The nest

On Friday night, there was a storm. It's big local news, though not likely to show up on the news of the world at large. Lots of trees down.

It started out as just an ordinary thunderstorm. Then the wind began rising, blowing rain so hard against the windows that it sounded like sleet. The wind got louder and louder, and suddenly there was a giant "Crack," and it seemed like something had hit the roof.

I still don't know for sure what the loud crack was, but my best guess is that it was the tree limb that came down from the maple in the back. Then again, it could have been the entire maple that was uprooted and came down on the street in the side yard. Or it could just possibly have had something to do with the giant blue spruce (see here for a mention of that spruce) across the street that narrowly missed the neighbors' house (their bedroom window right in the front) and was deposited precisely along the side. Probably did in the garage next door to them, but at least nobody was hurt.

But probably, the loud cracking noise was the limb that came down.

There's been a pair of robins with a nest in that tree. I don't think we've seen any of their babies, though a fledgling was found around the front of the house, probably from a different nest. A month or so ago, back in the days when it was cool outside, Youngest Daughter and I sat outside and watched this robin foraging for nest-building materials. Somehow a piece of clear plastic, rather tougher than the usual plastic wrap, had gotten left on the lawn, and he was determined to have that. I still don't know why he was having trouble with it. Maybe it was slippery, but eventually he flew off with it, up into the branches. That branch. The one that came down. I hope all the young robins were fledged. I found no egg fragments or dead nestlings, so I have hopes. But when cleaning up the mess, I did find the nest, in several pieces. Hardened mud making up part of it, woven superstructure. And a piece of familiar-looking plastic carefully included.

He was back, though, last evening. Surveying the territory. The rest of that tree survived. Just the one high branch gone. It looks a little lopsided but will grow back. I think he has plans for a new nest.

Interesting article in the most recent Human Life Review

I was just going through the most recent Human Life Review, a physical copy, to see if I would be keeping this physical issue. (I try not to let physical journals accumulate if the desired contents can be found on-line.) I found this article, "The Problem of Infertility in Africa," to be the only one I wanted to keep a record of, and this post is here chiefly for my own convenience, so I'll be able to find the link again.

I don't have many profound words about the article, but it is a window into a different world. In this world, people are literally obsessed by infertility, to the point that the author says that Gospel music (!) in Africa must always be addressing the issue of infertility, yet actual (ethical) medical treatments for and prevention of infertility, based on scientific fact, are rarely discussed. One of the most eyebrow-raising sentences: " Since popular media already pay much attention to infertility, perhaps they could be persuaded to include medical facts in their coverage."

Well, er, yes. One would think so. But evidently witchcraft or some Pentecostal-witchcraft hybrid is a more popular way to treat fertility.

In this world, women sometimes approach the nuns who run an adoption agency wearing pillows in the hopes that they can adopt a baby and pretend to have given birth. Husbands who don't wish to divorce their wives or to practice polygamy feel nearly forced by cultural pressures to do so if the couple suffers from infertility, since the wife is invariably blamed and the husband told that he has a duty to marry a woman who can give him a child.

Meanwhile, STD's are rife and are the major cause of infertility, both male and female, but apparently the common man does not connect the dots and apply the obvious remedy. Be monogamous. Don't genitally mutilate your daughters, as that can cause infertility. Don't marry off girls when they are so young that sex and childbirth will harm them and make them infertile. Stuff like that.

A dark continent indeed. It's good for pro-lifers and cultural conservatives to know what goes on in cultures widely, even wildly, different from our own, and I recommend this article for this purpose.

A few thoughts on the G.Z. and T.M. case

Yes, you'll gather that I'm sufficiently a coward to use initials so as not to attract search bots and worse than search bots, as the comments I'm going to put here are not going to be palatable to the sort of people who tend to threaten violence if you disagree with them.

Now that G.Z. has been acquitted by a jury of any crime and is merely still in danger of a) political and lawless pursuit by a Javert-like federal government bent on tasting "white hispanic" blood, b) outright murder, c) inability to get a job, ever, d) personal civil trial by the relatives of T. M., I'm going to offer a few comments on the case.

First of all, this case should never, never have been brought to trial at all, given that it was only political intervention that prevented it from all being over when the police didn't arrest G.Z. in the first place and when the local prosecutor considered that there wasn't a case, a point well made here and here. Second, since that is the case, the real injustice here has been done to G.Z., a point that some people even sorta kinda on the right do not seem to appreciate.

It occurs to me that G. Z. was one of those Obama supporters and men of the left who still believed that leftism is compatible with law and order, that the law is the same for everybody, and that we all agree that crime should be stopped. My deepest sympathies go out to him for what must be a rude awakening, though I have no idea if he has even yet connected those dots. No, committed leftism is not compatible with law and order, if keeping law and order means that the "wrong kind of people" get punished or arrested "too often."

I remember twenty-odd years ago bursting into the office of one of my conservative mentors at Vanderbilt and fulminating about an article I had been reading that day in a magazine. (This was before the Internet.) The article was complaining that the police in one city were arresting "too many" people of a certain race and saying that this had to stop. I was simply aghast at how blatant it was. It didn't actually present any evidence or documentation nor even bother to say that the police were stopping or arresting people of this race who were innocent. It wasn't even clear that the article was assuming that. It was a straight matter of bean counting: Thou shalt not arrest or stop more than x number of people of this race or thou shalt be in trouble, period. If that means that crime must go unprevented or unpunished, so be it. "So what does this mean, a daily bag limit?" I spluttered. That got a wry smile.

As with academic standards and hiring standards, so here: If standards of behavior mean that "too many" of x mascot group (women, minorities, whatever) are burdened or arrested, then the standards must be changed, or must be changed for them. We can't have disparate impact even if eliminating disparate impact means allowing anarchy to prevail.

G.Z. has had that illustrated to him the hard, the very hard, way.

Below are the comments I posted on Facebook about this matter after reading some comments by a "moderate" friend. The "moderate" friend had said that he accepts the verdict in the trial and that there doesn't appear to have been enough evidence to convict and does appear to have been some evidence that T.M. was the aggressor but that this is a time when we need to talk about the reality of racial profiling, what it's like to be black in America, etc. He said that G.Z. placed T.M. in a group of "them" who "always get away" and that this grouping and categorizing of black people is what we need to be talking about now. Another friend echoed him and approvingly linked this stupid article, saying that we white people in the evangelical church need to be "listening" to our black brethren about their experience. Here was my response:

For those who are saying in the wake of the Z. verdict that, even though there wasn't enough evidence to convict Z. of a crime, he was committing “racial profiling,” about which we should all take this opportunity to beat our breasts, I have a questoin: Must we all engage in reverse racial profiling? Reverse racial profiling is when you deliberately ignore suspicious behavior and self-presentation if engaged in by a person of a mascot racial group. Hence, even if M. was walking or dressing or behaving in a way that looked like he was high (which he may have been) and which was suspicious, Z. was obligated to pretend that this wasn't the case, because M. was black. Is that it? If not, then how the heck do you know that Z's suspicions were not based on self-presentation and behavior? Is it not jumping to conclusions (which is itself what is supposed to be wrong about “profiling”) for you to assume that Z. was guilty of wrong-thought in suspecting M. of being up to no good? Think twice. I refuse to use this as an opportunity to bang the “white guilt” drum. That's uncalled for, and even if you are a moderate in the way you do it, it plays into exactly the sort of hysteria that has put an innocent man through an unjustified ordeal and may yet cost him his life. Stop and think about that for a minute before you keep talking about the “evils of profiling.”

