Monthly Archives: January 2011

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 6 February 2011 (5th Sunday of Epiphany, Year A)

Isaiah 58:1-9a (9b-12) • Psalm 112:1-9 (10) • 1 Corinthians 2:1-12 (13-16) • Matthew 5:13-20

I’ll admit up front that I’m probably too eager to find Plato echoed in the New Testament.  I grant Paul’s ethics for the new Christian community stem mainly from a Christocentric recasting of the Torah of Moses, and John’s light-and-dark imagery is, if I’m honest, closer to what I’ve read in the Dead Sea Scrolls than what I’ve seen in Republic.  But this bit of the Sermon on the Mount has fascinated me ever since I started teaching Republic in its entirety to freshmen.  (I started in 2006.)  This school year, teaching the dialogue for the first time in a Christian-college setting, I assigned the Sermon on the Mount as homework after we’d finished, and the students agreed with me that, even if the man Jesus from Nazareth had never set eyes on the text of the dialogue (I’ll leave alone the question of whether the mind of God eternally contains all the books ever to be written), his upbringing in Roman-occupied, anxious-about-Hellenism Palestine had probably brought him into contact with the ideas in Republic, and the group agreed that this passage about the city on a hill had to be one clue to the atmospheric absorption, if not the reading, of Plato’s philosophy.

In Plato’s most famous dialogue, his main tool for examining the nature of the soul and the goodness of righteousness/justice/morality (to use just three of the words commonly used when translating dikaiosyne) is the analogy between the composite city and the composite human soul, and the mark of goodness in one, for Plato, is the mark of goodness in the other.  In a city, Plato insists, the best way to live is to allow every individual, male or female (this is important) to perform that complex practice that her or his nature fits her or him to do: those gifted for farming will farm, those fierce in the fray will fight, and those with the gifts to be developed into genuine wisdom will rule.  There’s little room for individual social mobility (after all, there’s little reason to stop doing what you do best to do something for which you’re not as well-fitted), but between generations, there is no inertia: the son of a farmer, if he has the spirit to do battle for the city, will be a warrior.  The daughter of a carpenter, if wise, will be a king.  This perfect harmony between ability and responsibility is what constitutes dikaiosyne in the city just as the proper allocation of responsibility in the soul (appetite to stay alive and to make babies, spirit to defend one’s self both from outsiders and from vice, and reason to govern the appetites with the help of the spirit) constitutes righteousness as Plato imagines it.

What’s most interesting about this Gospel passage, if one grants for the sake of argument that Plato’s an influence on it, is how different it stands from Plato’s construction.  Where Plato’s Socrates doubts strongly whether Kallipolis could ever actually exist in the world, given the wretchedness of the average human being, Jesus boldly faces a crowd of Galileans, the backwater people of the Judean world, and says, “You are the light of the world.”  Where Plato’s source of light is a city asserted and dialectically refined but never necessarily embodied, always hiding behind the next negation that a practitioner of dialectic is bound to loose on it, Jesus insists, “A city on a hill cannot be hid.”  And where Plato imagines the good city as the object only of true philosophers’ intellects, Jesus calls on the people before him, working-class and destitute alike, to let their “good works” be the light that illuminates all of humanity.

The move is fascinating in the same way that the Incarnation is fascinating: this is a far cry from the old Hesiod-myths in which Zeus first of all has a story in which he didn’t exist, then did exist, then once he does exist takes on various material bodies so that he can impregnate human girls.  John insists that the logos is in the beginning, that all things are created through the logos, that the logos that becomes flesh was with God and was God.  Likewise, this is neither a story of an Atlantis across the sea where people live reasonably nor a lost city of Shangri-La where folks live in harmony: this is right here, right now, and although I respect the Lutheran impulse to couch the whole thing in one grand hermeneutic joke (it is a scary responsibility to be as well as to talk about a city on a hill), I don’t see any indication that Jesus is crossing his fingers, winking his eye, or crouching, waiting for inevitable failure.  Instead, this is a Platonic metaphor taking shape, on a mountain, just as the grand metaphor  of the Torah, the royal priesthood, took shape at the base of Mount Sinai.

