Monthly Archives: June 2013

‘I’d Read Plato, and Listen to Sly Stone’: Cornel West’s Testimony

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Freedom, Philosophy, Religion, Speeches

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Cornel West“I’m a Jesus-loving blues man in the life of the mind.

I’m a Christ-centered Jazz man, which means that I do try to take, quite seriously, the endless quest for unarmed truth, understanding that a condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. So I don’t even think about trying to be true unless I’ve tried to enact and embody a sensitivity, even a hyper-sensitivity to the pain, the suffering, the hurts, the wounds, the scars, the bruises of people.

That deep compassion that you not only talk about, but that you embody…

Just. Bear. Witness. Be a sermon rather than give one. You don’t even need to talk about humility; just be humble. You know, a couple of months ago in the States, we had a sustained discourse on civility; and you know, I thought – why don’t you just be civil? Why do you have to have this sustained discourse? Just be respectful, that’s all.

It’s like the conclusion of a practical Aristotelian syllogism.

It’s action.

It’s not just a proposition. It’s not a sentence. It’s not a theory. It’s a mode of being in the world; it’s a way of life to be embodied, enacted.

But since I was young, I have been shaped by the legacy of Athens, by Socrates’s preoccupation with questioning: the unexamined life is not worth living.

That meant much to me as I was growing up on the chocolate side of Sacramento, going to the book mobile, and reading Plato and Kierkegaard for the first time.

I’d read Kierkegaard, put on some more Curtis Mayfield. I’d read Plato, and listen to Sly Stone — who actually did play organ in my church, Shiloh Baptist Church, every first Sunday. Northern California Mass choir. He grew up in Vallejo. Slyvester. Stewart. Genius that he was, and he could play that organ before he became Sly Stone.

But also the legacy of Jerusalem. And of course we want to acknowledge our precious Jewish brothers and sisters – it’s Passover tonight, the first night.

And there is for me no Christian faith, there’s no Jesus, without that prophetic Judaic tradition that deeply shaped me in a fundamental way.

The idea that each and every person has a sanctity. Not just a dignity the way the Stoics talked about, but a sanctity, a value that’s priceless. There’s actually a value that has no price — no market price…

There must be some standard that gets beyond the everyday culture, the everyday life, civilization, fleeting empires, changing regimes, to keep track of that sanctity, which is the ground of our equality… Our notions of equality somehow have to be anchored in that which cuts across the grain deeper than fleeting cultures and changing nation states and contingent civilizations and empires.

And these legacies of Athens and Jerusalem, for me have been brought together best in the black cultural expressions – the best of the black cultural expressions – that said, in the face of 244 years of white supremacist slavery, that somehow, we were going to love our way through that darkness, and not succumb to a hatred of the slave master even as we loathe the barbarity and the bestiality of slavery itself.

And that’s what those negro spirituals are about; I come from persecuted Christians in the land of religious liberty…

How do you look terror in the face, and still muster the courage to love?

Refuse to succumb to revenge, and drink from the cup of bitterness, and say, somehow, we’re going to hold on to love and justice, and not revenge and hatred. We’ve always known that hatred is the coward’s revenge against those who intimidate you. Always cowardly.

How do you learn to be courageous – and love wisdom, love justice, love neighbor, and love enemy?

And I am that kind of Christian.

I really do try to love my enemy. Not of course try to do it on my own, at home. A little too difficult, I need grace for that. It doesn’t make any sense – whatsoever – of talking about loving your enemy if you don’t have some connection to a power greater than you.

It’s the most absurd thing in the world, given the fact that our world is shot through with hatred, envy, player hating, backstabbing, domination, subjugation. These are the cycles of history –

And how, somehow do you break it? Even if you only break it in one life, in one community!

It’s got to be through love…

I was at the prison this morning, at Wagner. A brother asked me a question, it moved me so deeply. He said, “Brother West, I’m locked into bad habits, and I can’t break loose.”

And I said, “Brother, you’re not the only one. All of us are wrestling with that in some way.”

He said, “Oh not you… I saw you on television, looks like you got it together–”

I said, “No, no.”

I told you I’m a Christian. That means I’m a sinner, I’m just a redeemed sinner. I’m just trying to love my crooked neighbor with my crooked heart. That’s the best I’mma to do.

It’s true that I’ve been transformed. I was a gangster.

