effable

Hochzeit

2009-08-29T11:24:00.004-04:00

Pardon the absence. Since last I posted on this blog, much of my free time has been devoted to planning for my wedding, which is finally happening today at the Newark Museum. I wish all of you could be there, but for those of you who can't, we will be planning a reception in Idaho in November. I have been magnificently blessed by God to be marrying as beautiful and as gracious a woman as Manisha, and I hope that we will have the pleasure of seeing you all soon.

God bless,

Lincoln/Davis

Thoughts on Government and the Economy, Part I

2009-03-12T23:37:00.003-04:00

When we were first hit with the big crash this fall in the wake of Lehmann Brothers' collapse, commentators immediately began to blame, with general public concurrence, deregulation and laissez faire economics. "This is what you get," they said, "when you let those rich, Wall Street bankers run the show, restrained only by the limits of their own ambition and selfishness." The answer, of course, was more regulation. Yes, we let capitalism have its go at things, and because it failed, we must move toward the alternative of reregulation, of a government-restricted economy. Gotta force more disclosure, limit executive compensation, restrict further the types and amounts of loans banks can make, and tax their profits at higher levels.

But I'm not so sure this is true. Let's assume that the critics are right, and this whole economic mess is a necessary consequence of unrestricted, Bush-era capitalism. However, it no more follows that we should further regulate the economy because capitalism had some side effects than it does that we should go see a witch doctor because the chemotherapy didn't work.

The fallacy is in the base line from which we measure success. If the base line requires every citizen to be middle class or better, well-educated, with a prescription drug plan, a home, and job security, then it would appear that capitalism has failed its mission of bringing society up to this standard, and maybe we ought to turn to regulation instead. But that can't be the standard - when have we ever seen such a thing, and what evidence do we have that it is possible through regulation? The actual base line is probably something more like Locke's state of nature. In what condition do we find Man, and which governmental and economic system will best improve that condition? This kind of measurement does not seek to attain perfection, but rather asks what is the best possible solution.

Capitalism certainly has its defects; you can't premise an entire economic philosophy on human selfishness and always expect rosy results. But that doesn't mean regulation can do anything better. In fact, all the evidence is to the contrary. First, the market knows more than any set of regulators possibly can. Because the market knows more, if a problem can be anticipated, the market will anticipate that problem out of self interest, while a low-paid group of government regulators is less likely to anticipate the problem, having much diminished resources and incentives to approach it.

Second, the market is more flexible than regulators. While the market can quickly adjust to an unanticipated problem (and even find a way to make a buck on it), government is a slow-moving behemoth with a muddling bureaucracy that takes months to address a problem. Consider, for instance, that the FASB mark-to-market accounting standards are still in effect for publicly held companies even six months after the crash.

Lastly, regulation is often unnecessary, because the market learns from its own mistakes. For example, in the wake of this collapse, it will likely be unnecessary to tell banks to keep higher reserves, to be more careful with their lending practices, and to stay away from mortgage-backed securities, because they will all take those measures of their own accord. All the government could do would be to codify what will naturally develop as best practices among financial institutions. The government's new rules won't help anything, but will simply create a legal hurdle that may later prove an obstacle when we are faced with the next economic crisis.

As Obama is fond of saying, we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. So off with idealism, and let us return to capitalism, that great engine of human selfishness, to propel us out of this turmoil and back into our GED'd, lower-middle-class lives, where we still rent our homes.

Warning

2009-03-08T01:23:00.000-05:00

Do not see Watchmen.

Correction

2009-02-27T21:08:00.003-05:00

He who heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who rejects reproof goes astray.

Proverbs 10:17

One of the most valuable lessons I learned in my adolescence was to love correction. It used to be pretty hard on me, and I was often (shamefully) reduced to tears simply by the fact that my father pointed out something I was doing wrong, even if no punishment were given. More than that, I felt, as many surely do, that there was nothing more loathsome than receiving rebuke from someone who notoriously struggled with and succumbed to the same sin. Neither could I stand it when I went to a friend for sympathy, to vent, only to find them refusing to take my side and instead correcting me for my wrongs in the situation - however minimal I perceived those wrongs to be.

But I only harmed myself by scorning correction. A wise man listens to advice and rebuke no matter what its source. To emerge from my old habits, I started to tell myself, when corrected, that I could use the correction as another opportunity to improve, notwithstanding the hypocrisy or clumsiness of the corrector. What were their sins to me? Similarly, I began to see that if I went to someone to air my grievances and found myself instead upbraided for my own wrongdoing, it was more important that I learn to correct my own mistakes than that my confidante agree with me about someone else's sin. Without regard to their lack of sympathy or lack of tact, if they had something valuable to say, I should have been ready to hear. It takes humility to do this - a humility I was sorely lacking - but now it has become my reflex to accept correction, even to yearn for it. If anything, I accept it too readily (such that my friends feel free to blame me for everything that goes wrong in their lives, since I will gladly take it).

Now the lesson I have to learn is on the other side of things - knowing when to give correction. The Scripture indicates nowhere that we are to have the same eagerness to give reproof as we ought to have to receive it. My father has consistently identified my choleric tendency to, without warrant, "make a federal case about everything" (which perhaps explains why I've become a lawyer). His path has been much wiser: he will only issue correction after the putative correctee has had some time for the sin to sit on his conscience. Only if the correctee's conscience proves defective, or unable to overcome his pride, will my father ever say something admonitory. He has earned a lot of credibility capital by correcting sparingly, and I hope to uphold the same integrity in my own life.

Clarity

2009-02-23T23:42:00.003-05:00

Courtesy of Manisha, she and I went to see Jimmy Eat World give an exceptional performance at Terminal 5 this evening to commemorate the tenth anniversary of their album "Clarity," which preceded their mainstream breakthrough "Bleed American." They were in great form, and didn't miss a note as they played through the entire album front to back, winding up with some favorites from "Bleed American" and "Futures." I was blown away by the glassy purity of Jim Adkins' voice, which carries through as well live as it does on the album, and with heightened sincerity. Even as they hit the powerful, wide bridge on "Table for Glasses," I wondered whether Jim Adkins' life has just been a string of failed relationships out of which he hopefully emerges, yearning for something better, because it seems that's all his songs are about. I remembered all the nights I spent alone listening to "Futures," wishing I had a screwed up romance like Jim so I could ache along to his melodies sympathetically.

But this last weekend, I got engaged to Manisha, and I honestly (and happily) can say that I don't feel that way about life anymore. When I think of my relationship with her, I don't long for the pangs of conflict, I simply want peace. As my father has said, ever so wisely, it is far better to have love than romance, for romance thrives only on loss and misunderstanding, which are much more enjoyable to perceive in an aesthetic portrayal of the experience of another than to live through oneself. I hope and pray that God will lead me to be a good enough man that I can avoid those pitfalls and lead Manisha in security, comfort, peace, and most of all, godliness, such that she laughs at the time to come. I do not need the drama for myself; I will simply put "Futures" on the stereo for the occasional fix.

Apologies

2009-02-17T19:03:00.003-05:00

I am very sorry for all the stupid linking (or stupid Lincoln) issues that have been present on this blog of late. I will make an effort not to bungle it up every time I hit Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

This Time the Liberals Have Really Gone Too Far

2009-02-16T22:52:00.003-05:00

Governor Patterson's proposed obesity tax was one thing, but this is quite another.

Stimulus Response

2009-02-15T01:05:00.003-05:00

At the onset of every crisis, Man seeks eagerly two things: a scapegoat and a savior. Our collective response to the global financial crisis illustrates this nicely.

It is imperative that a scapegoat be selected as quickly as possible, for if we fail to find it before the dust settles, we may be left with the unhappy conclusion that the whole mess is our fault. In picking our scapegoat, we must set our sights on something as far from us as possible - just as we would rather kill a clueless, bleating animal than something dear to us, it is important that the recipients of our blame be entirely villainous and entirely unlike us. Thus, in the present situation, our middle-class existence leads to blame rich executives and their foreign world of million-dollar office renovations and luxury spa trips, or perhaps our blue-state predilections lead us to cast our aspersions on the reds, or vice versa. Better yet, we still don't have to blame a person, because we can just blame an entity - some faceless corporation - or a mere concept, like capitalism. If we are speedy enough with the finger-pointing and shrill enough in our cries for a lynching, we may slay that beast, convinced of our own righteousness, before we are ever forced to look at our own conduct and into our own hearts for the source of the problem.

But we also need a savior, because blame has little remedial value. We're sure that there has to be someone who can pull us out of this pickle we're in, and at the moment, we seem to be convinced it's the government. The government has to pass this stimulus, we say. The government has to save our jobs, we say. We look to it with eyes that convey an invincible, pleading hope, not realizing that our mere desire for government to just fix it doesn't mean that government actually has the power to do so. And if our lofty expectations are not completely fulfilled by this Golden Calf with its infrastructure investment and medical-record digitization, we are likely to be just as ruthless in retribution as we were faithful in hope, and we will shun the failed savior of this crisis, anointing it as scapegoat in the next.

Only once has someone volunteered to be both Our Scapegoat and Our Savior, but when He came to address The Crisis, He met our expectations in neither role. As Scapegoat, he was not distant and foreign that we could easily shrug our guilt off on Him, but He came and dwelt among us, healing us of our afflictions, despite that He was the only one Who deserved none of the blame. And as Savior, He was the only one Who could perform what we expected, indeed, what we had longed for and more, but He was the only one upon Whom we refused to look to heal us. Still, He has canceled and paid our debt and given us the promise of a secure and happy future in Him. To receive this, we need not submit our credit scores, and we need not even vote. All we have to do is admit that we were the problem all along, and that we desperately need Him - Scapegoat and Savior.

Tim Green

2009-02-13T16:45:00.000-05:00

This guy is awesome.

Two Links on Justice

2009-02-13T12:47:00.001-05:00

One and Two.

Indulgences Redux

2009-02-10T09:25:00.002-05:00

Looks like we need another Luther. As the Pharisees said, more rightly than they knew, "Who is this that speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only?"

The Tragedy of the Commons and the Economics of City v. Town

2009-02-08T12:25:00.003-05:00

Economic theory is successful because it uses realistic assumptions about the nature of man - that he is rational and will act in his self interest - to coherently explain how we can maintain a fairly efficient, thriving society that can benefit everyone. However, economic theory has also identified certain problems that are part and parcel to its core assumptions, one of which is known as the Tragedy of the Commons. In its classic form, this problem supposes a grazing field shared in common by a number of sheep herders. Because the field is shared jointly, each herder has an incentive to let as many of his sheep graze there as he can, to obtain maximum benefit for himself at a cost that will primarily be absorbed by others. However, because each herder has this identical incentive, each will let as many sheep as he can graze in the field, and soon the field will be destroyed by virtue (or lack thereof) of everyone's self interest.

Basically, the Tragedy of the Commons describes how individual self interest destroys a finite shared resource, despite that its destruction is against each individual's self interest. We see this all the time in everyday life. For instance, at a traffic intersection, it is in everyone's self interest to minimally break the law to obtain an advantage - the pedestrian jaywalks at the last minute, the driver just barely runs a red light, or the traffic heading straight refuses the waiting driver the opportunity to take a left turn across the right of way. The shared resource of limited time to execute a traffic maneuver motivates each man to put himself first and move at the last moment, thus forcing someone else bear the cost. However, because every man thinks that he can be the one to profit from bending the rules in his favor, the corporate traffic flow suffers a gigantic clog of inefficiency because no-one is abiding by the rules. The same man who ran the red light at one intersection will find himself waiting for five minutes to take a left turn at the next, because the drivers coming in the opposite direction - each of them just as rational and self-interested as he - refuse to be the ones to bear the loss and let him take his turn.