Jesus makes a notably un-Greek move with the last verse in this week’s reading: he calls on people to exceed, to rise above.  Greek ethics, of course, were a series of containments, moderating both the excesses of the appetite and the excesses of the spirit.  “All things in moderation,” to paraphrase the Delphic inscription, warns the reader that to attempt to exceed what is properly righteous is akin to stretching a harp’s string twice as tight once it’s already in tune, in hopes that it will thus be twice as in-tune.  But this is no Aristotelian Jesus in Matthew: this is the Jesus who calls on people to love friend and enemy, family and persecutor, just as the Father sends rain on the righteous and on the wicked.  The completion of dikaiosyne, something that eludes the Pharisees not because they lack the will (they’ve got plenty of that) but because they lack the imagination to open the holiest of holies to the sinner and the tax-collector, Jesus calls for later in the same sermon, still without a hint of irony.  The God who gives generously would have a dikaiosyne that takes the freewheeling shape of limitless generosity, and to do so does not negate Moses but fills what Moses leaves lacking.

May Jesus continue to enrich our imaginations, that our love of righteousness might love the Father’s kind of righteousness.

• David Brooks presents a case for disagreeing and meaning it without calling one’s interlocutors ugly names.
• Walter Brueggemann calls for more emphasis on public Scripture-reading on Sunday mornings.
• Some praise for Obama’s foreign policy from that arch-leftist, Dick Cheney.
• Patrick Deneen casts light on the other threat that Eisenhower warned us about.
• n+1 Magazine examines the slippery character of elitism.
• 

My pilgrim soul once undertook

A journey of the mind

To Hindustan, the mythic East

The truth of things to find.

Of blind men once a rhyme I’d heard

Whose hands did serve for sight

But none of which could comprehend

The human creature’s plight

As mortal and as strait of mind.

Each blind man, so it’s told,

Would shout to others, giving names

To what he touched, and being bold,

Would call the elephant’s leg the whole

Another one, the trunk,

And thus the creature must reflect

What each man held, so each man thunk.

So one man said “It’s like a wall.”

Another, “Like a tree.”

And so on down the line, it’s told,

Each claimed the whole of mystery.

And as each man would speculate,

The older poem did conclude

That God must likewise be beyond

The dogma claimed by any dude–

Divine things must be likewise dark

To those whose limits hold

Perceptions to one’s narrow sight.

And so I heard, and took as told

Until I came upon those men–

As blind as stories tell–

But where the old tale told of five,

Five there were, but one as well

Upon a hill, looking down,

As blind as all the rest,

But telling them with great panache

That what each one would thus attest

Was partial, part of larger mass

An elephant, he cried,

Must be the whole, but now I knew,

And when I knew, I sighed

Because I saw a different sight

From poems’ easy lore

Indeed, five blind men saw with hands,

But objects there were four.

Two men indeed did pat the hide

Of elephant so big,

But one in fact did touch a tree,

Another a nearby pig.

The fifth blind man in fact found a snake,

An oddly sanguine asp:

It never bit despite the abuse!

And then I did begin to grasp:

The sixth was the one to see,

I knew before too long:

The one who wove the tale of One

To that one only did belong

An elephant, a child’s toy,

A tiny world, at that.

As fingers grasped the minuscule

The blind man yelled, the blind man spat

And framed the dark so that it might

Be just like toys so small

And, being blind, the man knew not

That he had missed at all

The grandeur and variety

Of things under the sun

But being prone to claim too much,

The sixth man made all one.

And in the years that came to pass

The blind man fame did gain,

His poem did become a fad

On tour folks paid for his refrain,

And soon the ones who wished to sound

Like learned, reading folks

Would quote the poem I once heard

And tell some good, broad-minded jokes,

“Those fools,” the learned folks would start,

“They think a tusk a spear!”

“They think the ear a fan, I say!”

The fans did shout, then sipped their beer.

But I returned to my small world

Convinced that I’m still fine

To keep confessing creeds of old

And keep a humble mind.

I do not know enough, it seems,

To say that all our ways

Together make an elephant

On which I only gaze.

I do not write, in other words,

To claim that I can see:

I only wish to offer folks

Another possibility.

Season four begins with a bang!

General Introduction
- Welcome to Season 4
- David remains transient
- Michial and his dissertation
- That .01 episode from December
- What’s on the blog?
- The award we won

The Origins of This Episode
- Filling in the holes left by the CWC
- And of New Mexico? And of oversized cups of soda?