Unfortunately, there is more than one kind of race baiting. There's the extreme kind that calls for Z's blood and says that his acquittal was a victory for racism. But even just saying that this is a great chance to talk about the evils of racial profiling is a form of race baiting. It has the unsavory implication that maybe Z. has deserved at least what he has gone through thus far for engaging (so it asserts) in the evil thought of "racial profiling." And it contributes in its small way to keeping alive the flame of hatred against him for that wrong-thought, as well as downplaying or even ignoring the injustice that has been done to him. The only people who can be victims of injustice, apparently, are the mascot groups, and the rest of us must be kept ever mindful of that fact so that we can feel the right amount of guilt for being "privileged."

The "moderate" wannabes who engage in this kind of race baiting never for a moment think about the new climate of opinion that they are contributing to, nor about its victims. They don't seem too worried about anti-white racism, about innocent victims of that sort of hatred, about the under-reporting of those crimes, and about the way that constantly feeding the left-wing racial narrative (which they, in their small way, are doing) perpetuates and permits violence and interracial hatred from the alleged "victim" groups by confirming them in their "victim" status and giving them a sense of excuse.

That is reckless and foolish. It is a failure to recognize reality and to deal with it. And that is all the more ironic, since these are the kind of people who usually worry their heads a great deal about societal attitudes and "what we as Christians are encouraging," etc.

I hope that G.Z. and his family are protected and also, if I may say so, that they don't keep supporting President Barack Obama, who intervened so irresponsibly in this case and cared nothing about the effect of his intervention on an innocent man. There are plenty of things that this case tells us, and they do indeed have to do with "the privileged." But those words, as it turns out, don't mean what the liberals and the evangelical racial breast-beaters think they do.

The glorious liberty of the children of God

For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope; but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it....He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:18-25, 32)

There's definitely something to be said for an upbringing in which you are made to memorize a lot of Scripture. Yesterday I had the phrase "the glorious liberty of the children of God" rattling around in my head, and I was sure it was from Romans 8, as indeed turns out to be the case. It was exceedingly worthwhile to look it up and read the entire passage. The passage goes on, too, with "If God be for us, who can be against us?" and "I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities...shall be able to separate us from the love of God." The whole chapter is well worth committing to memory.

But about that "glorious liberty of the children of God." What does it mean? In context, it certainly looks like it means the new heaven and the new earth and our own redeemed bodies. The restoration of all things. Jesus said, "Behold, I make all things new" (Rev. 21:5), and that is what St. Paul is teaching about here. In, to be sure, somewhat general and non-specific terms, but as best we can understand it, it means that there will be an entirely new creation after the end of this world, a creation in which there will be no sorrow or pain but which will not be disembodied, which will involve all the beauty and grandeur of physical Nature, purged of its horrors and dangers.

We don't know what this will be like. Will there be germs, while we are simply resistant to them? If there are dogs, cats, and horses, will they have puppies, kittens, and foals, and how will the animal population problem work if they do? Where will our food come from, and how will we acquire it without the "sweat of our brow"? Bugs certainly have their place in the present ecosystem, but a new earth containing ticks, mosquitoes, and chiggers sounds a bit problematic, so how is that going to work? We have no idea of the answer to any of these questions.

So, yes, the promise of a new Nature, a new creation, a new heaven and a new earth, is left somewhat vague. But it is impossible to read Paul's words about the whole creation waiting in expectation without feeling a thrill of excitement. Paul even hints that in some sense the redemption and recreation of the whole world is bound up with us. The world is waiting for men to be redeemed, which will in some sense allow or bring about the redemption of the whole earth through the "glorious liberty of the children of God."

Then there is verse 32. It is all too easy when one is trying to submit oneself to the will of God to take such a verse about "freely giving us all things" in an entirely spiritual sense. Yes, yes, one says, along with the death of Jesus Christ God the Father gives us Himself, gives us the promise of the beatific vision, gives us spiritual growth and spiritual riches. That's all it means. But I'm not so sure of that. In fact, though it doesn't come immediately on the heels of the verses about the whole creation waiting for redemption, it now seems to me that verse 32 is about the redemption of the body and of the creation. God will with Jesus Christ give us all things--new bodies that never grow old or ill, freedom from pain and death, the end of sorrow, and the beauty we have loved in this world, translated into a new key.

In fact, perhaps the distinction between spiritual riches and recreated earthly riches is a little artificial, and perhaps we would see it to be wholly artificial if we were sufficiently spiritually insightful. Paul can be read here as teaching a kind of mystical spiritual truth--that the redemption of our souls and the redemption of our bodies and the redemption of the world are all bound up together at the root. "Whom he did predestinate, them he also called, and whom he called, them he also justified, and whom he justified, them he also glorified" (Romans 8:30). Glorified? Doesn't that have something to do with the "glorious liberty" and the "redemption of the body" he was talking about a few verses before? I think it does.

Perhaps it's a kind of spiritual mathematical equation: If we understood everything, we would understand why the whole of Nature was skewed and damaged by the Fall of Satan and the Fall of Man. Then we would also understand why it simply follows that when the Church Triumphant is gathered together in the presence of our Lord, when this present human history of mingled sorrow, misery, beauty, and grandeur comes to an end, when the glorification of human nature is completed, creation itself will "come right" and be recreated, so that what comes after is the best of all, though we can glimpse it now only through a glass darkly.

I announce to you what is guessed at in all the phenomena of your world. You see the corn of wheat shrivel and break open and die, but you expect a crop. I tell you of the Springtime of which all springtimes speak. I tell you of the world for which this world groans and toward which it strains. I tell you that beyond the awful borders imposed by time and space and contingency, there lies what you seek. I announce to you life instead of mere existence, freedom instead of frustration, justice instead of compensation. For I announce to you redemption. Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done. I restore the years that the locusts and worms have eaten. I restore the years which you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheel-chair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard, and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen, and the freedom lost to you through plunder, and the identity lost to you because of calumny and the failure of justice; and I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of. And I bring you to the Love of which all other loves speak, the Love which is joy and beauty, and which you have sought in a thousand streets and for which you have wept and clawed your pillow.

Thomas Howard, Christ the Tiger, pp. 158-9.

Force and Fraud refuted

I just recently ran into someone on Facebook trying the line that the only laws that can be justified are those against force and fraud. I suppose everybody on the conservative side of the spectrum has to go through a die-hard, card-carrying libertarian period in their lives, during which they agonize over the question, "How can the state rightly stop a man from cutting off his own arm with a chain saw, as long as he doesn't hurt anybody else? Think! Think! No, I just can't justify such a prohibition." I, too, have had such debates. (Though I wish to have it known that I was always on the anti-chainsaw side. I could never go quite that far.)

As time goes on, it seems to me that the restriction of just laws to those against force and fraud is so obviously incorrect that I find it more and more difficult to know why it is so attractive. Here are just a few knock-down counterexamples. (Note that I say "knock-down." My point is that I'm not going to put into this list laws against pornography and prostitution, because those are of course points at issue between the die-hard libertarian and the social conservative. I'm going to pick other examples.)