Indeed, there are thousands of other day-to-day examples of this scenario. I was at Carnegie Hall on Friday night watching the Cleveland Orchestra perform Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, and the instant the last chord rang out, about twenty percent of the crowd got up and ran for the door, each one hoping to be the first down the stairs, to the garage, etc. Each of these eager early departers probably knew that his abrupt exit was a bit rude, but trusted that he would be the only one getting up to leave, and that there would be plenty of other people who would stay the extra five minutes for the obligatory extended applause. However, because twenty percent of the audience had that exact same idea, the result was a collective insult to the Cleveland Orchestra that no-one would have wished.

However, the Tragedy of the Commons manifests itself far more often in urban than in small-town life. I don't think this is simply because people in cities are more selfish than people in small towns, but rather because the nature of incentives changes in smaller locales. For instance, a small town citizen may have the same incentive to consume as much as possible of a shared resource, but he also has an incentive weighing in the opposite direction - the incentive not to piss off the other small-town citizens with whom he has to work on a day-to-day basis. This second incentive will often prevail, and he is likely to curb his consumption of the shared resource, knowing that excessive consumption may harm his long-term relationship with his neighbors. But this second incentive is substantially weakened in the city, because there is no long-term relationship with most of the people one interacts with on a daily basis. They are each another face in the crowd who holds little leverage over us - so why not cut them off in traffic, be rude to them at the deli counter, and spit out our wad of gum on their sidewalk? Yet all of this selfishness together can make the city a pretty irritating and unloving place to live.

The prevalence of the Tragedy of the Commons in urban living may lead many to deem small-town life objectively better. But this ignores the upside of the city, the huge economic benefits of the city's vast network of producers and consumers, each of whom can maximize his self-interest through a multivarious and ever expanding number of possible transactions that increase collective wealth. Moreover, as Dr. Keller has pointed out, our final destination is the City. We began in a Garden, but God seeks to bring us to the New Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, where we will ever be enthralled by the excitement of the innumerable blessings of our relationships with one another.

But for now, cities are broken, because the self interest that temporarily sustains our society is only a laughable proxy for love, and its ugly side effects mar every encounter with our fellow urban citizens. It would seem that the solution to the problem is to find a way to introduce the small-town concern for one's neighbor into the city's anonymous sprawl of humanity. This is what Christ asked us to do - "Love thy neighbor as thyself." And who is our neighbor? Christ answered this as well: our neighbor is the man lying beaten and near death on the side of the road, the guy we could cut off in traffic, the post office employee who's taking forever, or the new waitress who just got our order wrong. Our cities will remain dog-eat-dog until we can learn to love these strangers as our brothers and as ourselves.

Two Articles

2009-02-06T17:46:00.004-05:00

One, a fiercely brilliant piece by a distinguished, unpredictable, Washingtonian columnist, concerning the abomination of an economic stimulus package that will likely soon be signed into law.

Another, a dry bit of legal analysis on the emerging climate-change litigation phenomenon, co-authored by a partner and a lowly first-year associate in the mass torts group of a major New York law firm.

Rationalizing Terrorism

2009-02-04T12:52:00.001-05:00

A great article by Judea Pearl, the father of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, on how elites have come to dignify the Arab world's "ideology of barbarism" as "The Resistance."

Obama and Advertising

2009-02-02T09:11:00.003-05:00

A collateral benefit of the Obama Presidency is in advertising. Black people have begun to take a much more prominent role in advertising, and the nature of their roles has changed (indeed, improved), such that those new roles seem plausible to the American public. For instance, a black woman in a television spot is now more likely to be checking her balance at Chase over her Blackberry than screaming out "You go girl!" Similarly, a black man - and not just a P. Diddy or a Lebron James - is more likely now to be a spokesman for a luxury sedan than a sports beverage.

And of course, as mentioned above, the real test of this is plausibility: after you've seen a black man in the Oval Office, there's nothing that seems unrealistic about blacks in all sorts of successful middle- and upper-class positions. Unlike the slew of ridiculous mid-90s commercials that portrayed some Waspy Chuck and Deborah hanging out with one black guy and one Asian girl, there's nothing about this that rings false.

I see this as an improvement, even if it is, in some respects, a temporary one. There has long existed a substantial black middle class in America, and I see black professionals every day, but these have held neither the attention of the whites nor of the blacks. Even if this new focus on black society is partially just a symptom of whites patting themselves on the back for voting for Obama, I think its effects will be more long-lasting than other manifestations of Obama-phoria, such as Pepsi changing its logo to look like the Obama Campaign logo.

During the campaign, I heard John McWhorter, a notable conservative black social scholar, participate in a panel discussion on Race & Class in America. He explained that he was voting for Obama (I expect then that abortion was a non-issue for him) because of the psychological effect it will have on the nation. He explained that Obama will do a lot of things during his presidency, but one of the things Obama will do every single day is be black. There he is, a black man, signing a bill into law. There he is, a black man, boarding Air Force One. There he is, a black man, giving the State of the Union address. Long-term, this will erode both the belief of blacks that their hopes are forever suppressed, that they cannot possibly succeed, and it will erode the belief of whites that blacks cannot compete on the same level. No matter what blunders and evils Obama may execute during his term, I cannot deny that this is at least one upside.

Just a couple more steps to Jurassic Park

2009-02-01T00:55:00.000-05:00

See.

If Nothing Else, Poor Advertising

2009-01-30T09:24:00.001-05:00

Saw this on the subway today:

On Slumdog

2009-01-28T22:32:00.005-05:00

As you are probably aware, Slumdog Millionaire has topped all the year's best-of lists, it cleaned up at the Golden Globes, and it will likely do some serious damage at the Oscars as well. Indeed, the critical response to Danny Boyle's latest has been almost entirely positive, as it is currently sitting at a pretty impressive 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. Even the soundtrack to the film is one of the top-downloaded albums on iTunes.

To my recollection, no movie since Crash has enjoyed such overwhelming critical appeal alongside such great popular acclaim. In fact, I think this response is for much the same reason. Crash was a thoroughly enjoyable, sentimental pop movie with a really clever-though-implausible plot, which managed to convince its audience that after sitting through two hours of popcorn fun they had attained a sophisticated, balanced understanding of racial relations in Los Angeles. Similarly, Slumdog seduces the viewer with its M.I.A. soundtrack, its colorful glimpse into Mumbai's call centers and urban sprawl, and its concluding homage to Bollywood dance, convincing him that he now has attained greater social consciousness through learning the plight of orphans at the hands of the beggar mafia. Slumdog purports to stare India, which is so hot right now, in the face, warts and all, and it doesn't even give you subtitles that are hard to read.

However, for both of these movies, this nigh universal approval has given way to counter-arguments from a few dissidents. There were many that loathed Crash, urging that it had made its audience no wiser, and alleging that it merely perpetuated unhelpful stereotypes about race. The same is true now with Slumdog. Many, especially Indians, are standing up to say that the portrayal the film gives of India is unfair, contending that it emphasizes the nation's flaws and ignores its virtues - other than pretty colors and pretty girls.

But in fact, this very reason is why I really love both of these movies. Truth be told, I also liked them simply for the drama - Crash with its heart-wrenching car-crash rescue scene, and Slumdog with its self-sacrificial, love-is-destiny message. But what was really notable about these movies is how they wrestled with key principles of contemporary liberalism and managed to gain the general approval of much of society, liberals included, in the process.

Crash was remarkable because it went against the grain of race-relations cinema. A typical race-relations movie involves some oppressed black people, some sympathetic white people who reach out to them, and some Dickensian caricatures of white bigots with Southern accents, who say things like "law don't go 'round here." Indeed, this is the story you are supposed to tell about race relations. But Crash, on the other hand, told the story that everyone is racist, no matter what color, and at the same time suggested that all of our offensive racial stereotypes may even have some merit. It's quite something that a major Hollywood movie could get away with saying this and still win an Oscar.

Slumdog is much the same. Contrary to our prevailing sense that more indigenous cultures in "the developing world" possess more nobility and general insight into life than we in the West with our lattes and frequent flier miles, Slumdog painted a picture not only of the vibrance of India with the saris, the bindis, and the Taj Mahal, but also showed its filth - the religious violence, the insuperable caste system, and the exploitation of children as beggars. Indeed, as some news articles are now noting, Slumdog actually portrays a fairly sanitized version of that filth. For instance, Manisha's father was telling me the other night how his sister saw a woman in India begging for money while holding a screaming child with bandaged eyes. Someone tore the bandage away to find that the woman had taped two live cockroaches to the child's fully healthy eyes, simply so the child would continue screaming and garner the sympathy that leads to charity. That story will stick with me for a while, and I expect that Slumdog's story will stick with us as well, even if we aren't supposed to think too much about it.

So if nothing else, I admire these movies because they tell, to popular and critical acclaim, the stories that liberal orthodoxy would rather not have them tell. Even where their take on these issues is trite or sentimental, I nevertheless admire that they are willing to preach it.

Right on Time

2009-01-24T01:06:00.004-05:00

My father recently wrote a very thoughtful, if characteristically obtuse, post about the non-existence of time. One of the things I admire most about my father is that he is a very careful, precise thinker, who does not draw any unwarranted inferences out of an emotional need to believe a particular proposition. It is difficult to quarrel with his logic in this post, where he contends that time has only conceptual, and not actual, reality. While I respect Daniel Bakken for fighting the good fight in the comments section, my father's arguments ultimately prevail. There are essentially three responses to the argument against the existence of time, and none of them are meritorious.

1. If there is no time, then God doesn't know the future, which would mean He wouldn't be omnipotent and omniscient, and therefore could not be God.

As an initial matter, this objection begs the question, for the very matter at issue is whether there exists a future that can be known. If no actual future exists (because such a thing would be nonsense), then God is not made any less powerful by not knowing a thing that cannot exist. He is no less powerful than for the fact that He cannot make a round square. Second, we do not owe God the duty of imagining the existence of additional realms for Him to govern - the mere fact that people can state "the future exists and God knows it" should not lead us to believe that the future does in fact exist, or that we are any less pious for disbelieving it.

2. These things are simply a mystery beyond our understanding, for who are we to question God's ability to reconcile this apparent contradiction?

This argument is most commonly made by someone who has been caught in a very obvious "A is not-A." Ironically, they usually bring this point up after arguing at length about the necessary rational inferences we must draw from this or that passage of Scripture, but when pressed on something their systematic cannot explain, they suddenly gain great humility. At bottom, however, this argument must be rejected when someone does come up with a way to reconcile the contradiction. The picture I get here is of a man who, after working for years to reach the answer to a math problem, declares it insoluble, only to have the whole thing reduced to simple terms by another thinker a couple weeks later. Even if the solution is elegant and compelling, the man who declared it insoluble must stick by his guns, because now his pride is on the line.

3. Everyone's always believed this - indeed, it is the orthodox position.

Everyone's always believed a lot of things, but while majority vote has force in our American democracy, it has no epistemic authority. This argument is truly a last-ditch effort. What does have authority? Is it not reason and the Scriptures? If our view of the existence of time, while confirmed by Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, and Sproul, is contrary to reason and the Scriptures, can we still justify ourselves in believing it? I should hope not.

If any of you have a better, rational rebuttal than these to the argument for the non-existence of time, I would love to hear it.

Our Fears Have Gotten The Best Of Us

2009-01-20T08:16:00.000-05:00

Read.

An Interesting Day At The Office

2009-01-15T23:00:00.002-05:00

Today wasn't anything special in terms of the work I did. However, you could see the rescue operations of the US Airways Flight that crashed in the Hudson from our office windows. One attorney on my floor actually saw the plane hit the water. And that wasn't the half of it.

Leaving work around 10:00pm, I was coming down the eleveator, which stopped at the 37th floor. There, a group of middle-aged men and women in formal wear boarded the elevator. I asked what the to-do was, and a gentleman told me that this was the reception for the Hillary Clinton fundraiser that Bon Jovi had held at Town Hall across the street. In fact, Hillary and Bill were allegedly still up on the 37th floor entertaining guests. When the elevator reached the lobby, I turned it back around for the 37th floor.