Dante ‘n’ Petrarch
- Coming to terms with classical myth
- Dante’s refusal to allegorize or to forgive the pagans
- On Limbo
- Raiding Egypt for gold
- Pardon our lacuna
- Dante’s real grief over Virgil’s departure
- Petrarch as Platonist and emo kid
- Medieval courtly love
- The universalizing tendency and the feminist objection
- Junior-high love

Renaissance Self-Understanding
- De-emphasis of the classical world in the Middle Ages
- Earlier renaissances
- Ad fontes and the Reformation
- A new kind of Dark Ages
- David Grubbs deconstructs the Renaissance
- Cultural translation and the Medieval Era
- Was the Renaissance in historical bad faith?
- How to enrage your Medievalist

Italian Renaissance Art
- The Vanishing Point
- The reduction of symbolism
- Community reality
- Michelangelo’s pagan David
- Anatomy vs. iconography
- The camera and the return to pre-Renaissance painting
- Renaissance Moses for the win
- Mona Lisa and moaning Petrarch

The Patronage System
- What does it mean to “sell out”?
- How capitalism killed patronage
- The legacy of the Medici
- The Romantic influence

The Courtier Meets the Knight Errant
- Podcast editing and sprezzatura
- Keeping the veil closed
- Learning from the wise and never letting them see you sweat

Machiavelli and Modern Politics
- The Prince’s far-ranging influence
- Underlying democratic Machiavellianism
- Distrust of the masses
- Kissinger and Nixon
- Machiavelli and the business world
- Is The Prince satire? Does it matter?
- The Discourses on Livy examine religion and the State

What Else?
- Effusive praise for the Decameron
- Why the Renaissance came before the Middle Ages
- Taking Pico della Mirandola allegorically
- Pushing the edge of humanism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blake, William. “The Chimney Sweeper.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 1979. 25-26.

—. “London.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 1979. 53.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G.H. McWilliam. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. Arthur D. Imerti. Lincoln, Neb.: Bison, 2004.

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. New York: Norton, 2002.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State UP, 2000.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

—. La Vita Nuova. Trans. Barbara Reynolds. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

—. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Petrarch. The Canzioniere. Trans. Mark Musa and Barbara Manfredi. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1999.

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. On the Dignity of Man. New York: Hackett, 1998.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Arden, 1997.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 30 January 2011 (Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, Year A)

Micah 6:1-8 • Psalm 15 • 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 • Matthew 5:1-12

When I started in on this week’s readings I realized that I was largely duplicating a reflection that I’d written back in October on the nature of justice as a theological category, so what follows is largely going to be a reworking of that post (which I liked).  I just figured our readers should know that this is more of a revision than an invention this week.

I have to admit that few conversations are closer to a guarantee of hurt feelings than when the phrase “social justice” comes up in Christian circles.  No matter who I’m talking to, I know that my position is going to end up odious.  For those whose piety runs towards equating Christian commitment and activism in behalf of the poor, especially those folks who think that such advocacy can and should go through the channels of a federal political party, I can’t help but appear a fatalist of sorts (though I prefer to think of it as providence rather than fate).  I do grant that some manners of governing are worse than others, and I certainly think it’s the educated Christian’s duty to be educated and to speak the truth regarding the state, but I’ve also got a deep suspicion that aligning one’s self, much less one’s God, against this or that political faction runs too much a danger of idolatry, especially when being against one faction, in America’s Manichean political arena, means allying with the other.  I prefer to be a Platonist of sorts, never ceasing to note where this or that candidate’s platform is actually promising bad things and of course never forgetting that a campaign promise is only as good as the diluted delivery later.  To someone fully invested, say, in the administration of Barack Obama or to the activities of Sojourners, I no doubt come across as aloof, more concerned with some abstract “moral purity” than with “results.”  (I disagree, but my disagreement seldom counts for much.)