It is obviously legitimate for some level of government to be able to stop/prohibit...

--keeping large dead animal carcasses all over your property, attracting vermin.
--dumping your garbage in the local public park to save on your garbage bills.
--having sex in public.
--walking around entirely nude in public.
--getting dead drunk or high and leaving your two-year-old to look after himself all day.
--deliberately cutting off your own arm with a chainsaw. (I know, I gave that one already, but I thought I'd put it into the list for good measure.)
--buying and selling infants.

Now, that's just for starters. I'm sure readers can add to the list. The point is that none of these involve either force or fraud, yet any person with a modicum of sense knows that to have laws against them or to allow the police to jump in and stop them (e.g., to confiscate the chainsaw) is not government overreach.

So why do people, it seems especially young people, adopt the slogan about force and fraud?

I can think of a few reasons.

1) Sensible small-government conservatives realize that notions like "the common good" and "indirect harm" have been vastly over-used by big-government leftists. There is a temptation to overreact, and the slogan about having laws only against force and fraud sounds in some way like a principled way to cut off all those big bureaucracies and excessive regulations at the knee. (Though come to think of it, why is it so principled? I mean, force and fraud are still moral categories. It's not as though we've somehow gotten away from morals by restricting laws to those against force and fraud. If getting away from morals is supposed to be a good thing, for some reason. What is the argument that places those moral categories into such a special position? Is it just supposed to be evident to the natural light?)

2) Related to #1, it is actually true that in many cases, laws that are not against force and fraud deserve additional scrutiny and prudential questions. Is it really going to be worth the intrusion into people's lives to have this law? This is true even before we get to ridiculous things like telling businesses how far away from the wall they have to have their toilets. Seatbelt laws are a good example. They are by no means knock-down laws. Are we really sure that it's worth it to have such laws? Doesn't it give you a bit of pause when your state gov. starts setting up "click-it or ticket" zones in which they videocam on-coming drivers and, if it appears visually that they aren't wearing a seatbelt, stop them and give them a ticket? It's perfectly legitimate to be in a sense libertarian sympathetic. I would be entirely open to an argument that, for all the lives they save, seatbelt laws aren't worth the loss of liberty and the feeling of giving the police state another stick with which to beat a dog. And so on for innumerable regulations. A phrase like "the common good" is not irrelevant, but it isn't a talisman either. It doesn't excuse just anything.

3) Finally, I think this "force and fraud" stuff gets brought up by fake libertarians who are actually leftists, and then conscientious conservatives feel stymied by it if they haven't answered it decisively already in their own minds. A liberal who accepts a kajillion business, environmental, and animal rights laws, and would even want to see more, a liberal who endorses Obamacare, of all things, will nonetheless start talking like a pious libertarian the moment one starts discussing a law against, say, prostitution or pornography. "It's a free contract." "It isn't violence against anybody." This, from a man who doubtless supports all manner of restrictions on free, non-violent contracts, is a bit thick, and the liberal should be called on the hypocrisy. Like this: "Do you support minimum wage laws? But isn't one freely entering into a contract to work for less than minimum wage? Do you support unions? But isn't that an intrusion into the right of a non-union worker to make a free contract with the employer? Do you support laws against pollution? But releasing x amount of smoke into the air is non-violent." And  so on and so forth. Instead, there are some conservatives who will feel that they have somehow been "caught forcing their morals" on other people, momentarily forgetting all the ways in which the interlocutor wants to "force his morals" on you. (Try asking him if he supports non-discrimination laws. Talk about forcing morals!)

The fact of the matter is that it is impossible to build a workable society with only laws against force and fraud. They're a good place to start, but they aren't going to do it on their own. Others have written about this much more eloquently than I. I think that Jennifer Roback Morse is a good example of a person who comes from a somewhat libertarian background but also sees the limits thereof, especially when it comes to issues regarding children and custody. Every good conservative should have a little libertarian inside him. But that's not the place to stop.

Nor let thy spreading Gospel rest

Here is a video I posted at What's Wrong With the World several years ago.

The Kimyal People Receive the New Testament from UFM Worldwide on Vimeo.

I thought of it today when we sang "My God Thy Table Now is Spread" for the Communion hymn and got to this verse:

Drawn by thy quick'ning grace, O Lord,
In countless numbers let them come
And gather from their Father's board
The Bread that lives beyond the tomb.

Countless numbers. It reminds one of this passage in Scripture,

After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands; And cried with a loud voice, saying, "Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.... (Revelation 7:9-10) \

Let it be so, Amen.

Punting to another blogger

Yes, I know, the way I have been neglecting this blog is shocking. And my intention had been that, within the beginning of summer break from home schooling, I would blog more. That has perhaps been somewhat true at What's Wrong With the World but has not worked out here. By the way, faithful readers, just a housekeeping note about W4: We have persistent display error problems there with our main page, and Tech Support has had a frustrating time trying to resolve them, so for the moment we have to live with them. Just hit refresh. Except on rare occasions, "refresh" should bring the page up for you just fine. 

Instead of blogging in my additional free time, I've been enjoying myself immensely working on some philosophical literature in the sub-field known as "Bayesian coherentism." Actually, I don't think it's really a form of coherentism as opposed to foundationalism at all, but the majority of its advocates think so. It's a truly enjoyable literature for the probability theory geek-inclined, and I'm getting into it this summer for the first time. At the moment I'm breaking my skull over a great article by probability theorist Timoji Shogenji on coherence and the transmission of evidential support. One thing that slows one down in this work is that nearly everyone uses his own notation, so one needs to learn a new notation almost every time. Now I know what "weight vectors" are, but that doesn't mean I have to like them.

Anyway, my on-line friend Kristor has a put up good post recently at the Orthosphere. It's called "The Eye of Sauron," and in light of recent depressing revelations, you can guess what that's about. The ending is my fave. Kristor hopes that the Enemy has just overlooked us little folk and that this is why we're still allowed to talk among ourselves, even though Big Brother is watching. He says,

I hope further that the reason we here are not factors material to the project of Leviathan is that we represent a salient in human affairs orthogonal thereto, that might – like hobbits – be too odd and humble to warrant his notice, yet spell his bane. God send it may be so, and grant us courage in the hour of darkness at the end of all things.

Some eagles would be good, too.

I second that.

The perfect storm of sexualizing children--choice/consent devours itself

(I know, a long period of neglecting the blog and then two posts close together. That's pretty much par for the course in blogging.)

Scott W. at Romish Graffiti has a story up about the so-called "Free Kate" movement. The short story goes like this: 18-year-old lesbian girl had a so-called "girlfriend" who was only fourteen. Parents of "girlfriend" were not happy and secretly recorded telephone conversations, which are now being mulled over by the local prosecutor for the possibility of a trial for adult-child lewd actions, given that the older girl was an adult and the younger girl was under the age of consent. The state (Florida) does have a so-called Romeo and Juliet law which puts the crime at the edge. According to that law the penalty after conviction is less if the age gap was no more than four years. It looks like the age gap in this case was right at four years.

But the perpetrator's parents and tons of activist friends are defending her actions by trying to play the victim card, claiming that "everybody does it" and that the state's law against sexual activity between an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old wouldn't be enforced if the relationship were heterosexual. Her parents would be willing for her to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, but not to a felony. The latter is the plea deal that was offered by the prosecutor. (If she agreed to that plea deal, she wouldn't have to register as a sex offender.)