And after my transformation, I still have gangster proclivities, to this day. Wrestling with it all the time…

And I live in despair. Not every day, but I wrestle with it.

It’s like the 32nd chapter of Genesis. Jacob wrestling at night with the angel of death. He emerges with a new name, wounded though. God wrestler.

And a blues man and a jazz man is always a god wrestler. And I’ve got some questions that I don’t fully… grasp.

In terms of the depth of the suffering in this world.

But the fundamental ground of my life is to be faithful unto death, and to attempt to live a life of love and compassion to the best of my ability.

Cornel West

__________

Dr. Cornel West’s impromptu testimony, given at Princeton University, where he is a professor of philosophy and African American studies.

To really get the full force of West’s testimony, you really have to watch him speak —

— it’s one of the most captivating monlogues of this sort that I’ve ever seen.

The entire exchange between Dr. West and Radhanath Swami is fascinating. This is part two — West’s testimony and a Q&A — but Radhanath’s part (linked here) is worth watching as well.

This exchange was titled “East Meets West: A Dialogue Between Cornel West and Radhanath Swami,” and though I have never, ever seen an inter-faith exchange that was ever worth anything, this is an exception — and better than that: it’s brimming with mutual respect, intellect, engagement with the world, and humor.

About Half of You Have Violent Genes

28 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Psychology, Science

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David Eagleman“Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It’s a nice idea, but it’s wrong…

Who you even have the possibility to be starts well before your childhood — it starts at conception. If you think genes don’t matter for how people behave, consider this amazing fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, your probability of committing a violent crime goes up by eight hundred and eighty-two percent. Here are statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, which I’ve broken down into two groups: crimes committed by the population that carries this specific set of genes and by the population that does not:

Average Number of Violent Crimes Committed
Annually in the United States

Offense                     Carrying the genes            Not carrying the genes

Aggravated assault           3,419,000                           435,000

Homicide                           14,196                               1,468

Armed robbery                 2,051,000                            157,000

Sexual assault                   442,000                              10,000

In other words, if you carry these genes, you’re eight times more likely to commit aggravated assault, ten times more likely to commit murder, thirteen times more likely to commit armed robbery and forty-four times more likely to commit sexual assault.

About one half of the human population carries these genes, while the other half does not, making the first half much more dangerous indeed. It’s not even a contest. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes, as do 98.4 percent of those on death row. It seems clear enough that the carriers are strongly predisposed to a different type of behavior – and everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behavior.

We’ll return to these genes in a moment, but first I want to tie the issue back to the main point we’ve seen throughout this book: we are not the ones driving the boat of our behavior, at least not nearly as much as we believe. Who we are runs well below the surface of our conscious access, and the details reach back in time to before our birth, when the meeting of a sperm and egg granted us with certain attributes and not others. Who we can be begins with our molecular blueprints – a series of alien codes penned in invisibly small strings of amino acids – well before we have anything to do with it. We are a product of our inaccessible, microscopic history.

By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.”

__________

From David Eagleman’s eye-opening and highly digestible Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. If you’re looking for a layman’s guide to the mind, fan through Incognito.

The photograph is of Eagleman at his laboratory and office in my hometown of Houston, Texas.

Check out a philosophical and a fictional work of Eagleman’s below:

David EaglemanWhat Is Happening When We See Someone Die?

Clouds and MetalIn the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences

“Chamber Thicket” by Sharon Olds

27 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Sharon Olds

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,
in their living room, on a winter night,
through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps
and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent
air was thick-alive with pearwood,
ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse
howled, and cat skreeled, and then,
when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us,
over us, in us, I felt I was hearing
the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening
and grieving and scathing, along each other,
scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that
woods of hating longing, and I knew
and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents,
there—and then, at a distance, I sensed,
as if it were thirty years ago,
a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching,
straying toward, and then not toward,
and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming
herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted
to warn him away, to call out to him
to go back whence he came, into some calmer life,
but his beauty was too moving to me,
and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the
covert, any more, and so I prayed him
come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.

__________

“Chamber Thicket” by Sharon Olds, which you’ll find in Stag’s Leap: Poems.

Great Men Cultivate Love

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Biography, Freedom, History, Philosophy

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Booker T. Washington

“I learned the lesson that great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred. I learned that assistance given to the weak makes the one who gives it strong; and that oppression of the unfortunate makes one weak.