On the other hand, because I do think that some governments are worse than others, and that staying informed on the actual substance of governance (rather than birth certificates, tasteless remarks on television interviews, and malapropisms) is worth a Christian’s time and effort to understand, and that republics are ultimately better for my neighbors than are tyrannies, I know that I must appear entirely too “political” to others.  (Of course, Aristotle would never have understood how “political” can be an indictment, since the human being is an animal who lives as part of a polis, but I don’t expect too many people to be familiar with Aristotle.)  What these folks often ask is whether I’m saved by justice or by mercy, the implication, as I take it, being that I’m somehow in favor of one thing for myself before God (mercy) but something entirely different, and perhaps even contradictory, for the other person (justice).  I’ll admit that I’ve never been quick enough on my feet to ask the next, properly Socratic question, so I suppose this little essay is my attempt to do so.

So when Micah, in this week’s readings, calls both for justice and kindness, I find myself revisiting the justice-or-mercy question.  In my estimation (and I’m always glad to entertain that I’m wrong in my estimations–the comment bar is just below), framing justice and mercy as two dialectical poles in perpetual tension assumes some things about reality that, in my estimation, are bad assumptions.  Two categories that theologians use when they talk about being (or Being, if you’re German) are univocal and analogous.  (Some also talk about polyvocal being, but I’ve not been able to make sense of that.)  Those who are of the camp of Thomas Aquinas (like myself) tend to say that the sentences “God exists” and “God is good” and “God is love” are statements that assume analogy, in other words that God’s being is related somehow to what we mortals think of as existence, but the confessions of God’s immortality and God’s omnipotence mean that the things that define (to be woodenly etymological for a second, those things that “put limits on”) our existence don’t define God’s.  And our threescore-plus-ten lives mean that what we think of as love (of the eros or of the agape varieties, really) are related to but don’t stand identical with God’s love.  Our being is related to God’s being, so that the sentence “God is love” means something, but it does not encompass the totality of that reality in the way that “Gilmour is a mortal” does.  And so on.  The camp that claims that being is univocal (among them Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and most popular atheist writerss of the twenty-first century) say that the sentences “God exists” and “Gilmour exists” are only different in their subjects, not their predicates.  Most (perhaps not Richard Dawkins) would then say that further true sentences about God would not be true sentences about Gilmour, but for the univocalist, predicates of existence and such are of the same type irrespective of their subjects.

I think that those who chastise the justice-seekers as hypocrites, as folks who want mercy for themselves but justice for others, are reading justice univocally, and frankly, I think most iterations of this sort of mistake begin with Anselm of Canterbury.  In Anselm’s atonement theology, the punishment for sin stands in the same schema as do punishments for civil crimes, and in medieval law codes, a crime against a peasant simply does not carry the same sort of liability as does a crime against a freeman carries, and likewise for a nobleman, and supremely for a king.  Anselm, familiar as he was with the contours of criminal law, simply extrapolated upwards in this scheme of crime and punishment and held that, if the punishment for wronging a king is the death of the mortal 0body, then the punishment for wronging God must be the death of the immortal soul.  In order for the injustice of a wronged God to be righted, according to this theory, only the execution of another God could set things right.  And since there is only one person of the Trinity who could die, namely the Son, Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross becomes the solution to the eternal legal problem of a wronged God.

I have to admit that there’s some elegance in the formulation, but I do think that it relies on an assumption that the king is as different from a peasant as God is from the king, and that’s where I think univocal metaphysics misses the boat.  I’m not going to deny that penal substitutionary atonement is a valid theory of atonement (although I neither think of it as uniquely valid nor as the most adequate to Biblical revelation, but that’s for another post); what I do deny is that the radical difference between mortals and God meanders down some “chain of being” in ways that can render any calls for earthly justice hypocritical.

I hold, to the contrary, that relationships between God and mortals are metaphysically different from relationships between rulers and subjects (much less between magistrates and citizens), and because the relationship between the powerful and the weak should be one of brotherhood rather than of semi-divine magnanimity, I think that “justice” (Latin ius and Greek dikaiosyne and Hebrew mishphat, for those keeping score at home) becomes something other than justice when it’s limited only to the enforcement of contracts, tempered on occasion by the generosity of the powerful.  Certainly the Old Testament prophets were not merely calling for contract-enforcement when Isaiah condemned those who despoil widows by adding field to field and when Amos called out the predatory lenders in Samaria (and their wives, who grazed like cows on the “fields” of wealth taken from the poor).  I don’t think that any of the prophets entertained even for a moment that Israel’s sins of idol-worship would be mitigated by generosity (so put your “works-righteousness” gun away, cowboy), but because the rich and the poor are very much alike, and because the rich and God are very much unlike, the calls for divine mercy and the calls for earthly justice could come from the same mouth/pen/oracle without much of a thought that mercy and contract-enforcement were somehow contradictory poles that must be synthesized.  They were simply parts of a whole, and that whole was called mishphat, justice.