The receptionists told me that only guests could enter the event, but since things were wrapping up, I was free to wait around until Hillary exited (turns out Bill snuck past them already) and try for a photo op. I sat on the couches in the reception area re-reading "A Man In Full," waiting for Hillary to leave. Finally she came out, in all her purple pants suit glory. Not being the assertive type, and unable to lose my integrity and muster up some I'm-your-biggest-fan plea, I just watched her as she walked by me, an arm's length away. She took one smiling look into my eyes, as if to ask, rhetorically, "And you are . . . ?," and then left down the elevator ahead of me with the Secret Service.

It may not be greatness I admire, but it is greatness.

Oh, Frank Rich!

2009-01-05T09:18:00.003-05:00

This, the most emailed story from the NY Times website, is journalism? Now I will grant that Bush-43 has not been a great president, and that he has made some big mistakes, but the fetish that the media has for him, the desire to portray him as a bumbling, incompetent Jesus-cowboy moron while simultaneously writing him up as a devious criminal mastermind of the sort that would make Hitler blush - even as the man is mere days from leaving office - is just ridiculous. Only in the appearance of this screed on the slick pages of a major national newspaper can anyone begin to justify its outrageous bluster. Rich will acknowledge no virtue in Bush-43; he refuses to encounter the man himself, as he would rather pommel the straw-man caricature from Oliver Stone's W.

But I've seen the same kind of nonsense from Ann Coulter in the opposite direction (notably, she approves of the New York Times, except the front page, the opinion page, and anything written by Frank Rich). And so I wonder at the motivations for this one-thoughted editorialism, this partisanship with blinders. Perhaps it's the craving for certainty. We are confident that existence really is black and white at bottom, but because it so often appears gray, we need a pre-packaged worldview that we can adopt wholesale as our own, that those irritating charcoals and creams may be strained out into pure, Platonic black and white. We do not wish to grapple with the delicate and complex balance of the many principles that, in tension with one another, govern our existence, but rather want an Absolute Rule of Thumb - one principle that we can apply to all the facts of life with utter, unquestioning loyalty.

To do this, we have to be zealous devotees to the system, and we must refuse even to listen or to entertain the ideas of outsiders (Coulter's book title, "How To Talk To A Liberal (If You Must)," is illustrative). And this loyalty to the One True Path is by no means limited to American politics - it can just as readily be observed in the Muslim, the Atheist, the Calvinist, the Environmentalist, the Yankees Fan. There is integrity to this blindness, but it is an integrity I can do without. Far better, I say, to really seek the truth as gleaned by reason from all of the data, even if we are not certain of all of it.

All this I have tested by wisdom; I said, "I will be wise"; but it was far from me. That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?

-King Solomon

A Couple Thoughts On This Whole Rick Warren Thing

2008-12-22T09:23:00.002-05:00

What surprises me most about the public reaction to Obama's selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguaration isn't the outrage from the gay community, but rather the complete lack of outrage from the Christian community. Not that it calls for outrage by any means, but I would have expected at least some conservative pastor to go on record criticizing Warren for consorting with The Enemy. Even Rick Warren's defense in this controversy has not been on the basis of an appeal to Christians to understand the value of this ceremony, but rather a defense to the charges laid by the gay community: ("We don't have to see eye to eye to walk hand in hand," and "Hey, I just had a great conversation with Melissa Etheridge!").

So I wonder what this means. Are the Christians just more adept at understanding the possibility of civil disagreement? Or have we just lost our zeal for fighting over these social issues? Or perhaps the gay community has simply become more quickly disillusioned with Barack Obama (amazing that it's happening before inauguration), while the large base of evangelical Christians who voted for Obama still places their hopes and dreams in him. Maybe Obama's gesture has been effective with the Christians - we appreciate the olive branch he offers, and retain unrealistic fantasies that because he lets Pastor Rick speak at his inauguration, he'll appoint a pro-life judge to the Court.

In the end, I think the Christians will realize, as the gays have, that Obama can't please everyone who voted for him. He can't be the consistent, thorough-going liberal in the model of FDR and JFK that he promised the gays and at the same time be the reach-across-the-aisle, post-partisan coalition builder that he promised all the disillusioned Republicans. Perhaps the most insightful piece of election commentary I read was Fouad Ajami's article in the Wall Street Journal on Obama and the politics of crowds - this uneasy coalition that has brought him to power will inevitably dissolve.

Reason and Empiricism

2008-12-21T23:07:00.002-05:00

Professor Opderbeck, who was the faculty advisor for Christian Legal Fellowship at Seton Hall Law, just dropped by this blog and left some good thoughts on one of my old posts about Absolute, Ultimate Truth, which you may read here, and which I now realize was a bit sloppily written. Professor Opderbeck said:

I'd encourage you to think a little more carefully, from a Christian perspective, about whether "reason and empiricism" are really the ultimate arbiters of truth. Sounds more like Jefferson than Jesus!

I likely agree with what Professor Opderbeck is getting at here. Reason and empiricism are not the ultimate arbiters of truth if by that we mean that it is on their authority that something is or is not true. The fact that Obama was elected president, for instance, is not true because reason and empiricism say so, it is true because back in November, he got the most electoral votes. Reason and empiricism, however, are my means of knowing that Obama was elected president.

Thus it becomes clear that rightly viewed, reason and empiricism are not declarative authorities, as though true things come into being by their say-so, but rather epistemic authorities, in that we learn what is true by reason and empiricism. Taking this to ultimate questions, Jesus Christ is Lord not because of reason and empiricism, but it is by reason and empiricism that I know Jesus Christ is Lord. No one learns anything true but by reason and empiricism - even when the angel appeared to Mary and told her she would conceive and give birth to a son, she knew that what the angel said was true on the basis of him appearing as an angel (empiricism) and the inference that things spoken by angels are to be believed (reason).

Understanding this distinction also helps reconcile the competing schools of evidential and presuppositional apologetics. For brief background, evidentialists argue that to persuade a non-believer, you must begin on common ground, and thus you argue toward God from reason and empiricism. Presuppositionalists, on the other hand, are uncomfortable with starting with anything other than God as a first premise. Accordingly, they assume the truth of the Bible, prove that such a belief is not self-contradictory, and then set out to prove that self-contradiction is present in every other worldview.

These two schools can reconciled by this distinction because evidentialism rightly understands that reason and empiricism are the proper epistemic authorities to trust, and presuppositionalism rightly understands that God is the only declarative authority that can be trusted. What the presuppositionalists miss is that every step of their argument is made with reason and empiricism, and what the evidentialists miss is that reason and empiricism are not in themselves declarative authorities. Reason and empiricism can only lead one to discovery of the declarative authority underneath: the Word of God, which spoke this earth into existence from nothing.

On Duty In Marriage

2008-12-18T22:58:00.003-05:00

Manisha and I were speaking this evening about cultural differences in the integrity of marriage vows. Sri Lankans, for instance, are suspicious of mingling their own with Westerners, given our propensity to cut and run when the going gets rough. She pointed out, however, that Sri Lankan marriages can be just as miserable on average as those of Westerners, but a miserable Sri Lankan couple is more likely to stay together than a Western couple, because of traditional cultural norms.

What I have just described is what many of the opponents of marriage present as its inevitable dichotomy: either realize you hate each other and go through the pain and shame of divorce to get away, or spare yourself the lose-half-your-stuff transaction and stick it out together for fifty years of joint misery. Obviously, I don't think it has to be that way. The solution is presented when we realize where the duties of the couples lie.

The Western couple views their highest duty as owing to themselves, and thus when self-interest indicates that it is advantageous to sever what man ought not put asunder, the parties, behaving like rational individuals in an economic hypothetical, are likely to split. The traditional couple, who views their highest duty as owing to society, knows that they should stay together for the sake of children and reputation. Accordingly, they put just enough love into the marriage to make it survive, as though holding it together with duct tape, but not enough to make it flourish.

The Christian couple, however, transcends both these cliches, viewing their highest duty as owing to God, Who has commanded that they love one another. The Christian couple knows that God isn't pleased by them merely sticking it out for the sake of the kids, He is pleased by their genuine love of one another, which love is far more a commitment than a fleeting emotion. Thus with the Christian couple, where the happiness of the other is the highest goal, there is likely to be far more shared happiness than in either the Western or traditional couple. The Western couple makes man and woman each an island, and the traditional couple makes each a fearful social slave, but in Christ the two are fully joined by their common love of God.

Don't misunderstand me though. This Christian couple, as far as I've seen, is more ideal than real-world example (though my parents have done an excellent job modeling it). I fear that more often, Christian marriages are like this, and of course the duty to society of keeping up appearances can sometimes get mislabeled as service to God. But that many fail at this goal does not mean it is not worth attempting - in this is happiness, and with His grace and by His strength I will seek to lay hold of it.

Vox Populi

2008-12-09T08:51:00.002-05:00

In America, we believe in democracy so wholeheartedly that we are more likely to blame the undesired outcome of an election on sinister external factors (corporate lobbyists, liberal media, voter fraud, etc.) than on the altogether more plausible possibility that the unenlightened majority simply got it wrong. Conversely, the winning party, candidate, or platform is more apt to express the merits of its victory in terms of a mandate conferred by the noble will of the people than to say anything emphatically about its own objective, internal correctness - the former is, apparently, the best evidence of the latter. Thus this cultural preference for defending the will and whims of the electorate tends to lead us either to conspiracy theory or myopic adulation of the victor - should we not question it?

Our Pantheon

2008-12-08T00:16:00.003-05:00

Human religion, it seems, longs to turn worship of God into worship of man. It is for this reason that we ever broaden our pantheons. The Greeks, the Norse, the Hindus, and the Shintos found something to worship in every part of their lives, conferring godhood not only on the big ticket themes like Love with Venus and Destruction with Shiva, but also down to every last local brook, tree, and hill, such that their universe was fully populated with deity. This amounts either to express pantheism, as in Hinduism, or de facto pantheism, as with the Greeks. Eventually, deity is stretched so far that man himself is worshiped - the eponymous ancestor of a tribe dies and is worshiped by his heirs, or perhaps a great architect like Imhotep attains deity through his achievement.

Christianity (or perhaps Christianism is more appropriate) has predictably not fared much better. We don't have gods; instead we have the saints. We have fictionalized their lives and alotted each a special jurisdiction of terrestrial reign, such that we can pray to a middleman with expertise in the subject of our petition, rather than to He Who is preeminent, in Whom we live, move, and have our being. We have even come up with special criteria for induction into the Christian Pantheon - no less than two (2) miracles, ratified by the special committee on saintly matters. Then, I presume, the forms are sent to God in triplicate, Who signs off on the whole thing. This is not real Christianity; it is merely worldly religion as told through Christian myth.

All of this allows man to look forward to the day when he may stop bowing the knee and instead rightly accept obeisance. We are full of ourselves, and we would rather instead receive the worship we have for so long grudgingly given. The big problem, of course, is that our wishful thinking about the matter doesn't make it true. We are no gods, and only One is worthy of our worship.

I wonder if reality TV is the latest manifestation of this theme. An easy case can be made that celebrities are the only gods we have left in American society. As we have long resented the impasse between their status and our inadequacy, we have now found, through reality TV, a way of bridging the gap. Anyone can be a celebrity; anyone can be a god. Perhaps a low-level god, like the sort who rules over a stream, or a small forest, but a god nonetheless. Chuck Klosterman put it best when he summed up the pros and cons of reality TV celebrity: you're famous enough that people recognize you at Burger King, but you're still the kind of person who eats at Burger King.

I do not wish to so cheapen godhead, and God doesn't either. Him alone shall you serve.

Team Jesus

2008-12-05T10:05:00.004-05:00

A Jewish friend of mine recently related to me his excitement that "we're" getting Ivanka Trump--the beautiful and intelligent daughter of The Donald is marrying a Jewish guy, and is accordingly converting to Judaism. What seems remarkable to me about my friend's comment is the "team" mentality about ethnicity and religion. It's of course not unique to Jews--Christians and many others share it. It's as though we think we're in some professional league for religions where we have a draft and trade players, hoping we can assemble a tight enough roster to take us all the way to the finals.

