Monthly Archives: December 2010

Theoretical Breakthrough: Generating Matter and Antimatter from Nothing

“Under just the right conditions — which involve an ultra-high-intensity laser beam and a two-mile-long particle accelerator — it could be possible to create something out of nothing, according to University of Michigan researchers.”

“Nothing” seems to include an awful lot of equipment. Someone please explain creation ex nihilo again to these people.

Lost Civilization Under Persian Gulf?

Historical sea level data show that, prior to the flood, the Gulf basin would have been above water beginning about 75,000 years ago. And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun, and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by underground springs. When conditions were at their driest in the surrounding hinterlands, the Gulf Oasis would have been at its largest in terms of exposed land area. At its peak, the exposed basin would have been about the size of Great Britain, Rose says.

Tigris and Euphrates, eh? That reminds me of something. Oh yeah.

Giant Storks May Have Fed on Real Hobbits

The extinct predator could have fed on fishes, lizards and birds, “and possibly in principle even small, juvenile hobbits, although we have no evidence for that,” she said. “These birds are opportunistic carnivores — if you give them plenty of prey items, they’ll hunt all of them.”

There are no signs yet of whether hobbits returned the favor by hunting these birds. “No cut marks are seen on any of its bones,” Meijer said.

Homer was apparently quite well-informed:

When the companies were thus arrayed, each under its own captain, the Trojans advanced as a flight of wild fowl or cranes that scream overhead when rain and winter drive them over the flowing waters of Oceanus to bring death and destruction on the Pygmies, and they wrangle in the air as they fly; but the Achaeans marched silently, in high heart, and minded to stand by one another. (Iliad III)

Medieval England Twice as Well Off as Today’s Poorest Nations

New research led by economists at the University of Warwick reveals that medieval England was not only far more prosperous than previously believed, it also actually boasted an average income that would be more than double the average per capita income of the world’s poorest nations today.

Say what you will about the tenets of feudalism — at least it’s an ethos.

General Introduction
- Hey, there are three of us
- A suggestion from Josh Altmanshofer
- The bizarro-world podcast

Starting with the Personal
- Nathan Gilmour, bodyguard to the “stars”
- How Christian college kills your interest in Christian rock
- David’s family traditions
- The sins of Bill Gothard
- Boxing up the secular music
- Michial digs a little deeper
- Chrindie rock and Christian alternative

A Quick Background Sketch of the Early Days
- The counterculture of the 1970s
- Why Larry Norman is so important
- Why should the devil have all the good music?
- Pro-life activism and Christian rock
- David’s Forrest Gump moment
- It’s a different world (than where you come from)
- A New Kind of Jesus Rock Record

A New Song?
- How revolutionary was early Christian rock?
- Nathan breaks the dichotomy…again
- The importance of the record store as a cultural institution

Let’s Attack Christian Rock!
- The ad hominem circumstantial argument
- Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll
- Co-opting Platonism
- How David changed his mind
- Is someone having sex to monastic chants?
- The “carbon-copy” argument
- Christian music’s distinct identity
- Nathan Gilmour kicks it old school
- Is Christian music objectively worse?
- Does Christian rock even want to be good rock?
- How iTunes changed the game

What is Christian Rock For?
- Is it a ministry or an artistic expression?
- Punting the witnessing question
- Making specific music for specific people
- Afflicting the comfortable with Steve Taylor
- Playing Nine Inch Nails in church
- Self-affliction: What rock ‘n’ roll does best

Lightning Round: Fix CCM in 60 Seconds
- Rock harder
- Reconsider what the genre does best
- Get with the times
- Make Christian rock and call it Christian rock
- Focus on quality

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 12 December 2010 (Third Sunday of Advent, Year A)

Isaiah 35:1-10 • Psalm 146:5-10 or Luke 1:46b-55 • James 5:7-10 • Matthew 11:2-11

Because I came to the text of Luke’s nativity relatively late in the game (that is to say, after I had taken a few months of freshman Bible survey at Milligan College), I’ve always thought of the Magnificat as a revolutionary song.  It’s rife with the sort of language that make Psalms laments, praising YHWH as the One who gives food to the hungry, who throws down the powerful, who takes the tight ranks of the proud and scatters them.  This is no song to inspire lofty thoughts of disembodied afterlife bliss that somehow negates the nastiness of the sublunary world; this is the celebration of one who knows that YHWH is the God who, by means that Mary probably is incapable of imagining, will bring salvation and justice to this world, and Israel will be once more the epicenter of that justice.

