way. Coming here was never meant to be a prideful experiment in existential survival but more of a head-on interaction with the world through my discipline: something I had confessed to be necessary and creational but something I had, as yet, never actually done.

My desire to move to the far east coast of Canada is, I think, less existential than Steffler's narrator's desire to inhabit an abandoned shanty on the rocky edge of the north Atlantic. But I guess this is all to say that I understand that impulse to find that place beyond constant noise and deadlines and "cultural engagement" so that when I return it is after having spent times in enough silence and solitude to hear God's voice, not just in relation to my discipline but in relation to my home life and my church life as well: all three of these intricately tied together for me.

I haven't found that "blunt place where excuses stop," not yet. But I'm looking for it. Lately I have begun to wonder if this "place" is less a place and more a person, a person in whom, I'm sure, I could stand to place more trust.

Puritans Love Disasters

Or so says Toby Young, at the Spectator. And if there is any sure way to being hated and despised it is surely to gloat when systemic failure strikes. Young writes, "the recession is not a 'much needed reality check' - it's a source of great suffering". A short piece I tend to more or less agree with, revealing some of the disturbing tendencies among especially Christian respondents.

The Pyschology of Economics

David Brooks writes a usual thought provoking piece today in the New York Times about how economic recession has triggered a collapse of classical economic theory, particularly its increasingly badgered anthropology. In classical economics human beings may be a mixture of passions and desires, but ultimately they are governed by reason. Thus the market can be predicted, and supply and demand constellate a relatively stable economic order. Brooks writes,

But an economy is a society of trust and faith. A recession is a mental event, and every recession has its own unique spirit. This recession was caused by deep imbalances and is propelled by a cascade of fundamental insecurities. You can pump hundreds of billions into the banks, but insecure bankers still won’t lend. You can run up gigantic deficits, hire road builders and reduce the unemployment rate from 8 percent to 7 percent, but insecure people will still not spend and invest.

The economic spirit of a people cannot be manipulated in as simple-minded a fashion as the Keynesian mechanists imagine. Right now political and economic confidence levels are running in opposite directions. Politically, we’re in a season of optimism, but despite a trillion spent and a trillion more about to be, the economic spirit cowers.

Mechanistic thinkers on the right and left pose as rigorous empiricists. But empiricism built on an inaccurate view of human nature is just a prison.

How to Use the Bible

I have an academic and a spiritual confession: I don't know how to read the Bible. I also do not know how to use the Bible. Let me describe what I mean very basically.

I read Scripture in two principal ways. The first way, is in reflective prayer. I read it several times a day, in a variety of corporate and individual settings, often in a tradition of lectio devina. In this practice Scripture surrounds my day, it begins with readings in the Psalms, Old Testament and New Testament according to the church calendar. It also ends the same way. My inspiration in this tradition of reading often comes from Catholic sources, from Ignatian practices, and from places, communities and people. This first method of reading profoundly influences my daily life, and feeds and funds my second kind of reading.

The second way I read Scripture is as a story, a complete whole through which I build theological constructs which translate into worldview'ish principles for engaging all of life faithfully. These constructs include things like sphere sovereignty and common grace, ideas that influence me deeply and show their marks throughout my thoughts and actions. The sources of my inspiration here are very diverse, but include books on reformed philosophy, the story of Scripture and finding our place within it.

Neither of these is exclusively spiritual or cerebral, both are integral parts of a whole reading and encounter with the Word. My real problem is these are the only ways I have been trained to encounter and engage Scripture.

My doctoral supervisor has challenged me deeply in my somewhat truncated reading of Scripture, to consider ways of thinking about and using it which do not - technically speaking - fit either of these traditions. He fills my head with ideas of reading books in the Bible politically and theologically, and discerning patterns for contemporary life - not mere reflective prayer, and not basic philosophical extrapolation, but bringing the Bible directly into conversation with political and social problems.

That I fundamentally lack skills at doing. I am even initially put off by this. But - as my supervisor tells me - pastors and theologians are constantly taking Scripture and applying it in backward and confused ways to social and political phenomenon they don't really understand, why shouldn't social scientists work alongside them, or work also to reveal what specific texts say to us about the fields we do know, at least a bit more, about?

Al Wolters writes in The Bible and the University that theology is no longer queen of the disciplines. To be honest though, I sometimes wonder how a book that is the breathed Word of God, cannot grant epistemological privilege to its students. If we're quite serious about Scripture playing this ultimate role, shouldn't it be incumbent upon academics of every stripe - not to mention thinking Christians - to cultivate a Biblical knowledge of their discipline in ways that far exceed the mere extrapolation of base philosophical and theological constructs - and ways that are more intellectually sophisticated than lectio devina?

Reformed theology suggests that one does not need to study Greek and Hebrew, or be a Biblical scholar to do social science well. But the plausibility of this is undermined by the examples of people I see around me. Almost none of the truly excellent and publicly engaged Reformed scholars that I know have not done divinity, theology or theology/philosophy degrees.

