A marvelous piece on the morality behind music and the problem with much of pop music, from Roger Scruton. Excerpt:

“The ways of poetry and music are not changed anywhere without change in the most important laws of the city.” So wrote Plato in The Republic (4.424c). And Plato is famous for having given what is perhaps the first theory of character in music, proposing to allow some modes and to forbid others according to the character which can be heard in them. Plato deployed the concept of mimesis, or imitation, to explain why bad character in music encourages bad character in its devotees. The context suggests that he had singing, dancing, and marching in mind rather than the silent listening that we know from the concert hall. But, however we fill out the details, there is no doubt that music, for Plato, was something that could be judged in the same moral terms we judge one another, and that the terms in question denoted virtues and vices like nobility, dignity, temperance, and chastity on the one hand, and sensuality, belligerence, and indiscipline on the other.

…

And even if we don’t forbid musical idioms by law, we should remember that people with musical tastes make our laws; and Plato may be right, even in relation to a modern democracy, that changes in musical culture go hand in hand with changes in the laws, since changes in the laws so often reflect pressures from culture. There is no doubt that popular music today enjoys a status higher than any other cultural product. Pop stars are first among celebrities, idolised by the young, taken as role models, courted by politicians, and in general endowed with a magic aura that gives them power over crowds. It is surely likely, therefore, that something of their message will rub off on the laws passed by the politicians who admire them. If the message is sensual, self-centered, and materialistic, then we should not expect to find that our laws address us from any higher realm than that implies.

Tags: Morality, Music, Nota Bene, Philosophy

If we take by the “End of History” Prof. Fukuyama’s sometimes misunderstood thesis that liberal capitalist order has no theoretical and ideological opponents left, and that the only future adjustments are within the bounds of democratic capitalism, what happens when the goose that lays the golden eggs lays smaller and smaller eggs? I think the financial crisis is re-ordering the American political-economic settlement of the post-War half century.

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2010/03/perils-of-the-stationary-state/

Since globalization is spreading the gains of marginal productivity to ever wider circles in the world: the economics that started in Manchester, and caught on in Rhineland-Westphalia, and then spread to Pittsburgh and Detroit, has moved on to Yunnan in China, India, and southeast Asia.  The world of the West’s industrial revolution has become post-industrial, where “labor” is redefined as moving characters of light around on computer screens (I can’t tell you how annoying the prospect of a career doing that is). John Stuart Mill, as the author of the FPR article cites, predicted the end of productivity gains for capitalism.  In the nexus where economics shapes culture, what culture arises?   Continue Reading »

Tags: Culture, Economics

Patrick Deneen’s most recent article in The American Conservative, “Counterfeiting Conservatism,” brings to mind an excerpt from one of the essays in my application to the John Jay Institute:

One of the more interesting criticisms of Edmund Burke made by Leo Strauss was that, in his valiant effort to defend certain latent functions in society, Burke had subsequently stripped them of that very latency.

It is a tragic irony which conservatives face, that their need and sense of duty to defend the traditions of their society often robs those very traditions of their greatest strength. By exposing their “veil” of beauty to rational, often cold, debate, all mystery and consecrated prejudice is removed. The challenge of each succeeding generation is finding a defense of its heritage that doesn’t strip it to naked axioms.

While Burke’s work did not go to this extreme, it was unfortunate that such an
explicit defense of “pleasing illusions” was necessary. Nonetheless, society depends upon these defenses for its survival. President Truman is often quoted for observing that, “Anything is possible if you don’t care who gets the credit.” It is this attitude alone which stands the best chance of answering the sort of challenges which Burke attempted to quell.

This, of course, is what animated my first thoughts on The Tragic Nature of Conservatism.

Tags: Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Tragedy

I’m still working my way through it, but this essay by N.T. Wright on scriptural authority is so good I’m having trouble deciding what to excerpt for you. But here is an exceptionally good (and rather large) nugget:

Let me offer you a possible model, which is not in fact simply an illustration but actually corresponds, as I shall argue, to some important features of the biblical story, which (as I have been suggesting) is that which God has given to his people as the means of his exercising his authority.  Suppose there exists a Shakespeare play whose fifth act had been lost.  The first four acts provide, let us suppose, such a wealth of characterization, such a crescendo of excitement within the plot, that it is generally agreed that the play ought to be staged.  Nevertheless, it is felt inappropriate actually to write a fifth act once and for all: it would freeze the play into one form, and commit Shakespeare as it were to being prospectively responsible for work not in fact his own.  Better, it might be felt, to give the key parts to highly trained, sensitive and experienced Shakespearian actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts, and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to work out a fifth act for themselves.[5]

Consider the result.  The first four acts, existing as they did, would be the undoubted ‘authority’ for the task in hand.  That is, anyone could properly object to the new improvisation on the grounds that this or that character was now behaving inconsistently, or that this or that sub-plot or theme, adumbrated earlier, had not reached its proper resolution.  This ‘authority’ of the first four acts would not consist in an implicit command that the actors should repeat the earlier pans of the play over and over again.  It would consist in the fact of an as yet unfinished drama, which contained its own impetus, its own forward movement, which demanded to be concluded in the proper manner but which required of the actors a responsible entering in to the story as it stood, in order first to understand how the threads could appropriately be drawn together, and then to put that understanding into effect by speaking and acting with both innovation and consistency.