Here's an aspect of this that is very important: Increasingly the "everybody does it" line is going to be used to excuse adult-child sex. I predict it. It's as sure as the night follows the day. And the reason this is so obvious is because Planned Parenthood and other organizations are aggressively sexualizing our children at younger and younger ages in the school.

This incredible story, which I don't actually recommend people read but which I link to for purposes of verification, is an eyewitness account of a Planned Parenthood-sponsored teen "sexuality conference" that involved young teens discussing pornography with adults and a lewd table display depicting a little girl in pigtails riding a tricycle (!) with the name of a female body part in large letters over her head. Arguably a great deal of illegal activity was going on at this conference given the existence of laws against lewd discussions with and presenting lewd materials to minors.

This conference was not at a school, but the young people involved were (let's just say) obviously not home schooled. Planned Parenthood has sex education programs all over the nation and is trying to run even more, and this conference tells us what they think it is appropriate to present to young teens. You simply cannot have a society where the publicly funded schools are teaching all of your children about all manner of sex acts from middle school up while maintaining a strong social and legal opposition to sex with children. It can't be done. When officially approved organizations are coming into the schools and teaching them that they are sexual beings and can consent to sex from a young age, plus giving them all sorts of how-to lessons, how in the world is that compatible with laws against children's having sex? It just isn't.

Sure, sure, the lefties, if they even begin to admit the lewdness of Planned Parenthood's materials at all, will try to tell us that, hey, they're just encouraging pan-sexual exploration between minors, not between minors and adults. Not only is that far from comforting, it also rings hollow. If one of these minor girls whose innocence was ruined when she was twelve by GLSEN or PP in her school happens at the age of fifteen to have a "consensual" relationship with a young man (or a young woman) of twenty-two, it's really difficult to say why the perverted educators who taught her all this stuff in the first place have any solid grounds on which to object, or on which to uphold laws against the relationship.

In the "Free Kate" case, the lesbian card provides a good opportunity, because this involves an alleged victim group and is therefore especially effective. But since the argument is that heterosexual couples are already doing this and not being prosecuted (which by the way does not appear to be true), there is really no stopping this argument. It's not as though Kate's supporters and her family are arguing that the law should be applied more rigorously to heterosexual adult offenders! Far from it.

I do not see how the current trend in school sex education and the left's aggressive sexualization of minors can end short of at a minimum a push for lowering age-of-consent laws at least to something like thirteen years of age. Probably, it won't end there.

We're suffering the old curse: May you live in interesting times.

Be sure to home school your kids now, y'hear?

The relative fragility of masculine identity

I have a theory. Readers can see what they think of it. Let it be known that this is just conjecture.

My theory is developed partly in response to the fact that blowhard feminist types, including male egalitarians, will sometimes bring up the fact that some girls are tomboys and nonetheless turn out just fine and use this to defend raising boys "gender-neutral," encouraging them to play with dolls and imitate Mommy, and the like.

It seems to me that the problem with this reasoning is that there is a major asymmetry between the situation of little girls who do or want to do stereotypically masculine things and little boys who are encouraged to be effeminate. The bottom line is that it seems that tomboyishness in a girl is less likely under natural circumstances (an important caveat) to translate into gender confusion in an adult woman than effeminacy (by which I don't mean simply not being athletic) in a boy.

Now, I hasten to emphasize that "under natural circumstances." If a tomboyish girl is surrounded by perverts and their enablers who teach her that many people just "are" lesbians and who encourage her to think that this is what her tomboyishness means, then that may be what happens. But absent this, she may just run around like a little hoyden in her youth, maybe get into swimming or become a triathlete when she's older, and nonetheless get married and be quite feminine. Ideologically she might or might not be a feminist. That's not so much what I'm getting at. I'm rather trying to say that tomboyishness in a girl doesn't have much of a natural tendency to turn into actual lesbianism, transgenderism, or general psychological gender confusion.

If, on the other hand, a little boy doesn't bond with an older man who is a mentor or father-figure, if he's raised too much in the company of women, if his mother stifles him, and especially if he's encouraged to think of himself in distinctively feminine ways--e.g., to imitate mothering behavior in his play or to wear female clothing--this can spell big trouble for his gender identity as he gets older.

These are all, of course, outrageously anecdotal generalizations, but they seem to me to have truth in them.

Why this apparent asymmetry?

Here's where my theory really gets wild: My theory is that this asymmetry arises in part from the fact that what we think of as distinctively masculine activities are in many cases the epitome of human activities. For example, training one's body and being in good shape, keeping animals or training animals, having dominion over nature, being sharp and analytical with one's mind, or even engaging in intelligent and trained fighting against evildoers. These are all things that are done or, in the case of fighting, can be done in an especially human way that represents mankind. Therefore, it is to some extent understandable that girls want to engage in them, to make up stories in which they are a boyish hero riding a horse and smiting bad guys, for example, or to construct a beautiful argument or win a glorious chess game.

The truly distinctively feminine activities are, by contrast, more narrow in scope and in a sense more characteristic of what mankind shares with the animals. Here I'm thinking especially of bearing and nurturing children.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a man's being a good father, helping his wife with the baby, and spending time with his children. In fact, that is all extremely important. Mankind has been designed by God to have one of the most long-term father relationships of any creature in nature. But fathering is not mothering, and the instinct to mother-love is to a very large extent shared across the spectrum of mammals and even birds. Of course this isn't in any way to deny that human mothers have anything distinctively human about them. It's just that, on my theory, for a man to try to behave like a woman and a mother and especially for a boy to try to behave like a girl is for him to mess himself up in some fundamental way, whereas the same does not seem to be always true for a woman who tries to "argue like a man" or a girl who tries to "play with the boys." It seems that the female is more resilient to that kind of role-playing than the male, and this might have something to do with the fact that in many ways a girl role-playing at being masculine can be doing something uplifting and something that reflects admiration of distinctively human characteristics whereas a boy role-playing at being feminine is doing something that degrades his identity.

This also seems related to the fact that a girl can wear pants without necessarily being masculinized while a boy cannot wear a dress (and no, I don't mean a Scottish kilt) without being feminized. No doubt I have traditionalist friends who will disagree with me about the first conjunct of the previous sentence, but by observation I think it is obviously true.

I don't have this all very well-worked-out, as you can see. There will be lots of counterexamples to anything of this kind that is overgeneralized. For example, a woman trying to act like a man (or like her concept of a man) in a management position is going to end up inevitably being an odious bully, which is degrading to all concerned.

I will be interested to see what thoughtful ("thoughtful" here means among other things "not known or obvious members of the manosphere") readers think about these odd thoughts.

Blessed Sunday after the Ascension

Yes, I know, I should have posted on Ascension Day. All my purist Catholic friends on Facebook have been posting quips about people who think Ascension is celebrated on the following Sunday. Ascension is on a Thursday. I get that. However, I'm just now getting around to a post, and the way I look at it is that giving Ascension a full octave is a way of honoring the feast and acknowledging its importance. This way there is not simply Ascension Day but also Ascensiontide.

Herewith a couple of great hymns. If you don't know 'em, look 'em up:

The Head that Once Was Crowned With Thorns

The head that once was crowned with thorns
Is crowned with glory now;
A royal diadem adorns
The mighty victor’s brow.