This mentality is probably what drove many of the Christian textbooks I had to read growing up, all of which claimed that anyone who did anything cool in history, Benjamin Franklin included, was a devout Christian (notwithstanding, of course, the great patriot's 127-some illegitimate children with French women). What are we supposed to think? That Christianity is somehow more true because George Washington allegedly thought so (unlikely)? What about all the great men who did not know God, like Homer, Alexander, Octavian, heck, even Charlemagne? Is Christianity rendered false by the unbelief of the excellent? To borrow Paul's words from Romans, "Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means! Let God be true though every man be false, as it is written, 'That thou mayest be justified in thy words,and prevail when thou art judged.'"

But just as God is not falsified by their unbelief, he is not proved by the belief of others. We shouldn't cling to truth by affinity with the allegiances of others, like following Brett Favre from Green Bay to the Jets. It's our own belief that matters. Would I still believe Christ if no-one of any importance agreed with me? I suppose I ought to ask myself.

Jdimytai Damour

2008-12-05T09:52:00.002-05:00

The family of the New York Wal-Mart employee who was trampled to death by shoppers on Black Friday is suing Wal-Mart for wrongful death. The suit alleges that Damour's death was caused by ""the carelessness, recklessness, wanton disregard for public safety and gross negligence of [Wal-Mart] in the staging, conducting and advertising for sales events." Exactly--Wal-Mart should have foreseen that letting their little smiley guy go around and roll back prices on PS3s and Elmo dolls would necessarily lead to a Pamplona of consumer frenzy. I always thought Wal-Mart's prices were recklessly low.

On Community Building

2008-11-16T14:28:00.003-05:00

Recently, some friends from church were speaking to me about their dissatisfaction with the couples fellowship group they attend. They were frustrated at the lack of real closeness in the group - while there was steady talk of intimacy and bonding, the whole affair felt more like a transaction than a relationship. In the end, the weekly event was little more than another in a series of the tedious social obligations that beset young professionals. It was all nametags and arms-length social networking; the group was more concerned with selecting co-chairs for the events planning committee, and with booking volunteers for snack duty five weeks in advance, than with really getting to know and serve one another.

What is ironic about this, and I can relate to it entirely, is that this fellowship group program was designed to create the very thing it is obliterating. Redeemer's fellowship groups are intended to serve the salutary goal of "community building." Now I don't begrudge Redeemer for their noble effort in this, it's just that community is not the sort of thing that one can just go out and build. Real community does not arise from deliberate efforts at fostering it, it springs spontaneously from the actions of a hospitable and loving spirit, which are not directed toward building community at all. Real community, the kind we all say we're looking for, is but a beatific side effect of a different pursuit altogether; it is collateral to the main event, that of loving one's neighbor. These days, you see all sorts of people holding forth on the benefits of community, and how important it is to cultivate it, but rarely in such places do you see the genuine sharing and kindness so sought after. And yet, where you do see community, where you do see love, no-one was doing it for the sake of mere community.

I consider this defect to be related to the extreme self-consciousness of our age. Nowhere now is the yearning for beauty and for taste; instead we devote ourselves to mere artistic "appreciation." Of course, appreciation will naturally arise from the pursuit of beauty, but it is not the end in itself. Similarly, we examine the misery and moral defects in our hearts and minds, and conclude that the solution is in prescription pills - we treat only the symptoms, never the cause.

Now it is certainly possible that someone who sets out to build community will in the end find himself wrapped up in real social harmony, just as if he sets out simply to appreciate art, he may instead learn to love its beauty. But such benefits are purely coincidental, and they follow not from the deliberate pursuit of the side effect, but because he has tapped into the real spring of love or of desire.

And yet community building retains its allure, because it's got most of us fooled. We think, perhaps because we've never experienced the real thing, as we stand around the cold cocktail party convened for non-committal networking, that this it; this is what we were looking for. But that we can mimic it does not mean we have grasped it - we have attained the intimacy we sought no more than someone playing Rock Band has learned to play the drums. So if we want that warmth, and not, in my favorite words of Ernest Gordon, the empty world where "men would touch each other but never meet," then we must forget about this community building nonsense. Stop putting the cart before the horse; love thy neighbor as thyself.

Early Returns . . .

2008-11-03T14:59:00.002-05:00

Just got the results from the New Jersey Bar Examination. I passed. Thank God - it was a hellish summer of sickness and study, but He brought me through. Now I'm just waiting on New York.

Some Thoughts on the Killers Show

2008-10-26T10:59:00.004-04:00

On Friday night, Manisha, Andy, Rosa, and I went to see the Killers, who are one of Manisha's favorite bands, play the Hammerstein Ballroom. Manisha's music background is primarily on the New York and North Jersey indie/punk scene, so seeing a prominent band at a mid-size venue like Hammerstein was a new experience for her. She was expecting a crowd of like-minded, young Killers fans who had been touched, as had she, by Brandon Flowers' lyrics, and who were ready to eagerly listen to him deliver a stunning and intimate performance. What she got was a bit different, and substantially less enjoyable.

Twenty percent of the crowd were in their 40s or 50s, and an even larger portion were drunk Wall Street types, still wearing the business casual garb of their day job to the rock show. A group of ten or so of these drunks yelled out choruses of "Ole, Ole" and Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" ad nauseam before the Killers took the stage. During the Killers' set, one stocky red-headed fellow - and I cannot describe his face other than to say that it lent credence to phrenology, for it was the kind of face you have never seen inhabited by a person of any intelligence - pushed up in front of us with his girlfriend, the two of whom together rubbed up against us and all others around to the tempo of the music for 45 minutes of the set, their sensation blurred by a periodically ingested swill of whiskey and pills. Eventually, this guy's behavior got so bad that he nearly threw a punch at another girl standing nearby, and this during a cigarette-lighter (or now iPhone-lighter) anthem. It was then that we pushed our way out, through the crowd's sloppy mosh to Mr. Brightside ("Hey, I know that song!"), to stand near the back for the duration, where the crowd's off-rhythm chant of "I've got soul but I'm not a soldier" during the bridge to "All These Things That I've Done" would nearly be drowned out by the loud and fumbling efforts of Manhattan professionals to pull at the blouses and the inhibitions of their co-wokers.

All of this was substantially more disappointing to Manisha than it was to me, because hey, I've been to Metallica and Tool shows, and I generally find the sociology of rock concerts pretty amusing. Our enjoyment of the concert was impaired because we could not engage with the music above the clamor and the clawing of the crowd, which paid no attention to the performance other than to occasionally blare out half of a chorus in a drunken lilt like an old barroom saw. Why were all these people here to see the Killers, who are ostensibly a thoughtful, sophisticated band?

Part of this is because of the position the Killers occupy in pop culture right now, along with bands like the White Stripes and the Arcade Fire: they are not so prominent that they are immediately recognized as a super-act, like Beyonce, but their fan base is still huge, and largely mainstream. The Killers are like Amelie - all who watch it think themselves sophisticated for having seen a quirky French film (with subtitles!), even though it's immediately accessible to a broad audience and has made hundreds of millions of dollars (not just euros) at the box office. Or they're like Stuff White People Like - "A guide to the unique taste of millions." (Ironically, Stuff White People Like itself exemplifies this, because white people think they're special and hip for being among the millions who read the blog and think it's funny.)

But beyond the annoyance of the interruption of the crowd, there is a second temptation afoot in situations like these: a desire to separate oneself from the band out of contempt for their fans. Why should this matter? If we enjoy something genuinely, should it make a difference that others enjoy it insincerely or for low reasons? If the Killers really are good, they are good even if frat guys like them too.

Yet this is difficult, because so much of why we care about aesthetic matters, whether music, fashion, or art, is the external social message these things convey about us. And if all of our brothers in arms who listen to the same music are manifestly moronic, we worry about what others must think of us by association. That, and we wonder whether we're really just like them.

I have written before about the dangers of letting social pleasures get disguised as real pleasures. This is a particular danger with music, where we are likely to let social connotations and considerations of whether a band is enjoyed by the right crowd color our enjoyment of the music. How do we guard against this? Only by self-examination and a healthy skepticism about our tastes.

A good test is asking yourself whether you would still like the band even if you knew they were not popular, or even if they were reviled. Similarly, if you find yourself desperately ditching taste when the cloud of the Zeitgeist has passed over it, watch out. For instance, if you listened to "Of Montreal" all the time two years ago, but got ready to bail on them when Pitchfork gave their new record a low rating, you should be concerned. Or if you sent your boot-cuts to the Salvation Army when you saw all the indie guys in skinny jeans, you might need to second-guess yourself. At the same time, this doesn't mean that you should substitute riding the crest of the avant garde for ironic endorsement of that which is most emphatically not popular - this is the easy way out, and it has no more to do with real aesthetic pleasure than a blind desire to follow to any band who lists "Gang of Four" as an influence on their MySpace page.

Don't have guilty pleasures, but neither let them be your pride. Discover for yourself whether you really like something, and if you find that you do, let it be your banner, not your shame.

Krauthammer Lays the Hammer Down

2008-10-24T11:06:00.000-04:00

On why he's voting McCain.

The News

2008-10-13T22:02:00.003-04:00

Last night while at City Bistro in Hoboken with Manisha, Neal, and Mary, I was struck by a sweet pang of nostalgia when "Hip to be Square" by Huey Lewis & the News played over the sound system. I was delighted as it brought back to memory my early childhood, my first album ("Fore!"), my adulatory desire to have my hair cut like Huey himself, and my hope that I would run into him into Montana, where both he and my great aunt lived, so that I could preach to him the gospel, and he could repent and be saved. So tonight, in honor of Huey, I downloaded "Fore!" from iTunes (my only other copy was on tape).

Honestly, I can't tell if it's good or not. My head is so clouded by my reminiscence that I am unsure whether I am really enjoying those sparkling harmonies and joyful brass lines, or whether it is merely the associations with my youth that bring me a residual high, like an acid flashback. At least I can be grateful that Huey Lewis has been largely untouched by the ironic affections of indie 80s sympathizers, so one does not have their insincere embrace of "I Want a New Drug" along with Joy Division and Flock of Seagulls complicating things. So maybe my readers can help me: is Huey Lewis actually any good? To chew on, I leave you with the lyrics to "Hip to be Square":

I used to be a renegade, I used to fool around,
But I couldn't take the punishment, and had to settle down.
Now Im playing it real straight (and yes, I cut my hair).
You might think I'm crazy, but I don't even care,
Cuz I can tell whats going on -
It's hip to be square.

I like my bands in business suits, I watch them on tv.
I'm working out most everyday and watching what I eat.
They tell me that it's good for me, but I dont even care.
I know that its crazy
I know that its nowhere
But there is no denying that
It's hip to be square.

It's not too hard to figure out - you see it everyday.
And those that were the farthest out have gone the other way.
You see them on the freeway, it don't look like a lot of fun,
But dont you try to fight it - an idea whose time has come.

Cato on the Crash

2008-10-10T17:06:00.000-04:00

Worth your read.

They really aren't making themselves look sympathetic

2008-10-08T12:38:00.002-04:00

Post-bailout, AIG executives take a trip to a luxury spa. Check out the half-million-dollar bill.

Elliott

2008-10-06T00:05:00.003-04:00

I just watched a video on Helen's blog about a boy named Elliott born with Trisomy 18, which is a chromosomal disorder similar to Down's Syndrome. Like Down's Syndrome, Trisomy 18 can be detected in the womb, but it is much more serious. The majority of children who have it die before they're born, and those who make it to birth don't live much longer - Elliott only made it to 99 days. The video, which is perhaps a bit too sentimental (choked me up), chronicles Elliott's short life and shows how completely happy his parents were for every day they had him, trials and all. The video concludes with words from the book of Job: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; Blessed be the name of the Lord."