I want to be a good political scientist, a faithful thinking Christian in politics and culture. Is it - after all - time to finally give up, pack my bags and head to Seminary?

Bleeding Heart Tightwads

"Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates."

And even better:

"People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent."

NY Times article here

This reminds me of the book "Makers and Takers: Why conservatives work harder, feel happier, have closer families, take fewer drugs, give more generously, value honesty more, are less materialistic and envious, whine less ... and even hug their children more than liberals" (here).

Ivory Tower of Love

According to a colleague of mine, this is why I chose my career:

Quote:

Five panellists presented on the subject [conference sex], drawing on broad themes of sexuality, professional conduct and literary theory. Jennifer Drouin (Allegheny College) outlined different types of conference sex, such as career-building sex and bi-curious sex; Ann Pellegrini (New York University), discussed literature as a first love; Milton Wendland (University of Kansas) discussed sexualized conference jargon; Israel Reyes (Dartmouth College) covered sexual harassment; and Daniel Contreras (Fordham University) lamented the lack of intellectual risk-taking at recent conferences. Pellegrini presented while wearing a bathrobe.

Pellegrini is living my dream. Can't wait to "deliver a paper" at my next conference!

Who would Jesus Smack Down?

Quote:

Even the skeptical viewer must admit that whatever Driscoll’s opinion of certain recreational activities, he has the coolest style and foulest mouth of any preacher you’ve ever seen

Calvinism in the News

Crossroads Reflections

I've just finished a grueling but incredibly satisfying conference at both my alma mater and the uni where I teach part time. A few reflections at the close before more sustained comments in the days to come.

1. It is good - so incredibly good - to think in an interdisciplinary context. The initial challenge can be formidable (what do you mean by realism?), but the dividends can be substantial. The combination of speakers, presenters and attendees was a smorgosbord of talent and expertise thinking deeply and Christianly about how to live with integrity in a broken and complex world.

2. What a delight to be among so many lost friends! The conference felt - in the words of one of the organizers - like a big reunion. Friends, colleagues and acquaintances the world over came together for days of hard thinking, conversation and prayer.

3. How badly we Christians need better representation/thinking in two key areas: economics and international politics, and especially their interrelationship. Almost every paper/discussion at the conference felt the touch of these powerful spheres on our lives and our institutions.

4. Finally - as Ray Pennings said in his session - if Christians want to speak relevantly and prophetically into our systems and publics we must begin answering the questions our neighbours are actually asking. As a person committed to the Christian university, this means to me that our departments and pedagogy must focus around equipping students to meet the challenges of the world such as they are. This means that a liberal arts education - in 21st century Canada - seems to have a few non-negotiables, including which I think is an overdue emphasis on economics and business. If we believe we can graduate tough thinking culture makers who cannot read the profound idols and forces of our day, we are sorely mistaken.

the Rubicon on the Green Bible

Another great group blog, and a good friend of mine, Geoff Ryan talks about the new Green Bible that's been released. I blog on it partly to highlight his whit, and partly because I ran across it yesterday at a bookstore with a friend who really liked the idea. I did not. Conversation ensued. Quotes from the Rubicon:

I understand that this is just the latest in a long line of niche-market Bibles. Meanwhile the Roman Catholics have been at it for ages with the Apocrypha, of course. It’s a kind of extra revelation just for them. Growing up as an evangelical, the impression given to me was that the Apocrypha fell vaguely in the same category as porn – a thing mysterious and fascinating, but dangerously corrupting and definitely off-limits for any true follower of Jesus...

I can theme my Bible too. For example, I can create a Salvation Army Bible, full of quotes by William and Catherine Booth, Samuel Logan Brengle, George Scott Railton and other worthies from our glorious past. I can diminish the Matthew 26 account of the Last Supper down to 8-point type and highlight in red type John’s account Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. I can put in bold type every passage that supports women in ministry, highlight every military metaphor and include illustrated sections on uniforms and brass trumpets. I can focus on whatever subjects most interest and concern me. In fact, it seems that I will be able to make the Bible say whatever I want it to and serve my purposes perfectly.

Another Floundering Industry

Larry Flynt and other captains of porn feel the US government should allocate $5 billion to assist the flagging industry. Is simply being hurt by a downturn enough of a reason for government to provide a financial stimulus? Should some industries be allowed to die? When asked if in financial danger, Flynt (Hustler) and Francis (the CEO of Girls Gone Wild), said DVD sales were in decline but online traffic is on the ups. Sooooo, you're saying you don't actually NEED the money, but would like some because everyone else is getting some? That'll help your credibility.

I find this line particularly vile:

But the industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. "People are too depressed to be sexually active," Flynt said in the statement. "This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.

It's when the porn industry rides to the rescue of a faltering and confused North American sexual psyche that you know you're culturally bankrupt. Here's to hoping this request is relegated to the gutter.The piece can be found here.

Where no Man can be Overchicked

In the land of Microsoft, where no man can be overchicked (a new word I also learned today), because the word simply does not exist.