This model could and perhaps should be adapted further; it offers in fact quite a range of possibilities.  Among the detailed moves available within this model, which I shall explore and pursue elsewhere, is the possibility of seeing the five acts as follows: (1) Creation; (2) Fall; (3) Israel; (4) Jesus.  The New Testament would then form the first scene in the fifth act, giving hints as well (Rom 8; 1 Car 15; parts of the Apocalypse) of how the play is supposed to end.  The church would then live under the ‘authority’ of the extant story, being required to offer something between an improvisation and an actual performance of the final act.  Appeal could always be made to the inconsistency of what was being offered with a major theme or characterization in the earlier material.  Such an appeal—and such an offering!—would of course require sensitivity of a high order to the whole nature of the story and to the ways in which it would be (of course) inappropriate simply to repeat verbatim passages from earlier sections.  Such sensitivity (cashing out the model in terms of church life) is precisely what one would have expected to be required; did we ever imagine that the application of biblical authority ought to be something that could be done by a well-programmed computer?

And this one, a bit more directly on topic:

Authority in the church, then, means the church’s authority, with scripture in its hand and heart, to speak and act for God in his world.  It is not simply that we may say, in the church, ‘Are we allowed to do this or that?’ ‘Where are the lines drawn for our behavior?’  Or, ‘Must we believe the following 17 doctrines if we are to be really sound?’  God wants the church to lift up its eyes and see the field ripe for harvest, and to go out, armed with the authority of scripture; not just to get its own life right within a Christian ghetto, but to use the authority of scripture to declare to the world authoritatively that Jesus is Lord.  And, since the New Testament is the covenant charter of the people of God, the Holy Spirit, I believe, desires and longs to do this task in each generation by reawakening people to the freshness of that covenant, and hence summoning them to fresh covenant tasks.  The phrase ‘authority of scripture’, therefore, is a sort of shorthand for the fact that the creator and covenant God uses this book as his means of equipping and calling the church for these tasks.  And this is, I believe, the true biblical context of the biblical doctrine of authority, which is meant to enable us in turn to be Micaiahs, in church and how much more in society: so that, in other words, we may be able to stand humbly in the councils of God, in order then to stand boldly in the councils of men.  How may we do that?  By soaking ourselves in scripture, in the power and strength and leading of the Spirit, in order that we may then speak freshly and with authority to the world of this same creator God.

Tags: N.T. Wright, Nota Bene, Scripture, Theology

I’ve already added it to the list of links on the right, under Resources, but I wanted to specifically draw your attention to a site I was shown today: Cradle of Prayer.

The website is posting daily professional recordings of the Anglican lectionary. They are the Morning and Evening Prayer services from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, with professionally sung Canticles and hymns, the appropriate collects, and daily scriptures. And it’s all free.

I can’t express how excited I am about this. It is truly a beautiful project. God bless them.

Tags: Anglicanism, Book of Common Prayer, Liturgy

ALMIGHTY and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Isaiah 58:1-12:

Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. Yet they seek me daily, and delight to know my ways, as a nation that did righteousness, and forsook not the ordinance of their God: they ask of me the ordinances of justice; they take delight in approaching to God. Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge? Behold, in the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours. Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness: ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice to be heard on high. Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an acceptable day to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward. Then shalt thou call, and the Lord shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity; And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day: And the Lord shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not. And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.

Tags: Anglicanism, Christianity, Lent

Good article from the Atlantic.

Some choice excerpts:

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’” Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”

and

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

and

Over the past two generations, particularly among many college grads, the 20s have become a sort of netherworld between adolescence and adulthood. Job-switching is common, and with it, periods of voluntary, transitional unemployment. And as marriage and parenthood have receded farther into the future, the first years after college have become, arguably, more carefree. In this recession, the term funemployment has gained some currency among single 20-somethings, prompting a small raft of youth-culture stories in the Los Angeles Times andSan Francisco Weekly, on Gawker, and in other venues.

Tags: Culture, Economics

… can be found here.  I was struck by the author’s point that both Protestantism’s Sola Scriptura and modern Catholicism’s (post-Newman) doctrinal development denies the material sufficiency of the early and medieval church’s understanding of tradition.

Lane is saying that with Cardinal Henry Newman’s idea of the development of doctrine, tradition itself becomes materially insufficient because a new agent, a third agent (in addition to Scripture and Tradition), the contemporary church, becomes formally necessary to actualize tradition.  But there was a time in which the contemporary church sought the norm of interpretation in tradition (the ancient Catholic church), as opposed to finding in tradition a “seed” for contemporary practice (modern Roman Catholicism). The article details that prior to Newman’s idea, the locus of discussion was of determining the content of tradition as normative for interpretation (which, after listening to a podcast from an Orthodox priest, seems to be the Orthodox view–and the Orthodox criticize Rome just as much as Protestants do for their idea of the development of doctrine, which to them seems like an ex post facto justification for the triumph of any contemporary doctrine.)