I do not apologize for defending the Greeks in my classroom and on the Internet–I do think that too many people–in my own time and before–have in bad faith made hay of stereotypes rather than reading carefully the texts of those old philosophical masters, and I would hope that, where I reduce genuine complexity to easy-to-dispel flatness (I suspect that I do so, for instance, when I talk and write about the Victorians), that people would likewise correct me.  That said, in my own sustained readings of the Greeks and the Romans, I have noted that Plato’s conceptions of God and the gods (and Aristotle and Cicero tend to follow him) have a decidedly ahistorical character.  For them, a deity that was going to revise the way that large patterns of life probably didn’t get it right the first time and therefore wasn’t much of a deity.  For Plato, the gods seem to leave the organization of society to mortals, and for the Stoics, there was more of a sense that the old ways were somehow divinely sanctioned, and the mortal’s duty was not to stage revolutions but to serve the existing structures well.  In no case did the changing of constitutions, as best I can tell, reflect that the gods or God was (or were) punishing those who had established those constitutions–such divine punishments were for the afterlife for Plato.  And with Homer, the differences between some gods’ preference for Troy and others’ for the Achaeans seem nothing other than arbitrary–there’s little sense that Aphrodite has a sense of dikaiosyne that could override her preference for the Trojans any more than the armies of Agamemnon appeal to an overarching standard of justice or righteousness to argue that the gods ought to favor them over Troy.

By contrast, the Psalms and by extension the Magnificat reveal a relationship between YHWH, God, and human agency that produces a very different sort of poetry.  Mortals (or Sons of Man, if one prefers the Hebrew construction) in the Psalms (and in Exodus and in Genesis and in Matthew… but I should focus here) make petitions to God, put guilt trips on God, threaten God’s reputation if God doesn’t follow through on promises, and otherwise assume that YHWH operates within the same framework of righteousness and goodness that gives shape to human life.  This is neither capricious Zeus of Homer nor the indifferent gods of Epicurus or even the overarching pantheistic Logos of the Stoics but another character in the story, one who always remains analogous to human existence (“My ways are not your ways…”) rather than univocal in ontological terms but nonetheless receives the petitions and addresses of the faithful without nearly as much qualification as one might expect.

Perhaps predictably, when the Enlightenment gave way to high Modernism and the resulting mindset began to govern the reading of Scripture (perhaps it’s high Modernism that I flatten), words like “anthropomorphic” and “primitive” began to attach themselves to those passages where YHWH’s moral life seems most intimately connected to human existence, and the old Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of God persisted even as their vision of the good human life gave way to utilitarian and nationalist ethics.  Does Moses “seem” to talk YHWH out of destroying the Hebrews?  That must be the wishful thinking of the less-enlightened.  Does YHWH “seem” to become angry at the idolatry of Israel?  Since a God who changes must become worse, in which case God is vulnerable to becoming less than God, or become better, which means that God was not previously God, then any appearance of change must be for the benefit of the dull-minded.  And so on. 

But in the face of the immutable God’s persistance, the text of the Scriptures continue to beckon, and those voices whom we call Bible continue to praise God not as a God who can never make the world otherwise but as God who will.  Prayers continue to Heaven for healing and for justice, for patience as well as for courage.  And the faithful of God again and again return to the songs, both Psalms and Magnificat, for another season at least keeping up that tension between the static God of Plato and Aristotle and the God-who-redeems of the Bible.  May all of our prayers reach that God who would best hear them.

• Chris Heard makes a useful distinction between media of academic publication and the review process.
• O’Nora O’Neill reflects upon the fiftieth anniversary of C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures.”
• Roger Olson makes a case for Arminianism in the face of its Calvinist critics.
• David Sessions on the ten biggest Christian political media hacks (HT to Jeff Wright):
  • Hacks 10-6
  • Hacks 5-1
• Allen Yeh outlines the debate between “The Old Perspective” and “The New Perspective” on Paul.
• Brian Leiter compares the deconstructionist scene to a poker game with no cards.
• How The Lord of the Rings should have ended:
  
• Late Addition:  Terry Eagleton’s Gifford Lecture (HT Tripp Fuller and meta-HT Arni Zachariassen)

In the spring semester of 2006, I overheard a conversation going on in the hallway between two of my graduate student colleagues at the University of Georgia. The funny thing is I do not remember the content of the conversation so much as I retain an impression that they were discussing some traditionalist’s most recent column about the death of traditional liberal arts education.  Whatever they were saying, it inspired me to put down whatever I was working on at the moment and start running an Amazon.com search for copies of Republic by Plato.  Within the next few days I put together a proposal for a special topics section of freshman composition, one in which the students would write papers about that famous and perhaps even often-read dialogue, and now, 4 1/2 academic years later, on Monday I finished up teaching that wonderful book for the fourth time.