It is now long ago that I learned this lesson… and resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him…

In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls—with the great outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by color can come into contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men, in many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind and narrow as race prejudice. I often say to our students, in the course of my talks to them on Sunday evenings in the chapel, that the longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for—and dying for, if need be—is the opportunity of making some one else more happy and more useful.”

Booker T. Washington

__________

From Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery. This particular excerpt is taken from chapter eleven, “Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie on Them”.

“… I would permit no man, no matter what his color might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

I’ve just been reading about Washington’s connection to and collaboration with Julius Rosenwald, the self-man entrepreneur who led Sears, Roebuck, and Company, and whose partnership with Washington at Tuskegee is truly one of American history’s most compelling and admirable friendships.

“History” by Mark Jarman

26 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Mark Jarman

History is not as porous to God as I thought and the gaps grow farther apart.

We can be like the child whose sister was raped and murdered who said at the funeral, “All the happy times I spent with you and will spend with you, I enjoyed and will enjoy.” Or like the woman who has one memory of her mother who died when she was eight. She is shouting at her in front of a closet.

In the meantime, put in the eyes of wish fulfillment, put out the hand with its five hungers, put on the skin of fiction.

When, with the help of micromachines, I am able to alter my shape at will, indeed to give myself a lifeshape without a death instinct, when I have conquered death in this body or another substitute body, while retaining enough of my soul to enjoy it, will I be worrying you or myself about what God wishes for his children?

This, as they say, lies years in the future. And if we are made or remade from remnants, thawed and brought back, it is years in the future. Burn your body and you will be safe, probably. Or maybe not. We are grave robbers–the museums, the traveling exhibits.

Eternal life may be coming back to this world perfected,
without your permission.

The creation of diamonds. A blip. The crocheting of DNA. A blip. Cross-stitch of the bilateral face. A blip. Condensation of tears from Paleozoic seas. A blip. Endurance of the strange, the doubly strange, the triply strange particle. A blip.

The time it takes to bring you past the kiss, past the coupling, past the nearly dispassionate concentration, so that time can stop. Blip. Blip. Blip. But the nine months, the terrible twos, the childhood, adolescence, adulthood, all the elongation of growing up and its estranging inwardness, the longed for reconciliation of parent and child before death, the wait for rebirth: these take forever.

What are you thinking now about eternal life? That it will be life eternally. And the bloody news at breakfast will continue. And the free-floating anxiety will continue. And the cosmic indifference will continue. But so will nakedness with my wife, black coffee in the morning, being read Dickens by my daughter before bedtime.

What are you thinking now about eternal life? That I will shed my guilt like sodden running clothes and hear the hymn of praise beginning in my throat as the multifoliate radiance anoints my face like a stiff hot shower and blurs every memory of earth.

What are you thinking now about eternal life? That I will wake up, stare at the twilit room, move over to mold my body to Amy’s, my left hand on her right breast, and go back to sleep for half an hour.

When the preacher stood before the class that day in June, 1968, and said that history was a river that God entered at will, he wished to console us for the assassinations. To comfort those who mourned. But no one seemed to understand. Perhaps no one was mourning.

Perhaps he should have said that history was a freeway that God entered at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was a TV show that God interrupted at will. Perhaps he should have said that history was six periods of stone boredom five consecutive days a week and an afterschool job and a weekend of chores that God cancelled at will.

He said history was a river. And the only river we knew was the Los Angeles, a concrete flood channel we had never seen in flood, running alongside the freeway like a giant gutter. And the assassinations that spring had occurred on people’s 16th birthdays.

Behind, beyond, before and after, existing now but separately, accessible in some special instances, like prayer, but present only as a listening, present only as a signal coming from a distance, present only as a silence.

We can live eternally like that. But for the time being, we will live as we are, for as long as we can.

These are the gifts of the Spirit. The belief that the body is enough. The belief that Love is a god. The belief that the next world is this world perfected.

__________

Like T.S. Eliot in a 21st century feverdream: Mark Jarman’s “History” from his collection Epistles: Poems.

This is an absolute tour de force of thought and writing — I suggest reading it in silence. It does everything a poem should do: it covers intellectual and emotional ground, it exercises language and creates pictures; it communicates sharply, stirs up dormant or longsleeping ideas in your mind, and it doesn’t spoonfeed. It echos through repetition of phrases and questions, while leaving other ideas only partially unturned — waiting for you to either read over them (and explore them more and again) or merely move on. It’s what T.S. Eliot would be writing if he were alive today.