I think Lane’s argument is that Rome’s argument from tradition has changed historically (in fact, “innovated” would be a more proper word given his argument) in tandem with arguments about tradition.  His very good insight is that there is equivocation in appeals to tradition at any given point in time (by the contemporary church) when that appeal is fashioned as essentially the same appeal as in 347 against the Arians, 1054 against the East, and in 1517 against Luther.  His names for each mode of the use of tradition were incredibly useful to me for distinguishing the relationship categories of Scripture and Tradition (and also his distinction between Apostolic and Ecclesiastical tradition, which was the subject of my previous post), and thus preventing their equivocation for polemics against the Reformers (even though the Reformers’ view of tradition was no longer Lane’s Coincidentalist view).

I think once you sort out historically that Irenaeus, Clement of Rome, Ignatius, et. al., were appealing to “oral tradition” as a coincidence of Scriptural content (because the deposit of faith was given in both written and oral forms), you must conclude that by nature there is a time-limited aspect about the Coincidental view… because the further removed in time we are from the immediate successors of the apostles who literally heard what they taught (e.g., Polycarp), the written tradition (Scripture) takes a preeminence because documentary evidence of a text preserves a message better than an oral tradition that degrades into hearsay (the authority of the Apostles continues in the Church not by their oral instruction — that should be obvious; the Apostles are dead! The authority of the Apostles continues in the Church through their teaching, through the deposit that they have passed to the Church. And the only way in which we now receive that deposit is in writing, in the Scriptures, which we take as the standard of our faith. On the fallibility of the process of oral tradition, even following from the mouth of Christ to the Apostles, consult John 21:20-24).

This is why sola scriptura is not articulated in the early church: sola scriptura only matters once a disparity occurs between the two forms by which the Gospel was communicated–when the oral tradition degrades–and that disparity only appears with time.  Thus the Ancillary view of Ecclesiastical tradition by the Reformers.

Tags: Nota Bene, Scripture, Theology, Tradition

Reading this:

The piety and devotion of Augustine is largely unquestioned by Orthodox theologians, but his conclusions on the Atonement are (Romanides, 2002). Augustine, by his own admission, did not properly learn to read Greek and this was a liability for him. He seems to have relied mostly on Latin translations of Greek texts (Augustine, 1956a,

p. 9). His misinterpretation of a key scriptural reference, Romans 5:12, is a case in point (Meyendorff, 1979). In Latin the Greek idiom eph ho which means because of was translated as in whom. Saying that all have sinned in Adam is quite different than saying that all sinned because of him. Augustine believed and taught that all humanity has sinned in Adam (Meyendorff, 1979, p. 144). The result is that guilt replaces death as the ancestral inheritance (Augustine, 1956b) Therefore the term original sin conveys the belief that Adam and Eve’s sin is the first and universal transgression in which all humanity participates.

Augustine famously debated Pelagius (c. 354-418) over the place the human will could play in salvation. Augustine took the position against him that only grace is able to save, sola gratis (Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, 7)4. From this a doctrine of predestination developed (God gives grace to whom He will) which hardened in the 16th and 17th centuries into the doctrine of two-fold predestination (God in His sovereignty saves some and condemns others). The position of the Church of the first two centuries concerning the image and human freedom was abandoned.

The Roman idea of justice found prominence in Augustinian and later Western theology. The idea that Adam and Eve offended God’s infinite justice and honor made of death God’s method of retribution (Romanides, 2002). But this idea of justice deviates from Biblical thought. Kalomiros (1980) explains the meaning of justice in the original Greek of the New Testament:

The Greek word dikaiosuni ‘justice’, is a translation of the Hebrew word tsedaka. The word means ‘the divine energy which accomplishes man’s salvation.’ It is parallel and almost synonymous with the word hesed which means ‘mercy’, ‘compassion’, ‘love’, and to the word emeth which means ‘fidelity’, ‘truth’. This is entirely different from the juridical understanding of ‘justice’. (p. 31)

Reminded me of this:

Justification by faith itself is a second-order doctrine: to believe it is both to have assurance (believing that one will be vindicated on the last day [Rom. 5.1-5]) and to know that one belongs in the single family of God, called to share table-fellowship without distinction with all other believers (Gal. 2.11-21).”Justification” is thus the declaration of God, the just judge, that someone is (a) in the right, that their sins are forgiven, and (b) a true member of the covenant family, the people belonging to Abraham. That is how the word works in Paul’s writings. It doesn’t describe how people get in to God’s forgiven family; it declares that they are in. That may seem a small distinction, but in understanding what Paul is saying it is vital.

Tags: Anglicanism, Justification, Orthodoxy, Sin, Theology

It seems that scientists may finally be violating the public’s trust in their objectivity.  In a Washington Post-ABC poll (questions 30-32), respondents report a declining receptivity to what scientists have to say about the environment.  Of course, the prestige of science (or, environmental science at least) was bound to take a hit after the revelations of gross and unethical behaviour at the University of East Anglia.  This is a good thing, as science is a discipline built on skeptical empiricism, and the political push for a universal, dogmatic consensus on anthropogenic global warming is quite unscientific.

Tags: Science