The highest place that Heav’n affords
Belongs to Him by right;
The King of kings and Lord of lords,
And Heaven’s eternal Light.

The joy of all who dwell above,
The joy of all below,
To whom He manifests His love,
And grants His Name to know.

To them the cross with all its shame,
With all its grace, is given;
Their name an everlasting name,
Their joy the joy of Heaven.

They suffer with their Lord below;
They reign with Him above;
Their profit and their joy to know
The mystery of His love.

The cross He bore is life and health,
Though shame and death to Him,
His people’s hope, His people’s wealth,
Their everlasting theme.

Great tune, too. Sing that one when you really need to cheer yourself up.

Now for some excellent Ascension theology:

See the Conqueror Mounts

See, the Conqu'ror mounts in triumph;
See the King in royal state,
Riding on the clouds, his chariot,
To his heav'nly palace gate:
Hark! the choirs of angel voices
Joyful Alleluias sing
And the portals high are lifted
To receive their heav'nly King.

He who on the cross did suffer,

He who from the grave arose,

He has vanquished sin and Satan;

He by death has spoiled his foes.

While he lifts his hands in blessing

He is parted from his friends;

While their eager eyes behold him,

He upon the clouds ascends.

Thou hast raised our human nature
In the clouds to God's right hand;
There we sit in heav'nly places,
There with thee in glory stand:
Jesus reigns, adored by angels,
Man with God is on the throne;
Mighty Lord, in thine ascension
We by faith behold our own.

And here I'm going to quote without shame from a past post of my own on the subject of the Ascension: One of the things I like about Ascension as an Anglican feast is that it's the kind of thing a person with a Baptist upbringing and sympathies can be enriched by without changing one whit of doctrine. It's just a set of ideas that simply never occurred to you before: Jesus took our human nature back to the Father's right hand. Jesus reigns with God, so God and man are on the throne together. We sit with Him in heavenly places. He intercedes for us with the Father. If you are familiar with Scripture, all of that comes back. But if you don't have a liturgical background, you usually didn't think of associating it with Jesus' ascension. But that's when that all started. And of course, as Jesus' words to the disciples just before ascending refer to the promise of "the Gift," the Holy Ghost, so the Feast of the Ascension looks forward to next week, Whitsunday, Pentecost.

I was also thinking this morning about the High Priestly prayer in John 17. If we wonder what Jesus says when He intercedes for us, perhaps that would be a place to start. It is the longest prayer of Jesus to His Father that we have recorded for us. I was much struck by his saying, "I pray not that you would take them out of the world but that you would keep them from the evil." And, "Sanctify them through thy truth." And then, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word." Jesus is now praying for us all the time like this at the Father's right hand.

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall  come in!

Blessed Ascension Sunday!

Yet more on misleading voices in the culture wars

I wanted to bring this to the top of the page. A reader has posted a comment in this older thread in response to a...ahem...kerfuffle at another blog. The topic of the original post at that other blog was the work of Rosaria Butterfield, a former Queer Theory professor who is now a married, Christian mother and has become a kind of "star" in the Christian community. She has a book and has speaking gigs in which she tells people how we can (and should) minister to homosexuals. Frankly, I have heard enough about her at second hand not to be interested in reading her book or getting into discussing her. I got involved in the other thread through a sub-issue--namely, whether feminist literary theory and "Queer Theory" and similar post-modern -isms in English departments are something better than trash, academically speaking. (Hint: No, really, they're just trash.)

Anyway, someone who read that thread came and left some thoughtful comments, considerately finding a fairly relevant thread and expressing some hesitations about Rosaria Butterfield. Apparently finding anyone who expresses hesitations about anything this new heroine says is exceedingly difficult. Certainly, the information I have thus far indicates that she's sincere but, on some issues misguided. And the problem is that, as I said in the comments below, Christians get a kind of affirmative action complex: This is one of our token celibate homosexuals or, in Butterfield's case, ex-homosexuals, so we mustn't criticize. I think that is a very dangerous position to be in, especially if they are going to be treated as advisers. More information relevant to that issue and to Butterfield can be posted here.

"Our highest priority is the safety of our students"

This story is an example of what is wrong with our public schools.

Let's suppose that the worst thing the story says about the teacher is absolutely true. He saw a 13-year-old who looked like he was about to strike another student. He picked up the 13-year-old by his ear and hair, put him in a choke-hold, took him outside, and threw him on the grass.

For this, he faces felony child abuse charges. You read that right. Possibly up to five years in jail.

This is insane. And the school has the gall, the utter gall, to pontificate that its highest priority is the safety and security of its students. Believe me, the school does not mean by this, "We fully support Mr. Cadwell for his desire to insure the safety and security of our students by protecting them from being beat-down by fellow students. We think law enforcement is insane to be prosecuting him. We will do everything we can to fight this unjust charge against a teacher who was attempting to protect a student." No. Somehow, I'm quite sure that isn't what they mean.

What, exactly, do they think is going to protect the safety and security of their students if not men (and I do mean men) who are willing to get physical in order to protect students from others who want to hit them? Are they relying on frowny faces? Maybe they have "no hitting other student zone" signs around. I'm sure that'll work.

Don't send your kid to public school. Just don't.

Women in the Military: Past flirting with disaster

Brian Mitchell's prophetic book was called Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster. It's a wonderful book, full of excellent documentation.

I've been doing a little research on women in the military for a post I'm writing for another venue, and today I came upon this gem, from 1991, over twenty years ago. (Let that sink in for a moment.)

Thirty-six crew members of the supply ship Acadia were pregnant and had to be transferred during the ship's deployment to the Persian Gulf, naval officials say.

More than half became pregnant after the ship was under way, but a Navy spokesman, Lieut. Comdr. Jeff Smallwood, said there were no indications of improper fraternization between men and women on the ship.

What? I must have misunderstood that. There's more:

The remaining 22 women became pregnant while the ship was deployed, perhaps on liberty calls in Hawaii, the Philippines and other ports the Acadia visited on her way to the gulf, Commander Smallwood said.

Right. Or perhaps the Angel Gabriel was making some very unexpected announcements.

The Navy has strict rules against sexual relationships between men and women while on duty or between commissioned officers and enlisted personnel, but Commander Smallwood said there was no evidence any such regulations were broken. 

There was no evidence any such regulations were broken! No evidence. I repeat, no evidence. Perhaps Commander Smallwood needs a refresher course in the birds and the bees. Where again do babies come from, Commander?

The military has been in a state of denial for a long, long time.

Telling ourselves lies

I have recently been thinking about a trend in the Christian, or perhaps I should say "Christian," response to the homosexual agenda. Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying the trend is entirely new. I know that in various ways it's been going on for a long time. But let us just say that I've recently come upon some examples thereof, two of which are new, and one of which isn't all that old.

That trend is telling lies.

What do I mean by this? Here's what I mean: Some allegedly Christian organization, church, or individual (and I have both Protestant and Catholic examples) will do something that obviously functionally communicates endorsement of homosexual activity and that conveys a scandalous presentation of homosexual relationships as normal. But a pretense, an explicit pretense, will be maintained that this isn't what's going on. To wit:

A Jesuit boys' high school has recently allowed two boys to go to its prom (Junior Ball) together as a couple. Let that sink in for a minute. Here is the disgusting letter by the principal (whose official title is "president"), Fr. Edward F. Salmon, S.J.,  defending the decision. In it he expressly maintains that by allowing a homosexual couple as a couple to come to a school ball together he is not endorsing homosexual behavior. I'll wait here while you get control of your incredulous laughter. Yes, seriously, that's what he says.