The picture is of Jarman outside his office at Vanderbilt University.

The Tyranny of Beauty

25 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in Interview

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Bret Easton Ellis

Interviewer: I’ve read that you’ve gone as far as to say that the “tyranny of beauty” in our culture has taken a tremendous psychological toll, and it has the tendency to bring out the worst in us. Expound on that.

Bret Easton Ellis: You know I grew up in a family of three women — my mother and my two sisters — all very smart, educated, beautiful, and yet still have problems that they don’t feel they measure up or add up to what the media’s ideal woman is: that they don’t have the hips of a Christy Turlington or a Kate Moss… that if they don’t look a certain way they won’t be accepted. And even though you know that’s wrong, and even though you know most people don’t look like that, those are really the images that flood our culture.

And the images are set up in such a way as to have a maximum impact on you when you look at them — and cause a feeling of desire in you, cause a feeling of wanting to have this stuff, and feeding an insecurity so you will go out and buy that product, buy that dress, buy that makeup.

And that is damaging.

And it’s not only women. I’ve seen in the last ten years men become effected by this too. I mean, the idea that you should have a full head of hair when you’re sixty, or this washboard abdomen when you’re a forty-five, fifty-year-old guy. Or, just that you have to look like a really great looking nineteen-year-old boy for the rest of your life — it’s really ridiculous.

And I don’t think, as humans, we would be thinking about things in this way — or that these would be the ideals which would be of the utmost concern to us — unless it wasn’t for this thing rising up in the culture to hit us in the face.

And it’s damaging.

__________

From Bret Easton Ellis’s interview with Allan Gregg, shown below.

–

I admire Ellis as a writer, even though all but two of his novels have been — I can say without a shred of ego or exaggeration — pieces of garbage. Less Than Zero is a punchy and iconic chronicle of adolescent decadence (Ellis wrote it when he was nineteen); and American Psycho is a vivid and unsettling and very good book — or at least about 98% of it is. The subtexts of both of those two books, moreover, orbit around the issues Ellis is discussing here. They’re really all about the superficiality of our culture — superficiality which does not mask banality, but spiritual emptiness and evil.

I would though take issue with the term “tyranny of beauty,” because it is, however evocative, a misnomer. Yeats spoke about “terrible beauty” as a way to call attention to a type of aesthetic allure that was somehow transcendent. Donna Tartt, who in fact went to school with Ellis at Bennington College in Vermont, and dedicated her first novel to her friend and former classmate, observed that, “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming… Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” And this seems to be closer to the truth, even if it is a tad overwrought. There’s nothing uglier than a culture so frenetically obsessed with systematized cosmetic standards that are, even in principle, unobtainable. No, the tyranny under which we suffer isn’t that of beauty; rather, it’s a tyranny of vanity — which can be the ugliest trait of all.

Two Ironic Anecdotes about Prophesy and Fate

24 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Literature

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NPG P202; Sir Max Beerbohm by Kay Bell ReynalIn Max Beerbohm’s 1916 short story “Enoch Soames,” an unsuccessful poet sells his soul to the devil for the chance to travel 100 years into the future to see how time has favored his work.

Under the agreement, Soames is transported to the Reading Room of the British Museum at 2:10 p.m. on June 3, 1997. He searches for references to his work but finds himself mentioned only once, as an “imaginary character” in a story by Max Beerbohm, and is whisked off to hell.

But, Beerbohm writes, “You realize that the reading-room into which Soames was projected by the devil was in all respects precisely as it will be on the afternoon of June 3, 1997. You realize, therefore, that on that afternoon, when it comes round, there the selfsame crowd will be, and there Soames will be, punctually. … The fact that people are going to stare at him and follow him around and seem afraid of him, can be explained only on the hypothesis that they will somehow have been prepared for his ghostly visitation.”

On June 3, 1997, about a dozen onlookers collected in the Reading Room of the British Museum to see what would happen. To their surprise, at precisely 2:10 p.m. a man matching Soames’ description — “a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair” — appeared and began to search catalogs and speak with the librarians. Dejected, he finally disappeared among the stacks.

Among the onlookers was Teller, of the magician duo Penn & Teller.