This time, of course, the context was different. I am no longer the vaguely subversive traditionalist graduate student at a gigantic State University; instead, I am teaching the honors section of freshman composition at a small Christian college.  And this time, I am a vaguely subversive (for some of the same reasons, believe it or not) traditionalist assistant professor.  But Plato persists, and in this context, it’s better than ever teaching this wonderful old book.

I tell my students at the beginning of every semester in which we read Republic that people have been reading Plato for more than two thousand years not because he has good answers but because he’s a pioneer in asking good questions.  Not content with the assertion that human government should be just, he wants to know what justice is.  And in the course of investigating that question, he opens up questions about the nature of education, how women and men relate to one another, who counts as a countryman and who deserves no such respect, whether human desires are all of a kind or whether some stand superior to others, what sort of constitution is best for a city, and about four hundred pages of other hard, worthwhile questions.  By the time my students finished the book, they had the occasion (even if they did not seize the occasion) to encounter questions that make disciplines like physics, history, sociology, economics, psychology, and even literary studies intelligible, and they became familiar with the sorts of questions that were still alive when Jesus did his earthly ministry in Palestine.  Since our college stands dedicated to the integration of faith and learning, Republic is in many ways our college’s best friend.  Today, in a departure from what I did (or could do, really) at the University of Georgia, we did a close reading of the Sermon on the Mount, noting where those questions were still alive as Jesus addressed the Galilean crowds those four hundred years after Plato, and my students seemed to connect, in proportion to what they had read, with the persistence of those questions for Christian theology.  In the process of doing so, we did indeed talk psychology, anthropology, and all sorts of other groovy things in relationship to that wonderful discourse of Jesus.  It was a good day.

Beyond the questions that I can ask and remain legitimate within the institutional mission, there’s more of a sense at Emmanuel that I’m talking to a group of people who experience their lives as called.  At UGA, as I’ve written before, there was absolutely no common sense of institutional mission.  People could generally root for the same minor league football team (although I did have the occasional LSU partisan in my classes), but there was little sense that anything but the atomized, individualistic goals of each student counted for anything in the grand scale.  At Emmanuel, the challenge is less establishing that there might be a God who calls the students and more establishing that the actual content of classwork might be the stuff of their mission.  Although many if not most of the students would agree with the assertion that God has called them to serve Church and world, many of them need some convincing that what we do in freshman composition has anything to do with that call.  Even given such, I do come into my classes here feeling like I’m starting from a better place.  Perhaps I get too excited about starting from the 20-yard line rather than from the two, but at least among the folks whom I taught this semester, they really did seem to grab onto what Plato was offering as a vision for the ends and aims of education, something that really I’d only ever experienced before among my ROTC students at UGA.  Beyond that general sense of mission, as I mentioned before, I really do get the sense among this group that they’re going to go back to their Bible studies and Sunday school classes reading the New Testament a bit differently–they now have a set of tools for reading that they hadn’t used before, and they see that Paul, when he writes about “elders” and “deacons,” has some genuinely serious stuff in mind, not just picking the folks who carry the offering plates on Sunday mornings.

In my own encounters with the world, I confess that I remain a Thomist Aristotelian, certainly modified by some German dialectical thought but in all of those influences solidly committed to finding the meaning of the world in the world rather than deferring meaning to that-which-lies-beyond in any simplistic manner.  I’m still suspicious of philosophies that would treat Heaven as simply another “level” of earth and that do not have Thomas’s analogical reserve about pronouncing on heavenly things.  And I tend to be a conservative politically, preferring Congressional declarations of war and citizen-militia systems where armies stand for only two years at a time (that’s article one, section eight of the Constitution, for those keeping score at home) to the modernized, professional armed forces that go anywhere a president bids them go at a moment’s notice.  For that matter, I tend to think of so-called “immoral” literature as some of the best stuff for moral education precisely because it stands to highlight the horror of evil and stir a sense of fear and pity.  I’m not Platonist, I assure you.  Even so, there’s still no book I can think of that I enjoy teaching to freshmen more than Republic.