None of this lets the social-justice advocates off the hook, of course.  As I noted earlier in the post, far too often any old cause of the New Left gets baptized in the name of being not-fundamentalist, and far too little inspection and criticism happens, especially when libertarian/capitalist categories of “choice” and “rights” rather than Christian practices like hospitality and thankfulness govern Christian discourse about “issues.” The univocality of Being once again threatens what I take to be genuine Christian reflection in these circles as well: throwing one’s time, effort, money, and sometimes more behind the DNC (just as much as the GOP) machine far too often requires participation in the Manichean machinery of American political discourse, and  such participation far too often loses sight of the common lot of mortals in light of the strong analogical difference between God and humanity.  (And there are few more dishonest moments than when a dedicated New-Left Democrat says that “this is not a left-right issue”: if I had money to gamble, I would bet every time that the next line out of the New-Left Democrat’s mouth is going to be party-line social liberalism.)  Not unlike the Right-Wingers that the Christian Left (rightly) holds in suspicion, the stance in favor of some kinds of Social Justice tends towards a strong division: contract-enforcement for one’s political enemies and seeking-for-shalom for one’s political friends.  The urge is neither inhuman nor unexpected, but it’s not all that different from its mirror image.  The hesed and the mishphat that Micah points to in this week’s reading call everyone to account and to repentance, not in the spirit of some flattened “moral equivalence” but in the realization that, when seen in the light of analogically different divine justice and kindness, no mortal’s sense of the good life should remain un-illuminated.  Perhaps the best place to start is indeed to walk humbly.

Of course, I acknowledge that my own politics, the incorrigible Athenian democrat and Roman republican that I am, deserve scrutiny.  My point here is that the philosophical assumptions we bring to words like “salvation” and “justice” render them anything but self-evident.  In other words, this long and rambling meditation is going to end with a call for more, not less, theology.

• Stanley Fish notes the similarities in the right-wing and left-wing criticisms of the modern university.
• Patrick Deneen calls for public liberal arts education, not careerist college education, for all citizens.
• Andrew Perrimen offers N.T. Wright as good medicine both for neo-Calvinists and for Emergents.
• Joanne Barkan suggests new ways to think about the “failure” of American public education.
• 

Howdy, readers.

I should have noted this back when I was tooting our horn for the recognition we received, but new every Christian Humanist Blog post has, at the bottom of its individual page (the one you get when you click on the post’s title) easy links to Tweet, Like (a la Facebook), print, and otherwise interact with the post if you enjoy the material but don’t at the moment have a comment.

Doing such things, of course, increases our exposure and perhaps might even get some more people involved in this little adventure we’re all on together, so I beg, plead, exhort, and otherwise ask you, O Good Reader, to share some material from CHB where you share online material you enjoy.

That is all.  Look for a new podcast episode a week from this morning.

Revised Common Lectionary Readings for 23 January 2011 (Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year A)

Isaiah 9:1-4 • Psalm 27:1, 4-9 • 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 • Matthew 4:12-23

I’ll admit that the final phrase in this week’s Old Testament reading sent me running to Google.  When I see “Day of the LORD” or “Day of Atonement” I know basically what I’m supposed to imagine, but when I saw that the promised end of shame will be like “the Day of Midian,” it took some searching to figure out that the phrase doesn’t appear (that I can tell) anywhere else in the Bible.  Taking the best guess I can take, I figured it must come from the story of Gideon in Judges (because he fights Midianites, not because he rhymes with Midian), and I smiled a bit as I realized that Isaiah here is making reference to Judges 7′s account of Gideon, a story that I’ve heard summarized plain wrong more than one time.