____

From a thousand year old story of unknown authorship:

“A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant out to buy provisions. In the market the man is jostled by a woman; turning, he recognizes her as Death. He runs home pale and trembling, and pleads for the loan of his master’s horse: he must go at once to Samarra and hide where Death will never find him. The master agrees; the servant rides off. The master himself then goes down to the market, accosts Death and rebukes her for threatening his servant. Oh, replies, Death, but I made no threatening gesture—that was just surprise. I was startled to see the fellow in Baghdad this morning, given that I have an appointment with him in Samarra tonight.”

__________

The first, a brilliantly condensed story retold by Greg Ross. The second was introduced to modern readers by W. Somerset Maugham, and later used by Nothing to Be Frightened Of, among others.

The photograph is one of the only images of Beerbohm that I could find on the internet.

The Challenge of Nietzsche

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy, Religion

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Hitchens Brothers

Let me ask a little more philosophical question. I’d really like to hear both brothers respond to what might be called the challenge of Friedrich Nietzsche, which assumes a large place in Christian apologetics, which is the idea that in the absence of transcendence, all you’re left with is a ferocious human will. So I just would love to hear the perspective of whether he was a crank or a prophet in these areas from both brothers.

Christopher Hitchens: I can rephrase the question in addressing it.

Nietzsche famously said that in the absence of the divine, all that there is, is the human will to power. That would be all you were left with. That’s why Nietzscheism is so often used as almost a substitute among some people I know for the work of Ayn Rand, for example. And implied in that is also that that can be admirable. I must just tell you that I was once asked by an evangelical radio station a lot of very, very polite questions about my book against God. Then at the end, they asked, was I an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche? I said, actually, I wasn’t really much of one at all.

They were clearly disappointed with this, but they went on and said, well, did I know that he’d written most of his antireligious books in a state of syphilitic paralysis? And I said, yes, I was aware of that, or certainly had heard it plausibly alleged. They said they just wondered if that would explain my own — (laughter) — more recent work — I thought, well, no, but thanks for the compassion.

Look, it might be that all of these questions are replacement questions. Is it not equally true to say that the religious impulse is an expression of the will to power? Who could deny it? Someone who says, I not only know how you should live, but I have a divine warrant here revealed to me, in some cases exclusively, that gives me permission to do so. What is that but the will to power, may I inquire? I think it’s a very, very strong instance of it.

If I don’t get asked the Nietzsche question, which I quite often do, if it isn’t that, it’s usually The Brothers Karamazov issue instead. I forget which brother it is, maybe it’s Smerdyakov. It doesn’t matter. He says, if there’s no God, then surely everything is possible — thinkable.

Everyone understands the question when it’s put like that. But is it not also the case that with God, or with the belief in it, permission can be given by anyone to do anything to anybody and has been and still is? Unfortunately, these questions are not decidable according to your attitude toward the supernatural. These are problems of human society and the human psyche — you might say, soul — whatever attitude we take to humanness or the transcendent.

Peter Hitchens: First of all, just a small objection to that.

It seems to me that the Christian Gospels are read any way you like, and especially the final few days are one of the most powerful denunciations of the exercise of power, of the behavior of mobs, of show trials, all the many activities of which governments and politicians get up to.

There is even in the jibe against Judas — “the poor ye have always with you” — the first skeptical remark about socialist idealism ever made in human history. So I think that you would be hard put to claim that the Christian Gospels gave you a license to order people about. And it seems odd that the center of Christian worship is someone who is indeed tortured to death by the powerful.

But leaving that one aside, I think atheists should pay more attention to Nietzsche because I think that he does actually encapsulate quite a lot of what they very, very seldom say they desire. Now, in my book I quote at length from a passage in Somerset Maugham’s book, Of Human Bondage, in which the hero decides — and this is an Edwardian person brought up in detail in the Christian faith in an English vicarage — decides that he no longer believes in God and says quite clearly, “This is a moment of enormous liberation. I no longer need to worry about things which worried me before, and I am no longer tied by obligations which used to tie me down. I’m free.”

What else is the point of being an atheist? But yet, when you actually put this to atheists, they tend to say, oh no, no, not me. I’m just as capable of following moral rules as you are, even if they are Christian moral rules. This constantly comes up and immediately swirls down the circle of the atheists’ refusal to accept that there is actually no absolute right and wrong if there is no God and that therefore, they are liberated.