He also has such a warped mind that he makes an express analogy to the heterosexual couples coming to the ball and says that, by allowing the homosexual couple ("our brothers," he keeps calling them) to come as a couple he isn't endorsing homosexual activity any more than he is endorsing heterosexual activity by letting heterosexual couples come to the dance.

That is incredibly twisted. I respond: Of course a prom is endorsing heterosexual activity. And a good thing, too. No, no, I don't mean that it's endorsing premarital sex right at this moment between those particular couples. They aren't married yet. But they might get married later. A dance to which one brings a date tacitly endorses the concept of the complementarity of the sexes, of heterosexual romance, leading ultimately (we hope) to loving, permanent, physically consummated, fruitful marriages. In other words, to heterosexual activity. Some young man might bring his future wife to such a dance, and that would be a charming and a natural thing.

Equally, for two young homosexual men to go to the prom together as an identified couple, and for the school to allow it, endorses the notion of homosexual romance. Which, tacitly, normalizes the idea of homosexual activity. This is blatantly obvious.

So Fr. Edward F. Salmon, S.J., is lying. I'm not going to try to force myself to believe that somehow he's suffering from invincible ignorance, because I can't make myself believe that. He isn't. He knows exactly the victory for the homosexual agenda that this decision constitutes, he knows how his decision and the events of the dance itself will contribute to the normalization of homosexual "love," and he's lying about it.

Example #2: Wheaton College has just started Refuge (isn't that a sweet name?), an LGBTQRSTUVWX...etc., etc., student club. (Yes, I just started typing in random letters and keys at a certain point there.) Here is the smarmy article about it. Please note that the definition of the target group is worded in a carefully value-neutral fashion: "students who experience a sexual orientation and/or gender identity that varies from the majority." Uh, yeah, it just varies from the majority. It's not, you know, intrinsically disordered or anything.

The article, on behalf of the college, claims that this "conversation" about homosexuality (it's always a conversation, isn't it?) does not contravene the school's explicit student covenant which disallows homosexual acts, because having such a club doesn't involve endorsing homosexual acts. The group is just there to provide support, love, etc., etc., to LGBTQRTSTPVX!#$!$...students.

This is a lie.

Many people at Wheaton must know that this is a lie. One of the homosexual (or something-or-other) students pretty much lets ol' Felix out of the bag by saying:

“I saw my future as something that was really bleak because, identifying as gay, I felt like I had been told that I was allowed to be a Christian as long as I fulfilled a certain set of requirements and as long as I stayed miserable and de-legitimized this very real aspect of my life,” a Refuge member said.

So in other words, this student's perverse sexuality is, so he believes, part of his very identity, and the existence of this student group makes things better for him than they were before, he thinks, because now he doesn't feel like he needs to "de-legitimize" that "very real aspect of his life." Well, yes, in terms of Christian teaching, he does need to de-legitimize it, because it isn't legitimate. That aspect of his life is a temptation to extremely serious sin. So it definitely should be thought of in negative terms. It isn't something to legitimize, and it shouldn't be the core of his identity. And setting up this student group is endorsing the idea that it's a legitimate identity and needn't be stigmatized.

Here are a couple of other smoking gun paragraphs. First,

A Refuge member also expressed hope that the Wheaton community will change its approach to this topic.

“There is no reason to fear talking about such topics, and I hope that our campus can approach conversations about the LGBTQ experience in a humble and loving way,” a Refuge member said. “We should be eager to talk honestly about it and not be afraid of perspectives that may be different from our own. I don’t think we should shy away from any conversation no matter how difficult it may seem to us.”

What are these "perspectives that may be different from our own"? Why, what could those differences of opinion be, I wonder? A nanosecond's thought yields the answer: This group (I'll just go out on a limb and hypothesize) includes students who deny the school's position that homosexual acts are wrong. But not only are they not being kicked out for rejecting the school's statement of faith and morals on this point, they are instead being encouraged to promulgate their false ideas more widely and not to have those ideas condemned, to have a "conversation" about them instead. In fact (next smoking gun), members of Refuge want Wheaton's entire atmosphere to be less, shall we say, oriented towards heterosexuality in its "all-encompassing assumptions":

Another source of frustration for Refuge members is the lack of sensitivity in language due to the assumptions about the gender identities and sexual orientations of Wheaton students.

“Whether because of the homophobic comments and jokes in the dorms … or the all-encompassing assumptions made in public … there are many ways that LGBTQ students can be made to feel marginalized or isolated,” a Refuge member said.

Heaven forbid that people talking casually at Wheaton, or speaking in public, should assume that most people are heterosexual. Instead, they should be guarding their tongues at every moment to avoid manifesting heterosexist assumptions about normalcy and about the heterosexual orientation of their audience. Such assumptions could make any homosexual students who might be listening feel "marginalized or isolated."

And I haven't yet pointed out that the T in that alphabet soup refers to gender-confused individuals who are choosing by their behavior to present themselves as members of the opposite sex. Cross-dressing and insisting on being called "Diana" and using the women's bathroom when you were born a biological male aren't just some kind of private temptation. They are in-your-face behavior. Who knows whether there are any male-female transgenders (or vice versa) living in the Wheaton dorms. One hopes not. But the very existence of Refuge tells them that they're welcome if they want to come. We're just here to help and support you, etc., etc.

Obviously, the formation of Refuge at Wheaton means that Wheaton is not remaining true to its principles on these matters. The formation of this group does amount to an endorsement of homosexual activity and other gender-bending activity.

So the school is lying. Probably several specific, concrete people at the school are lying, and have lied, to get this organization approved, about what they must know are the implications and will be the effects of this club.

Now, here is my most controversial example. (Controversial only because, given the circles I hang out with in the blogosphere, this post is more likely to be read by people who will feel uncomfortable or even be offended because of the blogger I'm about to mention than by people who hold a brief for McQuaid Jesuit high school or Wheaton College). Example #3, which is a bit older but has been bothering me for a while.

Catholic blogger Mark Shea, whom some people still think of as some kind of conservative, wrote this incredibly smarmy post in which he idolizes a "gay man" as a "saint." This "gay man" was a professional opera expert in Seattle and a music teacher in a volunteer position at Shea's church. Based on his obituary (see following quotation) it appears that he lived with a homosexual "companion" of many years, whom, the obit. tells us, he is "survived by," just as he is "survived by" his father. Gay partners are family, y'know. This is what the obituary says about the relationship:

Paul Hearn of Seattle, Mr. Lorenzo's longtime companion, said they met when Mr. Lorenzo gave a lecture at the University of Washington 13 years ago. Though Hearn was not Catholic, their first date was to St. James, he said.

Hearn said Mr. Lorenzo brought him to the Catholic Church and broadened his appreciation of opera. The two would pray together and do morning liturgies. "We were monks in love," he said.

The priest of Lorenzo's parish is full of praise in the obituary as well.

"He was a born teacher and a perpetual student who never stopped learning," he said. "He was the quintessential renaissance man. He had a passion for beauty and a passion about his Catholic faith. As much as he loved opera, it was his faith where all this came together and made sense."