This video about Elliott made me reflect on a frequent theme in contemporary film and literature, specifically, the unreasonable reactions of parents who are disappointed with their children. This theme takes many forms - the square parents who don't want their son to play Rock and Roll, the quarterback father who is frustrated that his kid is a brain, the white parents who don't want their daughter with a black man, or the Christian parents who disown their son when he tells them he's gay. As audiences, we nod approvingly with the moral sentence handed down on these parents: your son is not just an extension of you; you have to be more tolerant; you must want his happiness more than your own. At the same time, however, our culture widely approves of acting on prenatal diagnoses of genetic disorders to abort a baby. In such circumstances, the parents haven't even waited for the child to prove himself; they have merely looked at the printout and said, "no son of mine," wishing to spare themselves the headache of a child whose abilities do not meet their standards, at the cost of that infant's life. It would be one thing if these were parents who bought the whole it's-a-fetus-not-a-child argument, but they are not - they are parents who would have called the same baby "son" if the test results were favorable. And this disgusts me.

One of the things I respect most about my father is the way he loves each of his wildly different children whole-heartedly and unconditionally. My father did not love me less because I wasn't Naval Academy material, nor did he love Graeme any less because he doesn't like to read. He raised us not as pet projects or as some means of fulfilling his own ambitions, but as unique individuals, each with our own set of gifts and desires. All he asked was that we love God - but even the love of God was instilled in us not as his paternal expectation, but as the wish of our much higher Heavenly Father.

In short, my father was a good example of what God has done for man: He has loved us unconditionally, in spite of our defects, and He has called us to freedom in Him. Our culture has sought to give us all this love and this freedom with humanism and a professed respect for the individual, disdaining the imposition of parental expectation on subsequent generations, but this has been only talk, as we readily murder infants because they don't meet spec. God help us.

Cross Promotion Has Got a Bit Out of Hand

2008-10-02T19:31:00.000-04:00

I just saw a companion book to Lego Batman: the Videogame.

The Ironies of Negative Rights

2008-09-30T22:34:00.005-04:00

Conservative jurists are fond of stating that our American Constitution is "a limiting document," that it offers a unique structure of negative rights. They offer a happy comparison with the constitutions of European States, which are sprawling enumerations of specific guarantees of freedoms to the citizenry, and note, citing the "Congress shall make no law" phraseology in our Bill of Rights, that the US Constitution is not so much about what the state must do for you as what the state may not do to you. However, at bottom, a negative right is no different from a positive right. Sure, they are phrased differently, but they achieve the same end: one side of the legal line is restricted, and the other side is left free. For instance, the First Amendment guarantee that "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion" could just as well be phrased "All persons shall be free of laws by Congress respecting the establishment of religion."

The only difference between negative and positive rights is socio-psychological. Citizens in a state structured with negative rights are likely to be more suspicious of government power, less ready to let it intrude in their lives, whereas citizens in a positive rights government are more likely to look to government for solutions to their personal problems. But that may be circular; perhaps those who naturally dislike government intrusion simply tend to phrase their laws as negative rights. Moreover, this does not mean that the mere fact that a right is stated in negative or positive terms has any bearing on its content as law. Whether the right is restrictive of the public (e.g., citizens have the right to be free from racial discrimination in public accommodations) or restrictive of the government (e.g., no taking of private property for public use without just compensation), it is inevitably negative on one side, and positive on the other.

Our negative rights system is nonetheless fascinating. Horrified by the evils committed by the rulers of Old-World European states, the Founding Fathers wished to curb government's natural inclination to increase its own power by memorializing restrictions on its power in the fundamental law of the United States. They were as Ulysses lashing himself to the mast so he would not be seduced by the sirens and pulled to his death. However, when one of these negative rights restricting government power is called into question because of an alleged abuse, someone has to be there to enforce it. The government must itself have the power to restrain its own action if it violates the negative right--that is, the ropes with which Ulysses bound himself must be strong enough to hold him down.

But this defeats the whole purpose of negative rights in limiting the power of government--the government must be vested with enough power to enforce its own limitations on that power. This problem is a perhaps a partial explanation of why many decrees of the US Constitution were not widely enforced until the 20th century, when the government had finally attained enough power to give real weight to the principles of its fundamental law. For example, the Supreme Court was only able to ascribe deep, meaningful content to the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantees in the 1960s because by then it had reached an institutional height of power such that it no longer needed to operate within the confines of the law as written (consider Justice Brennan's quip, "With five votes you can do anything around here!").

And thus we see that, absent a powerful state to enforce them, the negative rights guaranteed in this limiting document are nothing but empty promises. This is not really a limited government. If government is truly limited, it is limited extrinsically--by the territorial claims of outsiders, the will of the mob, etc. Self-limited government, on the other hand, is just an oxymoron.

The Bailout, and Why We'll See Congressional Approval Drop Below Its Already Abyssmal Twenty Percent

2008-09-29T14:29:00.002-04:00

As of this writing, the bailout bill was defeated in the House. In my mind, this is a really stupid move on Congress' part. They can harp all they want to about how financial institutions must learn to bear their own losses, and how the American taxpayer shouldn't have to shoulder this burden, both of which are true statements, but of absolutely no use here. Like it or not, bailout or no bailout, the American taxpayer will pay--he can either pay now with a cataclysmic crash in uncertainty, or he can pay in deferred payments over time, the value of which will be decreased by inflation. And sure, Wall Street must learn to bear its own losses, but in this situation, that's like refusing to put out a forest fire just because we want to teach little Johnny not to play with matches--the financial institutions' interests are intertwined with our own, and if they suffer, so will we all. The bill's opponents are just engaging in oppose-the-unpopular-administration politics (see Michael Moore's recent rant), propped up by a silly idealism that smacks of Ron Paul's abolish-the-Fed lunacy, and I fear that, like Stalin, their purported zeal for uplifting the common man will merely starve him.

Your thoughts?

Ennui or Attainment?

2008-09-28T20:53:00.008-04:00

I would really love to write something tonight, as I find myself with all sorts of time, but I find myself in a very odd position for a Wilson--I have nothing to say. In fact, readers who have followed this blog from its inception may have noticed that over the last couple years, my postings have gone from one or two a day to one or two a month. Why is this?

Well, I think it's a few things. I wrote like a madman in my first year of law school because I was so excited by my new surroundings. The metropolitan setting gave me all sorts of food for thought, which I devoured daily, always asking myself how I would frame my experiences and casual philosophies in prose. And there were all the questions in my eager heart, those of God, politics, art, women, ambition, and the like. And perhaps most of all, I really didn't have many friends, so I had lots of solitary time in my apartment to think. (But somehow that was a happy, happy year alone; there is a time and place for everything.)

But things have changed substantially since then. On the immediate level, I've just had less time, since I've taken on new responsibilities. But as now, even when I have time, I find it harder to write. I think this is because I am getting comfortable (read: old). I have a job that I really enjoy. I have wrestled through to working philosophies, both religious and political, in which I am at ease operating. Most of all, I have a girlfriend--impressing chicks is one of the main reasons one writes, always with the hope that some cute girl will surf across the internet to find your blog, and then, wowed by the quality of your thought and your character, email you to suggest you meet up at the local bookstore to discuss your mutual affinity for heavy metal and originalism--but I've now found that girl, and the liberty I have to bark my strange ideas at her every day over coffee leaves me less eager to bark them into the void and onto the black pages of this blog.

Something of the fight has left me, or at least left me for a while. I am satiated, and somehow I now get more of a craving for stupid Will Ferrell movies than I do for challenging dramas charged with racial themes. It is not just my heart that has fattened (hopefully not in a day of slaughter) but also my figure--last year was the first since 8th grade that I gained weight. Just a couple pounds around my gut, but it speaks all too clearly of my mortality.

Yesterday was a nice day--I bought a new comforter for my bed, as well as two side tables. I realized how much I was looking like Frank the Tank in Old School: "Yeah, pretty nice little Saturday planned . . . We're going to Home Depot, maybe Bed Bath & Beyond . . . I don't know if we'll have time." But the thing was, I really enjoyed it! Didn't bother me an ounce. Nothing I would have rather done than pick out end tables. Perhaps this is just growing up, and just the next phase, which I will gladly accept, but perhaps it's just a temporary calm, and I will soon find my head and my heart awash with new ideas and filled with the yearning to express them. Who knows. But in the meantime, I'll just post some pictures from my apartment, in all its glorious yuppitude.

On the Economy

2008-09-22T23:43:00.002-04:00

This article is worth your read. And David Brooks' recent editorial is also.

On Lehman, etc.

2008-09-16T08:20:00.003-04:00

As the New York financial world falls apart around us in what former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is calling a once-in-a-century economic event, I am very grateful to God for where I've been placed. The financial turmoil has its effect on the NY legal services industry, which depends on growth via new deals for much of its revenue. Many firms, low on work, have ceased hiring now and are doing what they can to stop the bleeding by deferring start dates for their new associates. Few feel secure. However, I was fortunate enough to start at a firm that, unknown to me at the time I accepted my offer, is so diverse and globalized in its areas of practice that there is little real threat to me from the current crisis.

I'm thinking back right now on a great interview I had with a big New York firm in my second year of law school. At the time, it had the largest profits-to-partner ratio of any major firm in the nation. I got along wonderfully with the interviewer, who was also a Seton Hall alum and a musician. Everything seemed perfectly poised for him to grant me a callback interview, and then I said something at the end of the interview that, as I realized later, was uncommonly stupid. No callback. But now that firm, which was right at the heart of the sub-prime business, has fired 100 associates and is deferring start dates for incoming associates. There is even talk of winding up this firm, which is one of the old Wall Street giants. I am so glad that I never got that callback interview.

Thank you, God, for giving me those stupid words.

Palin

2008-09-05T12:43:00.003-04:00

Of all the articles I've read on McCain's VP pick, many of them quite good, this one from the UK is probably the best.

Raising the Bar

2008-09-02T17:14:00.000-04:00

Makes me proud of my good ole alma mater.

Memet

2008-07-28T22:31:00.001-04:00

Tim Hagen's got a post worth reading on his blog.

Agenda

2008-07-28T14:57:00.004-04:00

Beginning tomorrow at 9am EST, Manisha and I will begin taking the New York and New Jersey bar exams, which will occupy us for the next 3 days. I'm pretty much recovered from my illness, and I feel prepared for the tests--thank you to all of you who prayed for me. If you think of it in the next couple days, please pray that we pass.

On August 2nd, we're flying to San Diego for my grandmother's 80th birthday. We'll spend some time with Andy Jacobs while we're there, and then head up to L.A. to see some of my family and some of Manisha's. On August 9th, we fly up to Idaho, where Manisha will be for a week and where I will be until the beginning of September. For as many of you who are in Moscow, give me a call. I look forward to seeing you all.

The Newsworthiness of the Newark Starbucks

2008-07-23T11:35:00.003-04:00

I've blogged before about the significance of our Newark Starbucks--we originally had one location in a city of 250,000, and now we have two (technically three, but I've never seen the third). Compare that to Manhattan, where there are almost 400 Starbucks locations in that borough alone. Well, with the downturn that Starbucks as a corporation has recently experienced, the original Newark Starbucks location is one of the 600 stores slated for closure--it's just not profitable, and they don't think it will be anytime soon. This has prompted outrage among the patrons of the local Starbucks, and there are petitions going around to try and save it; while Starbucks represents the blight of yuppiedom in most locales, in Newark, it has truly been a beacon of hope for redevelopment.

So this outrage caught someone's attention, and the New York Times sent reporters to our Newark Starbucks. The manager, defending corporate interests, tried to keep them out and away. When I walked by yesterday, the NYT photographer was filling out a police report, because someone associated with the manager had threatened him with violence if he took any more pictures from the sidewalk. Nevertheless, the intrepidation of the press prevailed, and the New York Times today ran an article on the scheduled closure of our beloved Newark Starbucks, which you may read here.

Reason v. Faith

2008-07-21T10:20:00.002-04:00

I might have addressed this in some capacity in another blog post--forgive me any redundancy.