Why aren’t they more pleased they’re liberated and why don’t they exult more about it? Perhaps because they don’t want to spread the idea too widely and have too many people joining in.

Nietzsche

__________

From the Pew Forum’s roundtable conversation with brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, on the question of Can Civilization Survive Without God?.

Mark Twain claimed that the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at once, and still retain the ability to function. That said, I think both Hitchens brothers are right on this point.

This entire Pew transcript is worth reading. So often in discussions like this, the prompts do nothing to constrain interlocutors’ answers, serving instead as runways for flights into digression or monologue. The questioner cited above could have simply asked, “Do we need faith to moderate human will?” But that wouldn’t have been as restrictive. Instead, by citing Nietzsche (and thus inviting further reference to his work), and locating him within the context of a broader philosophy, the question takes on color and context.

The Pew roundtable is great for that reason; all the questions are similarly sharp and provocative. One of my bosses, Michael Barone, also asks a question further into the discussion.

Watch a preview of these two titans in conversation below.

A Theology of the Mind

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Religion

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Portrait Karl Barth

“One of the greatest theologians of this century, Karl Barth, reacted against the idea that theological education should be relegated to an elite class of professional orators. He wrote, ‘Theology is not a private reserve of theologians. It is not a private affair of professors… Nor is it a private affair of pastors…. Theology is a matter for the church…. The term ‘laity’ is one of the worst in the vocabulary of religion and ought to be banished from Christian conversation.’

Concerning the seminary, we might say that Peter Abelard laid the egg and Thomas Aquinas hatched it. Aquinas had the greatest influence on contemporary theological training. In 1879, his work was endorsed by a papal bull as an authentic expression of doctrine to be studied by all students of theology. Aquinas’s main thesis was that God is known through human reason. He ‘preferred the intellect to the heart as the organ for arriving at truth.’ Thus the more highly trained people’s reason and intellect, the better they will know God. Aquinas borrowed this idea from Aristotle. And that is the underlying assumption of many — if not most — contemporary seminaries.

The teaching of the New Testament is that God is Spirit, and as such, He is known by revelation (spiritual insight) to one’s human spirit. Reason and intellect can cause us to know about God. And they help us to communicate what we know. But they fall short in giving us spiritual revelation. The intellect is not the gateway for knowing the Lord deeply. Neither are the emotions. In the words of A. W. Tozer: ‘Divine truth is of the nature of spirit and for that reason can be received only by spiritual revelation…. God’s thoughts belong to the world of spirit, man’s to the world of intellect, and while spirit can embrace intellect, the human intellect can never comprehend spirit…. Man by reason cannot know God; he can only know about God…. Man’s reason is a fine instrument and useful within its field. It was not given as an organ by which to know God.’

In short, extensive Bible knowledge, a high-powered intellect, and razor-sharp reasoning skills do not automatically produce spiritual men and women who know Jesus Christ profoundly and who can impart a life-giving revelation of Him to other. (This, by the way, is the bases of spiritual ministry.) As Blaise Pascal (1632-1662) once put it, ‘It is the heart which percieves God, and not the reason.’…

The Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates taught that knowledge is virtue. Good depends on the extent of one’s knowledge. Hence, the teaching of knowledge is the teaching of virtue.

Herein lies the root and stem of contemporary Christian education. It is built on the Platonic idea that knowledge is the equivalent of moral character. Therein lies the great flaw.”

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From George Barna and Frank Viola’s new book Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices.

The picture above is of Karl Barth. Below: he’s at Princeton with another famous reverend.

Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr.

“Debtors” by Jim Harrison

21 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Poetry

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Jim Harrison

They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

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“Debtors” by Jim Harrison. You’ll find it in the consistently refreshing The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems.

In Our Image

19 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in History, Psychology

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Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin“Nazism and Marxism shared a desire to reshape humanity. ‘The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary,’ wrote Marx; ‘the will to create mankind anew’ is the core of National Socialism, wrote Hitler. They also shared a revolutionary idealism and a tyrannical certainty in pursuit of this dream, with no patience for incremental reform or adjustments guided by the human consequences of their policies. This alone was a recipe for disaster. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, ‘Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble — and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology’

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can come only from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryan races or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.”

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From Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, one of the  most illuminating, easy-to-read books about science and philosophy out there.