Mark Shea castigates anyone who thinks that this was a scandalous relationship or who even asks whether the couple was celibate. Now, if we accept that the couple was actually celibate (which, according to an update Shea added later, Hearn, the "in love" partner, did claim in private communication to Shea, some time well after Shea had first written the post), they were nonetheless living in such a way that the world at large would be led to believe that they were not celibate. Unless Hearn is lying, they conceived of and were presenting their relationship as romantic (they were "in love"). It is utterly, utterly perverse and scandalous for a supposed Christian to endorse and to embody to the world in his own person the idea of homosexual romance, even if it should happen to be the case that the romance is not consummated. But Shea insisted, over and over again, even before receiving any definite communication on the question, that it was no one's business whether they were actually celibate. So, in Shea-world, it was fine for this pair to be together as an openly homosexual couple, qua couple, saying that they were "in love," going on "dates," the first of which was to church. It was fine for a person living in such a way to be admired greatly and vocally as a Christian by everyone, including his priest, in his Catholic church. In Shea-world, who is to blame if someone says, "Gee, this certainly looks like a sexual relationship. Isn't that a problem? Isn't that a cause of scandal? Should this man hold even a volunteer position of leadership of any kind in a Catholic church? Should we be holding him up to our children and to the world at large as an example? Should we be praising him to the skies?" Shea blames the person who asks those questions! Such a person is nosy. He's wondering about something that is "none of his business." Instead he should join Mark Shea in gushing about a "gay man who was a saint."

I will say it right here: The claim that a homosexual "partnership" does not functionally endorse and normalize homosexual behavior is a lie. It's such an obvious, grave, foolish, pernicious falsehood that anyone who puts it forward for serious consideration is to be blamed. Someone, somewhere, is lying. Perhaps it isn't actually Shea. There are always different levels of this sort of thing. There are those who promulgate propaganda knowing it to be utter baloney. There are those who are complete dupes. Though, when the issue concerns the intersection of morals and cultural meaning in ways that are readily accessible to any mature and aware American Christian, it's harder to accept that anyone who says such a thing is really a complete dupe. And there's the large grey area in between, where people say edgy things because they think it sounds profound to do so while strangling their own common sense in the cradle and lecturing other people for allegedly being nosy and judgmental.

Perhaps someone lied persuasively to Mark Shea, aided and abetted by something in the water in Seattle that makes Catholic bloggers susceptible to such nonsense. Maybe it was his priest who taught him this bizarre version of, "Don't ask, don't tell." Which really is, "Hey, they can go ahead and tell people that they are a romantically connected homosexual couple, 'long-time companions,' but no one should ask if they are actually having sex. Then we can assume that they aren't and can venerate and practically suggest the canonization of one member of the couple when he dies, as a shining example of Christian life and devotion." Someone, somewhere, is telling a falsehood that, at some level, he must know to be a falsehood--namely, the falsehood that such a relationship does not functionally promote and endorse homosexual behavior as legitimate.

Shea is so mixed up by the "priests he has talked to" that he thinks it could be legitimate for a priest to counsel a homosexual person to continue in a sexually active homosexual relationship--this is clearly what Shea means to be referring to in the context--because, for various "special reasons" peculiar to that relationship, it would be "more destructive" to end it. See for yourself. It's right in the post. So Shea is so confused about these matters by the people he's listening to that it would be difficult to know how to un-confuse him.

This is the level that we have fallen to in various Christian communities: Openly touted homosexual romance is fine. Live-in homosexual couplehood is fine. Homosexual couples "in love" are fine. Homosexual couples going to dances together are fine (at McQuaid Jesuit High School). Self-styled homosexuals who don't want to "de-legitimize this area of their lives" are also fine (at Wheaton). As long as they don't come right out and say that they are presently having sex with each other, they're fine. We'll just go on loudly pretending that nothing in any of this endorses homosexual behavior. The next step is apparently to say that, you know, even if a pair of known homosexual "partners" are having sex, the rest of us sometimes fail to control the sin of gluttony.

Perhaps Wheaton would balk at that point, though. Or would feign to balk. For right now, my guess is that students in Refuge can hold pretty much any moral opinion, but the school claims (truly or falsely) that students can't admit to being presently sexually active, because that would be hard to square with the student covenant. But give them time; they'll probably start openly using the gluttony line next year. Maybe the year after that they'll tell us that it would in some cases be "more destructive" for homosexuals to get out of their sexual relationships. Where precisely on the whole continuum the Jesuit high school falls in its day-to-day workings, we probably don't want to know.

Lies are bad for Christians. They are at least as bad for Christians working in groups as they are for Christians as individuals. In groups, human beings toss lies back and forth like hacky-sacks until they can't remember what's true and what's false anymore.

Start by thinking clearly. Go on doing it. Neither listen to lies nor be confused by them nor promulgate them, even if they sound conveniently non-judgmental. If you don't maintain this kind of mental clarity, you will harm more people than just yourself.

Alleluia! He is Risen!

A joyful Easter to my readers. He is risen! Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

[Digression: Someday, I'd love to go to a funeral that included a rousing sermon all about Jesus' resurrection and about how our resurrection as Christians is assured by the historical fact of Jesus' resurrection. Wouldn't that be great? When I'm old I should try to convince some preacher to give such a sermon at my funeral, despite the fact that I wouldn't, strictly speaking, be there to hear it. End of digression.]

Herewith, some music. This is the same music that I linked here, but some of the youtube versions have disappeared from where they were three years ago, so these are current links.

"Worthy is the Lamb" and "Amen" by Georg Frederic Handel:



"Christus Dominus Hodie Resurrexit" by Glad. (If you aren't familiar with the Christian a capella group Glad and if you like classy men's a capella music, you have much edifying enjoyment ahead. Look up more of their music.)



A musical Easter post here wouldn't be complete without some Southern Gospel. "Because He Lives" sung by the Gaither Vocal Band:



As readers know, it is my position that Jesus' resurrection is the evidential center, the heartbeat of Christianity. When God the Father raised Our Lord Jesus from the dead with great power, this was a sign. This was not a mystical event that can be seen and believed only by the eyes of faith. It was a miracle. It spoke to the world. When people ask, "Why can't God be more obvious?" it behooves us to remind them: God has been obvious. He raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Jesus showed himself to his disciples by many infallible proofs. They recorded it for us. That's pretty darned obvious.

Jesus' resurrection is thus an indispensable point where metaphysics and epistemology come together in Christianity. We can be saved because Christ arose in both senses of "because." Metaphysically and theologically, Jesus' resurrection was the necessary completion of his saving work. It is because Jesus lives that we shall live also. He had to destroy the work of the Devil by destroying death.

Epistemologically as well, we can be saved because Jesus rose from the dead, for it is by his glorious resurrection that we know that his death was not just another death, not just another act of injustice, not just an emblem of man's cruelty to man, but rather that it was the means of our redemption. Let there be no mistake: Had Jesus remained dead, his death would have redeemed no one. And had he remained dead, we would have no reason to believe that his death redeemed anyone. We would be, as St. Paul says, of "all men most miserable."

Here are some past posts on this subject:

What Not to Tell a Young Enquirer about the Evidences of the Christian Faith

Evidential Ammo for the Christian Soldier

Is "Jesus Rose from the Dead" a Self-Committing Proposition

The Ascension and the "Objective Vision" Theory of the Resurrection

And here is Tim's and my 2008 article, a preprint copy posted by permission of the publisher, on the evidences for the resurrection.