In many of the conversations I have had with young atheists and agnostics, the principal justification that they offer for their disbelief in God is that the idea is contrary to reason. God commands faith, doesn't He? What is faith but believing what you can't see? Why should the young man trust the command of a Person he's never met and throw himself haplessly into a religion without any inkling of whether it's true? This young man would much prefer to rely on reason, yes, reason and science, to lead him to truth. Reason doesn't lie; reason he can trust. Reason and science have explained the universe and filled our world with wonderful, life-saving technologies, but what has faith given us but jihad and crusade?

I submit that the conflict between reason and faith is mostly illusory. While reason and faith are distinct ideas, in almost every situation they overlap. But let's first define our terms.

The definition of faith from Hebrews seems like a good place to start. I use it because the whole debate about faith has generally centered around Christianity and Christian notions of faith, and because I think the definition is generally fair and amenable to all. Part of the problem with our confusion over reason and faith is that we limit the idea of faith exclusively to religious contexts, but even the Christian idea of faith describes a general state of knowing that is not confined to religious matters. Faith is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." And what is reason? Here I offer no Oxford or Webster's, but rather what I think is a fair definition of reason for these purposes: reason is the logical process by which one infers from acknowledged truths other propositions that are likely or necessarily true. This definition describes both inductive reasoning, of which the scientific method is a species, and deductive reasoning, which encompasses math and propositional logic.

Now to the intersection of faith and reason. Let me begin with an illustration. Suppose I set in front of you three opaque cups turned upside down, and tell you that you are to assume that under one of these cups there is a rubber ball. Suppose then that you turn over two of the cups, and discover that the ball is under neither of them. Obviously, if what I told you is true, then you know that the rubber ball must be under the third cup. Here, both faith and reason are operative. Faith is operative because we cannot see under the third cup, and yet we are convinced the ball must be there. Reason is operative in that we may logically conclude from the premises (the ball is under cup A, B, or C; it is not under cup A; it is not under cup B) that the ball is under the third cup. The two concepts do not exclude one another; here, they operate together.

In fact, reason wouldn't be any good to us if it didn't involve some faith. Reason is valuable precisely because it tells us about things we cannot see, because it infers the unseen from the seen. By reason Galileo inferred from what he saw through a telescope truths about the fundamental structure of the solar system, something he could not see. By reason scientists developed hypotheses about atomic structure, that which they could not see. By reason a man can predict how his actions toward his wife now might affect their relationship in the future, though he cannot see the future. If reason only told us about things we could already see, it would be superfluous. Only reason that operates with faith has any value.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that all faith involves reason, or that all faith is reasonable. But neither is faith, as a concept, anti-reason. Rather, different faiths have varying degrees of reasonableness. We would characterize the faith we have in the structure of the solar system as very reasonable, and the faith that the Branch-Davidians had in cult leader David Koresh as very unreasonable. In between those two extremes are most of our other ideas about things we can't fully see, all of which lie upon some continuum of reasonableness--the harmfulness of trans fats, the danger of global warming, the utility of capital punishment, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the reader is suspicious that what I am doing with words here is rather like what a con artist does with the three cups and the rubber ball described above. Even if he concedes my point as a matter of linguistics, he will note that there is obviously a big difference between accepting the time-tested, verified ideas of scientists about the solar system, and living one's life based on teachings found in an ancient, thousand-page, leather-bound book. I'll grant that there's a difference, but let me point out two things.

First, the main difference between accepting scientific truths and living one's life according to the gospel of Jesus Christ is the confirmatory ability of science. There are certain scientific hypotheses that were once taken on a great deal of faith, but that, as technology has advanced, we have been able to actually observe. For instance, we once had to guess about the nature of the atom, but now with the electron microscope, we can look at it; we once had to guess about what the moon was like, but post-Armstrong, we can land on it and touch it. That which was once faith becomes un-faith, or at least less-faith. On the other hand, with Christianity, or any religious faith for that matter, we have much less confirmatory power. If Jesus Christ tells me that if I believe in Him I will not be damned but will instead be saved, well, there's no way I can know about that until I die. I have no ability to confirm my ultimate faith with sight, at least not in this life.

But that lack of ability to confirm is no justification for disbelief; it simply means that I have to wait. It does not go to the reasonableness of my faith, it only goes to my ability to verify that faith. And because of the unique nature of mortality (as Jim Morrison said, no-one gets out of here alive) and the complete inability of science to tell us what, if anything, happens to the maybe-soul inside us after we die, there is no point in refraining from answering the question simply because we can't confirm it now. We must answer it, one way or another, and we must answer it on faith.

Second, in answer to the objections on the difference between the reasoned acceptance of scientific hypotheses and taking the truth of the Scriptures on faith, I submit that the difference between the two is not as extreme as it is often characterized. This is not a contest between the words of unimpeachable Ph.D.s in lab coats and witch doctors muttering nonsense imprecations and incantations. In fact, it is not necessarily a contest at all. Go ahead, accept what the guys in lab coats say. But accept also the equally weighty evidence for the truth of the gospel--the historical record, the archaeological record, the textual evidence, the philosophical evidence, the moral evidence. Setting forth this evidence is beyond the scope of this blog, but the reader would do well to pursue it. Faith in God, you may come to see, is quite reasonable.

Obama Fever

2008-07-20T17:32:00.001-04:00

Another excellent article on Obama's international influence.

An Epistemology of Want

2008-07-19T20:36:00.004-04:00

Finding myself in conversations with atheists in which I have contended for the faith, I have been reflecting on the words of the author of Hebrews that "whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek him." This language is an abomination to a Western-minded realist, who would prefer something more along the lines of "whoever would draw near to God must believe in an objective reality and philosophically sound means of ascertaining truth." This intellectual realist can't stand the presupposition in the quote: "You mean I have to believe in Him first before I can find Him? But that's the whole question!" He may begin to think that any god who expects to be found via immediate concession to his existence and beneficence is a god not worth finding. The likely agnostic will have none of it--if he is ever to be converted, he will only be converted with dignity, having impartially weighed all the evidence and found for God, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Now, for the sake of argument, let us grant that God did not create a world in which His existence and beneficence are readily apparent to the average man beyond a reasonable doubt (Rom. 1:20 notwithstanding). But He certainly could have created such a world. The example I often use is that God could have His existence writ large in the sky every day, with a new miracle daily establishing its authenticity, just so mankind would not forget. Yet this is not the world He has created; rather, He has given us a world where the believer can marvel at the wonder of His handiwork in Creation and the depth of love in His personal providence, but where the atheist, Buddhist, Muslim and Mormon can semi-plausibly claim it is not so. Why, when the stakes on the question are so high, has He not made it more obvious?

Here is where the Hebrews quote provides an answer: God created the world as He did not so our abstract desire for truth would move us toward Him, but so our desire for Him would move us toward the truth. He wants us to want Him to be true. He wants us to look upon His gospel, the power to freely redeem us from our sin and from the futility of existence, and find that message to be infinitely preferable to the emptiness of Buddhism, the slavery of Islam, or the cosmic gloom of atheism. He has so placed men in the world "that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him." (Acts 17:27). If the prospect of a loving Savior doesn't sing to our hearts more than the roaring chaos of the Big Empty, God would just as soon not have us.

Now, none of this is to say that, as a matter of philosophical epistemology, our wants have anything to do with what is true. I may want to look like Brad Pitt all day, but that wish should not lead me to believe that I bear him any resemblance. The distinction here is in the difference between the processes of philosophical epistemology, in which a desire for a proposition to be true has no bearing on its actual truth, and the epistemology God has laid out for us as to the ultimate truth--that He wants our desires to lead us to Him. As we are led to Him by our desires, it is not as though we abandon everything we know about why things are true, suddenly taking everything on illegitimate authority and wishful thinking. Rather, we hope our longings will be supported by our bedrock commitment to the truth. In this, we progress toward belief, which C. S. Lewis eloquently described as the psychological exclusion of doubt, but not the logical exclusion of dispute. Indeed, even Lewis, whose conversion was markedly intellectual by most standards, ultimately surrendered to God not because of the evidence in history, philosophy, or literature, but because of joy, the longing in his heart for redemption.

But though the believer is moved by his want for God, that does not mean the atheist is not similarly moved by his want for not-God. Modern man has been told that he can select his tools of epistemology and philosophy and then, as his best lights suggest, select from the myriad offerings before him the worldview he thinks most plausible (invariably he picks atheism or agnosticism, thinking it the heroic, intellectual choice). But whether atheism or theism is true, man is not some great, extrinsic mind, carefully selecting the best quality systematic explanation from among the others as though it were a superior pair of designer jeans--he is infintessimally small, inferior, subordinate, looking up at or out into the terrifying cosmos that, whether personally or impersonally, owns him. That is, whichever system is true, man has a lot on the line, and a good reason to be suspicious of his motivations in selecting any religion. In either case, his wants and fears, whether for a saving God or for freedom of choice, whether of a commitment to others or of the terror of nothingness, will in great measure inform the view he takes of the world that looms large around Him. In such a grim scenario, there is little room for courageous objectivity, and Want becomes ground zero of Everyman's ultimate epistemology.

P.S. As you might gather from the fact that I had time to write this, I'm feeling much better. The steroids the doctors gave me have kept my tonsil issues to a minimum, and I have the energy and mental stamina I need to stay on top of my studies. Please pray though for complete healing, and most of all, that Manisha and I will both pass the bar. Thanks.

L.D.W.

The Audacity of Vanity

2008-07-19T13:28:00.000-04:00

Ouch.

An Update

2008-07-17T20:47:00.002-04:00

So, nearly two weeks out of the hospital, it turns out I don't have viral hepatitis--misdiagnosis. The problems with my swollen and malfunctioning liver are actually traceable to the virus I do have, mononucleosis. This has also resulted in a flare-up with my tonsils; they're huge now and I have a tough time swallowing.

Long story short, this means I'm going to be sick for another 2-6 weeks. In all likelihood, I will still be sick when I take the New York and New Jersey bar exams on July 29-31. It is going to be difficult to get in all the preparation I need for these exams, as well as have the energy I need to take them. Please pray for the physical strength to do so and for the spiritual strength to count all of this as joy, knowing it comes for the strengthening of my faith.

Thanks much,

LDW

A Sickness Observed, Per My Father's Suggestion

2008-07-10T08:58:00.003-04:00

Thanks for all your prayers; I'm feeling much better in the past couple days, and Manisha's taken good care of me. I'll go in for a check-up today to track my progress. Pray that it goes well.

***

When I began to feel ill last week, I thought it was going to be a standard one- or two-day fever that I could beat with some rest and a lot of fluids. My Stoicism told me that this was just the sort of thing one had to occasionally endure, and that if I kept my chin up and my eyes on the horizon, I'd emerge shortly the better for it. But my Stoicism has its limits; apparently it taps out around the 6-day mark. It was then that I found myself getting worse, unable to keep any food or water down, so I checked into the emergency room at UMDNJ.

I chose UMDNJ because my last experience with a Newark ER (St. Michael's in 2006) was less than ideal - 28 hours in one bed, howls all around me, drug overdoses, drug-related assaults, and holding my possessions to my chest through the night lest they be wrested from me by one of the winos wandering through the halls. So UMDNJ was a step up, but only slightly so. It is still in Newark; the craziness of that particular community is a substantial hurdle to the administration of any health-care agency. As such, I waited four hours from the time I checked into the ER for them to take the first step and stick an IV in my arm.

Weak, nauseous, feverish and uncertain of my ailment, I waited in the ER for 16 hours while the doctors and staff ran me through a panoply of tests - blood, X-ray, urine, ultrasound, CT scan. At the end of those 16 hours, approximately 5:30 Monday morning, the doctors told me that I had Hepatitis and that they would discharge me. I didn't feel in any shape to be discharged - I threw up on myself (bile and a few sips of water) shortly after the diagnosis and had barely enough strength to put my clothes on. Chris Elko was the only person I could get a hold of this early in the morning, and he graciously agreed to pick me up and take me back to my apartment. At home, now with a diagnosis, but feeling twice as awful as the day before, I realized that this was the most miserable I had ever felt in my entire life. It had been bad enough enduring a week of the sickness, and now the doctors told me I had two more weeks ahead of me, two weeks where I wouldn't be studying, two weeks at the end of which I am supposed to move to a new apartment. I felt helpless.