Why are online dictionaries and search engines, like Google, so vastly superior in word and spelling updates to word processing programs like Microsoft Word? Chris Wilson of Slate magazine writes that it's because they have two different goals:

Google has to field queries as broad and varied as the Internet itself, so it needs a very large vocabulary in order to differentiate spelling mistakes from legitimate search terms. Word processors are much more conservative, limiting their lexicon to words that are definitely legitimate.

But Word is working to incorporate user data into its dictionary process. In a rather interesting paper two Microsoft gurus reflect on how to exploit collective knowledge via web based platforms, while retaining all important quality control.

Another classic quandary, methinks, for open source web based collective knowledge types (I affectionately called them the Wiki folk) and proprietary, quality control types (I like to think of them as the Old Guard). Prediction? Chris Wilson thinks,

Eventually, a spell-check based on Web data will be the way to go. Sure, we would see a few more naughty words and Dalmations in our Word documents, but the end product will be something that resembles the way people use language in the present day. Tally it up as one more victory for the pragmatists in the language wars.

Empire Building: Leadership Lessons with Darth Vader, MBA

This article gives you a few of my favorite management secrets, some of which I have passed on to my brother, Chad, who manages the Day Shift at Empire Market. In the spirit of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, here are what we might call “Nine Habits of Highly Sith-cessful People.”

A few of my favourites:

3. Punish Incompetence. Many of your subordinates will be as clumsy as they are stupid. If someone has failed you for the last time, Force-choke them to death and promote someone who knows what they are doing. Keep Force-choking people until someone finally learns his or her lesson.

6. Always Look for Talent. Periodically, you will come across a real gem like my wayward son, Luke. Realize that they can be your key to double-crossing your superiors. If they don’t play along, kill them.

8. Get Out There and Lead. While Grand Moff Tarkin was prematurely celebrating victory over the Rebel Alliance, I was out there shooting at X-wings. Which one of us survived the Death Star attack? That’s right, me.

Check out all of his helpful and very practical suggestions here.

Just War...

But for the framework to have the desired restraining effect on statesmen and warmakers, it has to marry practicality to idealism, and strike enough of a balance between the two to make it seem applicable to real-world crises. And if it's important not to stretch the theory to justify any goal or end you seek, it's also important not to narrow it to the point where it seems so unrealistic and disconnected from the realities of war that policymakers will feel comfortable ignoring it.

From a fascinating debate happening on the Atlantic blogs (this a post by Ross Douthat) and elsewhere. See also Andrew Sullivan's discussion of the same issue. I'll post my thoughts on this matter more, later, maybe after some riveting discussion following Adunare's paper.

Economic Equivalence

Passed on by one of our very own members. Take a look, you'll figure it out. Link

Think Tank? Think Tank!

Foreign Policy does a Think Tank Index in its Jan/Feb issue. Think Tanks came on the political and social scene in the 1950's, filling roles that had traditionally been filled by a combination of the academy and government. The number of US think tanks has doubled since 1980. Even though I work at a think tank, I've had mixed feelings about the rise of such institutes because it often means a corollary decline in the public responsibility of the academy. I have also heard friends criticize think tanks as privatizing and commercializing the policy process. But contra these critics I believe the world of ideas - like the world of economics - is not a zero sum game: it is a world of absolute, not merely relative gains.

Foreign Policy's field guide differentiates between five types of think tanks: Policymakers, Partisans, Phantoms, Scholars and Activists. Canada has a polite h/t via 2 of the top 20 global think tanks: the Fraser Institute and the Canadian International Council. I suppose, like Pamela Anderson and Avril Lavigne, these are our think tank ambassadors, for better or worse.

I know that Feeling

One Generation to the Next

With the passing of the old year, generational change has been on my mind. I was discussing with a friend before the holiday that each generation has its own questions; or - to be more precise - its own way of asking timeless questions. Thus this or that way of forming the question may come and go in fashion, but the core of what we are looking for, the root of the perplexing problem, is not altogether very different from how it was in the past. Contra constructivists but ala Andy Crouch our words and ideas do not change the world, but they do create, cultivate and illuminate the substance of what is there in new and surprising ways.

Over the holidays my last surviving grandparent passed away, in relative peace in the Netherlands. Her expressions and ideas were very different from mine, as from my mother's, but the faithful expression she gave in her own time, before the face of God, certainly lives on both in the here and now, and in the time to come. How will the questions we ask, the answers we find and suggest relate to her own? In 2009 I am committed to becoming a better traditioner, less impressed with the new, the gaudy and the flashy, and more impressed with the historic, the timeless and the tested.

Shortly before, a monolithic figure in international relations scholarship also passed on. It would be difficult to overstate the impact that Samuel P. Huntington has had on the discipline, particularly his role in suggesting a tangible place for religion in IR, whatever we might make of it. He also leaves a towering legacy worth thought and reflection. Via A&L Daily:

Samuel P. Huntington, versatile scholar whose idea of a “clash of civilizations” was vastly influential, is dead at 81... Forbes... WSJ... Wash Post... London Times... Harvard