Holy Saturday--Recycling

I've been looking over some of my older posts, searching for the word "Pilate." This occurred to me to do after I listened last evening to my husband reading the Passion of Our Lord according to St. John, with its strangely vivid portrait of that first-century Roman procurator. I'd like to draw new readers' attention to some of these posts, because they may be useful Passiontide meditations here just before the glorious day of Our Lord's resurrection. So I'm taking the risk of seeming egotistical by self-quoting. Please do read the whole posts if you think they could be of spiritual value. 

On Pontius Pilate and historicity:

For this very reason, some have feared that they believe Christianity only because they want it to be true, only because it would be so wonderful if it were true. For this very reason, too many Christians have played along, fearful that the prose might cancel the poetry, separating the "Christ of history" from the "Christ of faith" and assuring the faithful that they can have the latter on which to rest their hearts and feed their imaginations even if the former is...a bit lacking.

This is to separate the prose and the passion with a vengeance.

But this is not Christianity. For Christianity affirms, "He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, He descended into hell, and the third day He rose again from the dead." There is no separation between the great truths of the Gospel and the prosaic truths of history, between the massive miracle of Jesus risen and the all-too-human, bureaucratic hand-washing of a harassed Roman official two thousand years ago.

On "transgressive" art, the cross, and mankind's rejection of Jesus:

Via Dawn Eden, I learned this week of an "artist" (I use the term with some hesitation) in Australia named Adam Cullen who was at least short-listed for (and it appears may have won) an award known as the Blake Prize for his deliberately mocking and cartoonish painting of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. 

[snip] 

 As Dawn Eden says, the real kicker is in the final line of the Telegraph story, when Cullen gives us his response to the brouhaha: "How can he be so offended? It's just a Jew on the cross."

Um, yeah. Huh. And that's supposed to mean what, exactly?

The more you think about that line, the more unintentional resonances it has. It reminds me of what St. John tells us about Caiaphas--that when he said it was expedient that one man should die for the people, he prophesied though he did not know it. And when Jesus died he said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." "It's just a Jew on the cross." Pontius Pilate himself couldn't have said it better. Shaking it off. Telling himself it doesn't matter. How could it matter? How could this obscure Jewish teacher, crucified by the Romans in the first century A.D., matter? Just another of the victims of the cruelty of man in history. Lots of Jews were crucified by the Romans. It's just a Jew on the cross. "All they that see me laugh me to scorn. They shoot out the lip, saying, 'He trusted in God that he would deliver him. Let him deliver him, if he delighteth in him.'" "Come down from the cross, if thou art the son of God."

Cullen is in a long line of the mockers of Jesus on the cross. And all their mockery God Incarnate, the Jew on the cross, took upon himself, and by it they did the will of God against their own will.

Thy rebuke hath broken his heart

The tabernacle is empty, the door standing open. The altar is stripped and bare.

On Good Friday, we remember the Passion of Our Lord, the Messiah.

The genius of Handel was to choose the words of Scripture, and the words of Scripture only, and to set them musically in such a fashion that they come alive.

The two verses used here are Psalm 69:20 and Lamentations 1:12.



And this, from Isaiah 53.

Palm Sunday and Witness

It is Palm Sunday, and I have nothing much new to say. Years ago I poured myself into quite a few liturgical posts, and they still seem good today. The Anglican liturgy is a gift. The Sacrament is a gift, and therefore we cry, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!" The gift that makes all other gifts possible is the Sacrifice of the Cross, the death of Our Lord. One's ability to speak about those gifts sometimes decreases with age rather than otherwise. Here is an old Palm Sunday post, also brief, with a hymn text. Here is a post on the epistle lesson for Palm Sunday on the Holy Name of Jesus. Here is a post on the Passion.

This Lent I have been reading Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Chambers says of himself, "I was a witness." If you have not read the book, read it. This time, I'm going to read it all the way through. To whet your appetite for Witness, please do read Bill Luse's excellent choice of selections.

I also began reading I John through with my younger daughters for the second time recently. St. John, very much like Chambers, thought of himself primarily as a witness: "And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." "That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which our hands have handled of the Word of life." "That which we have heard and seen declare we unto you." "And he who saw it bare record, and his record is true...that ye might believe."

John must have been quite young, in all probability only a teenager, when he lived with Our Lord through His ministry and was the only one of the twelve to witness the crucifixion. It was all burned into his mind in those early years, and then in old age he writes his epistle to "My little children" (a phrase he uses again and again), telling them, as the last living eyewitness, of what he has heard and seen. John was a witness.

This is what Chambers says about the cross, as a witness to his children:

My children, when you were little, we used sometimes to go for walks in our pine woods. In the open fields, you would run along by yourselves. But you used instinctively to give me your hands as we entered those woods, where it was darker, lonelier, and in the stillness our voices sounded loud and frightening. In this book I am again giving you my hands. I am leading you, not through cool pine woods, but up and up a narrow defile between the bare and steep rocks from which in shadow things uncoil and slither away. It will be dark. But, in the end, if I have led you aright, you will make out three crosses, from two of which hang thieves. I will have brought you to Golgotha – the place of skulls. This is the meaning of the journey. Before you understand, I may not be there, my hands may have slipped from yours. It will not matter. For when you understand what you see, you will no longer be children.

I wish all of my readers a blessed Holy Week.

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation; that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts, whereby thou hast given unto us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Immanent teleology and holism

I've been thinking a bit about thinkers who recognize teleology in nature but don't want to attribute this to a superpowerful and intelligent being. Here I have Thomas Nagel in mind, but it may be that Stephen L. Talbott also fits the description. Talbott is particularly interested in organismal holism, and this thought came to me:

If it appears that the parts of an organism do not work without the whole organism and that the whole organism does not work without its parts, or even that "parts" is an overly crude word for the dynamic relationship between, say, enzymes, proteins, or cells and an organism as a whole, this apparent holism argues not for some kind of immanent teleology which (in some unspecified manner) makes gradualist Darwinian explanations more plausible by making Darwinism itself (in some unspecified sense) teleological. Rather, it is evidence for a more radical degree of intervention (that bogey of the theistic evolutionists) even than some Intelligent Design theorists want to hold out for--namely, that an intelligent being made the whole organism at once.

In other words, recognition of the importance of organs as wholes and of the nearly insoluble chicken-and-the-egg problem of an issue like body plan development in the newly conceived embryo constitutes, whether people realize it or not, an argument for special creation of species.

Notice that by itself this says nothing about the age of the earth. Progressive creationism could also involve special creation at widely spaced intervals.

Some Gospel music to make you happy

I linked this a few years ago, but it deserves to be posted again. And who knows, maybe I've picked up a reader or two in the meanwhile who hasn't seen it before. Here are the Cathedrals (again) singing a joyful medley. (Don't knock the misspelling of "medley" in the Youtube video. It's probably part of what has kept this one hidden from the takers-down.)





The March weather around here is a bit gloomy for my taste, so here is something else to brighten it up. The Akins doing "I'll Fly Away." The complete song is on Grooveshark. Some great pickin'.



If you'd like to see a generous clip of it that you can watch, here it is. (Dig the curls on the right!)