I always feel strangely cheated when I get diagnosed with a virus. The doctors fuss over you for as long as the diagnostic process takes, seeming very official, intelligent, and in control of every vein, neuron, and ligament that makes you tick, and at the end of it all they tell you, somehow without the air of defeat, that it's a virus and there's nothing you can do except wait it out. But I am an American consumer! I demand more! I mean, this is the 21st century isn't it? There's clearly a market for curing viruses - do I have to utter the password and slip the doctor a couple fat bills under the table to get fixed? But I've just grown fat and happy (not in the literal sense), and expect not only that as things are they will always be, but also that I have a right to my present good circumstances, whether my career, my health, or my free time. I must remember that, as Solomon says, "time and chance happen to them all."

So I tried to remove myself from my young-and-upwardly-mobile mentality about the sickness, and began to give the matter some spiritual reflection. The verse that kept running through my head was Paul's line from Philippians that "for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in Him, but also suffer for His sake." I thought to myself then that this was simply my turn to suffer; God bore the ultimate pain, shame and disgrace for me, so couldn't I bear with a little for Him?

But then I chided myself for my terrible exegesis of the passage, for I was neglecting the second part of the quote: "engaged in the same conflict which you saw and now hear to be mine." The conflict Paul spoke of was his ministry of the gospel while in prison and under persecution for his faith; how was that anything like me having Hepatitis? Was my sickness some sort of stand for the faith? Was I bearing pain in myself that another would be healed? No, it was nothing of the kind. My suffering, while it was certainly suffering, was not essentially Christian suffering - it was the shared ache and agony of the world's futility, the pain of mortality. This pain was not the persecution believers must expect from the world, and neither was it the discipline that proves we are God's children. It was the universal pain that is designed to point us to God, to long for something better.

I read further in Philippians, and came across Paul's remarks about Epaphroditus, which were more on point:

I have thought it necessary to send to you Epaphrodi'tus my brother and fellow worker and fellow soldier, . . . for he has been longing for you all, and has been distressed because you heard that he was ill. Indeed he was ill, near to death. But God had mercy on him, and not only on him but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow. I am the more eager to send him, therefore, that you may rejoice at seeing him again, and that I may be less anxious. So receive him in the Lord with all joy; and honor such men, for he nearly died for the work of Christ, risking his life to complete your service to me.

This, I thought, was the model of the sick Christian. Epaphroditus was sicker than I (near to death), but he was distressed not so much by bearing his own sickness as by the effect it had on others. Epaphroditus thought only about the work of Christ in his sickness, not about some entitlement he had to health or happiness. We are to honor such men, but if I were held up to this bar, would I be honored? I think not. My thoughts had been fairly selfish in all of this. What was lacking in my perspective? Why did I care more about my tummy ache than I did about Christ's expectations for my life?

And so I learned that my Stoicism was in one respect too strong and in another not strong enough. It was too strong in that it told me that there was reward in merely bearing up with the illness. The only reward of bearing up with illness in itself is eventual death, whether sooner or later. If I was hoping for vindication simply in keeping a strong jaw about the whole thing, I'd find none. But in another respect, my Stoicism was too weak, because my ability to bear up with the weakness failed me after a few days. I realized that though I am 26 and in my prime, I can only expect more illness, weakness, and failure for the rest of my life. I had not enough of the unquenchable verve of youth in me to carry me through the sickness; I am not Invictus.

These two problems are linked; my Stoicism failed because it had no end to it other than duty. What it needed was desire. If this suffering of the flesh is common to all, it should serve only to make me desire more earnestly that which transcends it. Binding myself to Stoicism leaves me marching sternly down a tunnel the end of which I know is in the darkness of the earth, but living rightly, I live by the light, and in it there is no cause for stumbling. Perhaps most on point:

Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

Prayer Request

2008-07-07T18:23:00.002-04:00

I've been really sick for the last week, and after a day-long stay in the ER, it turns out I have hepatitis. They don't know which type it is yet, but it's likely to be A or B, and they caught it relatively quick. After a couple weeks, I should be back to normal again. However, with studying for the bar and getting ready to move, two weeks off my feet is a pretty heavy burden. I would appreciate your prayers.

Thanks,

Lincoln Davis Wilson

Theophobia

2008-06-20T15:29:00.001-04:00

From PrawfsBlawg.

On the Authority of the Scriptures

2008-06-18T09:31:00.003-04:00

After an interesting discussion on Josh’s blog about the nature of the authority of the church fathers, I thought it needful to draft a statement of what I affirmatively believe about spiritual authority, rather than merely setting it out responsively in the comments section of Josh’s posts. Two central questions will frame the essence of my disagreement with Josh and the other readers and commenters on his blog: (I) Why are the Scriptures spiritually authoritative, and (II), are the church or the church fathers spiritually authoritative, and if so, to what extent? Because of length concerns, I will address only the first question in this post, and take up the second question in a subsequent post.

I. Why are the Scriptures Spiritually Authoritative?

This larger question presents two sub-issues: one of the ground of Scriptural authority, and a second of how we as finite creatures may recognize that authority. As to the first issue of the basis of Scriptural authority, I expect that both Catholics and Rome-ward leaning Protestants would agree with me that Scripture is fundamentally authoritative because it is God-breathed, not because it is ratified by man (see 2 Tim. 3:16-17). Having resolved this, we are left with the second, epistemological question—how do we know what is authoritative? I will first address the traditional answer to that question, and then offer my answer.

A. The Authority of the Church Councils

The orthodox view is that we may know the canon is spiritually authoritative because the church said so, specifically, at the Council of Carthage in 397. However, at that time, the canon still included some of the books of the Apocrypha. As debate within the church progressed over the centuries, different books came in and out of acceptance. For instance, the Revelation of St. John and Hebrews were oft-disparaged, and the Shepherd of Hermas was frequently included. Eventually, dispute over the canon coalesced into two divergent views at the Reformation, with the Protestants adopting the traditional 66 books and the Catholics, at the Council of Trent, adopting those 66 books plus the Apocrypha.

Thus the contention that the authority of the church councils established the canon cannot answer the question. Which church? Which church council? When? Why Carthage? Why not the Synod of Laodicea? Why not Trent? Or perhaps we should adopt all the church councils—perhaps certain books go in and out of spiritual authoritativeness as the church alternately approves or disapproves them?

The advocate for church authority will perhaps answer my rhetorical questions by making any number of distinctions. X book was rightly rejected by one council because it advocated a heresy; Y book was rightly included by another council because of the valuable instruction it provides on Christ’s work on the cross; Z council was not official because of some church split, etc. But drawing these distinctions only proves my point. When we offer distinctions on these bases, we make plain that these other criteria, and not mere church fiat, are our determinants of spiritual authority. And who determines these criteria? We do. It is not really the church that is the authority; it is we who establish the canon—we are free to employ the church council stamp of authority when we agree with the decision reached, masking our preferences as submission to authority, though we are ready to distinguish that authority on any ground we please when one of those church councils goes against our ideas of the way things ought to be. As my mother has said of submission, “it’s not submission unless you don’t want to do it.”

B. An Evidentiary Approach

So if the church councils didn’t make the canon authoritative, what did? I suggest an evidentiary approach, considered under the totality of the circumstances. I understand that this is uncomfortable for many, because we crave authority and definitiveness. But even those who believe the church fathers authoritatively established the canon should recognize that the process used by the church fathers to determine the canon was fundamentally an evidentiary process. For us, many factors will be considered in making this evidentiary evaluation, among which are:

The witness of the Holy Spirit in our hearts;
The internal consistency of a given work;
Its consistency with recognized Scripture, including the extent to which it fulfills Old Testament Scripture;
The consistency of the work with the saving gospel as orally preached;
The proximity of the writing of the work to the events it describes;
The age of the oldest available manuscripts;
The authorship of the work (e.g., by an apostle, friend of Christ; perhaps explaining why the church was so reticent to adopt Hebrews);
Corroboration by other authorities (e.g., historical, archaeological, contemporaneous non-Christian accounts);
And, of course, the opinions of the church councils and church fathers—highly persuasive, but not binding.

Although I list the opinions of the church councils and the church fathers last, I do acknowledge their importance. I list them last because, in fact, the early church would have considered most of the other factors above in reaching a conclusion as to which Scriptures were authoritative. The church councils and church fathers are powerful evidence for us today because of their proximity in time to the actual events; having been only a few generations removed from Christ, they were in a better position to make this assessment than we are. Thus we should consider what they have said, but on an evidentiary basis, not for the declarative authority of their ultimate determination.

However, because we consider the church councils and fathers only on an evidentiary basis, we may part company with them on certain issues without fearing logical inconsistency or hellfire. For instance, we disagree with the Council of Carthage because we do not recognize the Apocrypha as consistent with the Spirit’s inspiration as revealed in other Scripture, and we do not heed the church fathers who accepted other pseudopigraphal works because the message in those works is contrary to the gospel as preached (“As we have said before, so now I say again, if any one is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed.” Gal. 1:9).

To better understand why this evidentiary approach makes sense, perhaps we should put ourselves in the position of the early church, which heard only an oral gospel, before the message had ever been committed to writing. The early church members would have heard and received the gospel, repenting of their sins and turning to Christ for salvation. After this, they would have been given the Holy Spirit, which would empower them to live holy lives, and they would recognize that authority as truth-bearing in their lives. By way of illustration, someone in the early church reading 1 John would have recognized the authority of the Holy Spirit where John writes that “the anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie, just as it has taught you, abide in him.” 1 John 2:26.

Further, having heard that Jesus appointed the apostles, early Christians would have trusted those men as authorities. Saint Paul, for instance, must have seemed particularly authoritative, and given his prior standing as a Pharisee and dramatic conversion, (“He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.” Gal. 1:23), he would have seemed highly trustworthy. Again, John preaches in his first letter that “[w]e are of God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and he who is not of God does not listen to us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” 1 John 4:6. This quote embraces two factors indicating Scriptural authority: (1) the authority of the apostles, and (2) consistency with the gospel message.

And further, the early church also would have understood the apostles’ interpretations of Christ’s fulfillment of Old Testament Scripture, accepting them on that basis. Along with this, they would know that the accounts of others such as Matthew and Mark were of people who actually knew Christ, whose connection to Him could be easily verified. They also would have respected the histories of Luke, given the comprehensive research of his gospel and his connection to St. Paul, which is apparent in Acts. It is thus appropriate to adopt an epistemology of the Scriptures consistent with the approach that would have been used by the early church, those who first heard the gospel.

C. Conclusion

While this evidentiary approach is less consoling than an ecclesiastical approach in its lack of certitude, I think it is important to remember that our religion is about faith—the conviction of things unseen. Ultimately, I think my faith more justified in the evidence of God’s revelation of the truth to the world than in the majority-vote decision of an ecclesiastical tribunal. Further, it seems improper to view the canon as magically definitive when there was no certainty about it for over 200 years of church history, and a wide divergence of views about it until the 1500s. A final retort to my view might argue that Scripture itself declares the authority of the church to declare Scripture, but that is more closely related my second point on the spiritual authority of the church, so I will address it in my subsequent post. I welcome dispute in the comments below, but will probably only be able to respond to the general thrust of any criticism.

And it gets better . . .

2008-06-17T09:05:00.000-04:00

Check this out.

Lawsuits among believers

2008-06-16T11:11:00.000-04:00

This one is quite ridiculous.

Victory

2008-06-05T10:35:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday, I argued my first case, McLamb v. County of Suffolk, before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The case was an appeal of the dismissal of a section 1983 claim made by a state prisoner, Jefferson McLamb. He was initially proceeding pro se until the case was assigned to Seton Hall's Impact Litigation Clinic for representation on appeal. This allowed me, a student, as well as my co-counsel Matthew Heimann, to argue a real case before a federal appellate court under the supervision of Professor Jon Romberg.