I always have to go back to the text to make sure I’m not just remembering wrong, but the sense seems fairly clear: what everyone remembers in common is that Gideon, chosen shophet of YHWH, has gathered a makeshift army to oppose the Midianites and that YHWH calls on him to be a sign of divine power: he is to take a mere fraction of the force with him into battle.  To determine who will stay and who will go, YHWH performs two trials.  In the first trial, Gideon asks who among the warriors of Israel is afraid.  If a man fears, that man goes home.  So far, so good.

Then people start to misread.  People think that, since the first trial must have been one of courage, one of the classical virtues, the second must be a trial of temperance, another of those classical virtues.  But it’s another sort of separation.  When the soldiers go down to the water, most of them, being courageous, also exhibit a bit of self-control, drinking as human beings do.  But three hundred of them apparently declined flight not out of noble virtue but out of bestial stupidity: they dip their entire heads in the water, lapping the water as dogs lap.  Those three hundred, God insists, will be the ones who take up arms as YHWH’s army, proving that YHWH, not classical discipline, has won the day.  And they do win.

The subtle insult that YHWH gives to the remnant of Israel here is not hard to understand: just as a small pack of dog-men has no real ability to break the back of the Midianite oppression, so the men of a Jewish ghetto have no weapons that can do real harm to the mighty Babylonian empire.  Yet YHWH will save, and YHWH will save in such a manner that history can scarcely credit a great Jewish general, the collective will of the people formerly of Judah, or any such thing: this will be a divine actum, and they will know that YHWH is Lord.

When Matthew in turn takes up this Isaiah text, when allusion becomes allegory, he pairs up this moment with one of the most underused phrases that I can think of in the Bible.  Folks immediately think that fish in Jesus’s famous statement about fishing for men must mean something roughly synonymous with “converts,” and the promise to Andrew and Peter is that they’ll be the first door-to-door Christian prosyletizing team.  But placed next to that famous moment in Isaiah, which in turn makes reference to that famous misreading of Judges, the phrase suggests to me something more akin to the moment in Amos 4 when YHWH says of Amos’s prophetic activity that it will lead away the wicked among the nations on hooks, an image of divine judgment rather than salesmanship.  I don’t think that such a reading means that public proclamation of the gospel is a bad thing; far from it.  It just makes me wonder how eager one should be to think of one’s neighbor as a fish.

The point of all of this hyptertextual reading is to note that Israel is always thinking about Israel, and the Church is forever thinking about what it means to be and not to be Israel.  It’s also a reminder, to me at least, that to be Israel is not to be a powerful or a clever or even a self-disciplined people but to be those people selected, perhaps scandalously, to bear witness to those people not selected.  It’s an inscrutable picking-of-teams that puts someone like me in the position of saying to people better than me in many important ways that the God of creation and redemption has saved the world and that judgment is coming on those who would oppose that salvation.  It’s a strange story, really.  But it’s also unquestionably glorious.

Happy [redacted]th birthday to our co-host, David Grubbs! (He can tell you how old he is if he’d like to do so, but I’m not touching it.)

Obviously, our podcast wouldn’t be the same without Grubbs’s cantankerous orthodoxy and frequent appeals to the Anglo-Saxon period. He also had what I consider the deepest thought in our music tetralogy last season–the bit in the Christian Rock episode about the things rock music does well.

Wish Grubbsy the best in the comments section!

(Yeah, I’m proud of that title.)

• Who should determine the course of Christian theology–pastors or professors? (I guess no one’s arguing for bloggers or, um, English teachers.)
• A model for the new literary humanism.
• Leo Tolstoy’s descendants and fans want the Russian Orthodox Church to reverse his excommunication.
• Resisting Glenn Beck (or the Glenn Beck function) in a Foucaultian wonderland.
• Bringing some humility back to Aristotelian logic.
• Someone tell us how to feel about the “n-word-free” Huck Finn. (Farmer will: IT’S A TERRIBLE IDEA, AND PEOPLE WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY SHOULDN’T BE ISSUED LIBRARY CARDS.)
• Why a strict Constitutionalism isn’t a good idea.
• Ilya Nyzhnyk makes me sick. (The Oskiper triplets also make me sick.)
• When is it okay to support terrorist groups in public?
• Grammar watch: On verbing nouns.
• John McWhorter on Zora Neale Hurston as a model for black conservatives.
• 
  see more Funny Graphs