Today, the Court issued its decision in the case by summary order, finding for our client. This was a remarkably short time for decision. I'm quite pleased. You may read the opinion, though it won't necessarily make any sense to you, here.

Graduation

2008-05-26T14:22:00.005-04:00

Pardon the absence - I've had a very busy couple of weeks after finals and up through graduation. I'll give you the highlights. My band, the Restatements, played the Cap & Gown party for the law school, and rocked to our hearts' content. My immediate family all flew in for my graduation, as well as my grandmother and my Aunt Heather. I had an excellent steak dinner with my family at Del Frisco's, and an even better dinner at Buddakan with my family and friends, including Asher, Andy, Yonaty, and of course, Manisha. I got to take my father to the Met, Strand Bookstore, and Hudson Bar & Books, which is one of the few places you can still smoke a stogie indoors in New York.

It was a really great extended weekend, and I was happy that I and everyone else were able to enjoy it. But above all, I am grateful to God for all the blessings. I am grateful to have a sensible and godly family, with whom love has never been in doubt, and a wonderful girlfriend. I am grateful for my friends and for their loyalty over many years. And naturally, I am very grateful to God for bringing me with much success through law school, and for providing me with many exciting opportunities afterward. I only hope to continue in faithfulness to Him.

I didn't take any pictures over the weekend, and no-one else has sent me anything yet. However, the camera team from the school ended up taking a few pictures of us, which I post here:
I promise I wasn't stoned - you know that's just how I look.
Manisha at the commencement ceremony.
Andy and Michal at the Cap & Gown Party.

Final Final

2008-05-09T16:35:00.001-04:00

I have my last tonight - four hours of Family Law at 6:15 EST. After that, I just have to wrap a few things up with Law Review and the Impact Litigation Clinic, and then the J.D. is mine. Your prayers are appreciated.

Flakiness

2008-05-09T15:49:00.000-04:00

My sister has some great thoughts on failure to commit.

New Weezer

2008-05-08T14:38:00.002-04:00

I haven't listened to Weezer for the last couple albums, but I'm somewhat impressed with their newest single, "Pork and Beans." The music itself isn't too impressive - it's standard, circa-1995 Weezer - but the lyrics are worth hearing, especially in the context of Rivers Cuomo's career, as they are a simple statement that he doesn't care what the critics expect, he wants to make music that people like (much like the Tool song about selling out, the title of which is unmentionable here, but begins with H).

With the exception of the blue album, Weezer's commercial success has been more inversely proportional to their critical respect than almost any other band I can think of - anyone with taste knows it's their duty to embrace "Pinkerton," the commercial failure, and to malign the Green Album and "Maladroit," which put them back on the charts. Rivers cannot but disappoint his fans, who all seem to have a better idea of what Weezer is supposed to be than he does. In any event, I give you the lyrics to "Pork and Beans."

They say I need some rogaine to put in my hair
Work it out at the gym to fit my underwear
Okaley makes the shades to transform a tool
You'd hate for the kids to think that you've lost your cool

Imma do the things that I wanna do
I ain't got a thing to prove to you
I'll eat my candy with the pork and beans
Excuse my manners if I make a scene
I ain't gonna wear the clothes that you like
I'm fine and dandy with the me inside
One look in the mirror and I'm tickled pink
I don't give a hoot about what you think

Everyone likes to dance to a happy song
With a catchy chorus and beat so they can sing along
Timbaland knows the way to reach the top of the charts
Maybe if I work with him I can perfect the art

Imma do the things that I wanna do
I ain't got a thing to prove to you
I'll eat my candy with the pork and beans
Excuse my manners if I make a scene
I ain't gonna wear the clothes that you like
I'm fine and dandy with the me inside
One look in the mirror and I'm tickled pink
I don't give a hoot about what you think

No, I don't care

An Alternate Conception of the Chasm

2008-05-05T12:32:00.005-04:00

Allow me to paint with a broad brush.

On his blog, my uncle, Doug Wilson, presents a vision of the way Christians should approach the liberal/conservative divide in American politics. I agree with him in his basic premise that the liberal/conservative dichotomy has very little to do with how Christians should view politics. However, I disagree with his conception of how the Christian approach is different.

He argues essentially that secular conservatives in America are those who have been able to see the big "E" on the eye chart of God's morality, and thus they oppose things like abortion and homosexuality. They have seen a piece of what God has revealed to the world about justice, what C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, calls the Tao. However, my uncle contends, the secular conservatives cannot be trusted to accurately understand the full extent of God's morality; thus, Christians should be reticent to fully endorse these secular conservatives who are merely fellow travelers on a few points.

Liberals, on the other hand, he says, have missed even these obvious points of morality. Thus, he argues, they are clearly blind, in ignorance of the Tao. While the secular conservatives probably cannot be trusted to understand the finer points of God's morality, the liberals most definitely cannot be trusted. How can we listen to liberal notions of justice when they have completely misunderstood fundamental principles of social morality?

Thus, if we drew up a chart of my uncle's conception of things, we would probably see the liberals on the far left, sitting next to some big block letters reading "WRONG." A little right of center, we would find the secular conservatives. On the far right, we would find my uncle and, presumably, God.

I differ with this conception of things because it calls the liberals blind. Assuredly, they are wrong about some very important pieces of God's will for mankind, but there are also matters about which they are correct. Inasmuch as the Tao has been revealed to us in Creation and has been written on our hearts, both the secular liberal and the secular conservative will be able to grasp after a part of it. I imagine the liberal and the conservative as the men in Plato's cave who do not see the forms of the world outside, but see the shadows of those forms projected onto the wall of the cave. The conservative sees the shadow of one truth, the liberal another. Both need to turn around (repent) and face the light.

Yes, the secular conservative is right to oppose homosexuality and abortion. God condemns both. But the liberal is also correct about a piece of God's plan, insofar as the liberal pursues social justice, caring for the oppressed, giving to the poor. "The LORD works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed." Ps. 103:6. "As it is written, 'He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures for ever.'" 2 Cor. 9:9. This a piece of the Tao that has been revealed to the liberal, though the liberal may not be able to see the rest of it.

In fact, the parts of the Tao that the conservative sees are the parts that the liberal is most in need of understanding, and vice versa. The liberal is in ignorance of the fact that men are evil to an extent that cannot be redeemed by social programs. The liberal has to deny much of reality in order to maintain this view, perhaps because he knows that he wouldn't be able to love people if he fully understood how irredeemably awful is the human race. The conservative, on the other hand, understands full well how evil people are, so he insulates himself from all of it and is content to let the huddled masses go to hell - they, in their wickedness, don't deserve his compassion.

The problem with both the liberal and the conservative is the one thing they agree on: that salvation comes through merit. The liberal believes that salvation is through merit, and so he pretends, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary (making him myopic), that everyone deserves it, which will allow him to love everyone. The conservative agrees that salvation is through merit but thinks everyone (except himself) wicked, so he doesn't need to care about them. But the central message of Christianity is that salvation is not through merit - if it were, who could be saved?

The Christian, if he lives rightly, has the compassion of the liberal and the standards of the conservative. He has, from Christ's strength, a great capacity to love others in spite of what he will readily admit are their faults, understanding how he has been loved in spite of his own faults.

My uncle concludes his post with an absurd parable of a liberal who kicks puppies for fun but preaches the necessity of ending poverty as a matter of justice; he then suggests that the best way to argue with this man is to say, essentially, "What do you know about justice? You kick puppies for fun!" I disagree: the best way to respond to this man is to agree with him that the resolution that we long for, that God will someday provide, is the end of all sadness and poverty, but that the fact that he kicks puppies for fun is evidence that he is not capable of bringing this change on his own strength, for he cannot even change himself. This absurd caricature of a liberal needs to learn that man cannot save himself, that humanity cannot save itself. The conservative, on the other hand, needs to understand that he cannot even live up to his own standards; that even if merit were the way to salvation, he wouldn't make the cut.

Christianity is extreme not because it drops 500 lbs. of fundamentalist weight on the right side of the political scale; Christianity is extreme because it contradicts every human worldview at some point, yet at the same time embraces the purpose of each of these worldviews and religions. The graph of the relationship of Christianity to all other political-philosophical views would show it not to the right of all, but above all, negating each of them, but affirming, and providing for, the peace for which each of them longs.

Neither the liberal nor the conservative understands the great, incomprehensible folly of God, that He will not punish us according to what we have done, but will reward us according to what He has done!

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

1 Cor. 1: 20-25.

Dominoes

2008-05-05T11:15:00.005-04:00

I had one of those moments yesterday where you finally realize the meaning of a song you've been passively listening to for a long time. The song was Dominoes, by Butch Walker and the Let's-Go-Out-Tonites. Call me sentimental, but I think it's quite nice. Walker has always been good at the tragic character sketch. Here are the lyrics; criticism to follow below:

Sitting with the dog,
Trying to clear the fog
Of a memory: the last time
I saw her face.
Fifty years of time
An accident would take my mind,
Shortly after take the wife away from me.

Everybody knows
Memories will keep you alive,
Some of them can't be erased.
If I remember one today,
Let it be of Grace

The Catskills are all frozen,
Playing Dominoes and
I can hear a voice reminding me
I'm her hero.
Finding myself able
In the chair across the table
To remember that it wasn't always empty.

Everybody knows
Memories will keep you alive,
Some of them just won't go away.
If there's a memory left of Grace,
Let it come back today.

And I see her beside me
As the grandkids they remind me
She's in the cemetery that we
Played in as kids.
They just think I'm crazy,
But the things she tells me lately
Are the only things that I cannot forget.

Everybody knows
Memories will keep you alive,
Some of them can't be erased.
If I remember one today,
Let it be of Grace.

Most Butch Walker songs have a solid core of lyrical brilliance, but fail to attain perfection simply for lack of polish. Walker seems inspired, but he doesn't bother to edit; he just runs with the first workable line that comes into his head. This is, ironically, antithetical to his sense of production in recording, because his records (both his own and the innumerable albums he has produced for other artists) are laden with some of the most shimmery, sculpted, studio gloss you've ever heard.

While I find the song lyrically impressive on the whole, there are approximately three lines in Dominoes that bother me. The first is in the first stanza where Walker says "fifty years of time." Come on, Butch! Couldn't you think of a better word than "time" that the years were filled with? It's just redundant. Then in the second stanza, we have the line where he can hear her voice reminding him that he's her hero. This just seems too trite; he's painted an intriguing character in a vivid scene (Catskills, playing dominoes), and then as his wife's voice comes back, she gives him a Wind Beneath My Wings line? Lastly, there's the line about her being "in the cemetery that we played in as kids." I actually think this is a good line, but the only problem is that Butch used it in another song, Thank-you Note, where he says "and it felt like the mud from the pond on the ground that she played in as a kid." I wonder if he even notices the reuse.

Still, I love the song. Butch Walker is my kind of guy - a smart, talented singer-songwriter who is anything but cool. He joins the ranks of Don Henley, Justin Currie, and Roger Clyne of the Refreshments as a direct, cynical poet who will never be wholly embraced by masses or respected by the tastemakers, but will continue to be studied by me.

A Link From Manisha

2008-05-02T20:09:00.002-04:00

Have you Vegetarians ever felt condescended to in the presence of a Vegan? Well now there's a way you can one-up them on the piety scale - Freeganism!

Per Tradition

2008-05-01T12:04:00.001-04:00

I have my first exam today: Bankruptcy. It's Pass/Fail, so I'm not worried, but Manisha is taking it for a grade. Wish us luck, or pray us Providence, whatever your preference.

Some thoughts on "Sellout"

2008-04-30T10:12:00.004-04:00

In my spare time, I've been working through Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal by Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law. While Kennedy isn't what I would call a black conservative like Thomas Sowell or John McWhorter, he is moderate in his liberal views and gives a lot of deference to conservative blacks. In Interracial Intimacies, for instance, he proposed what is anathema to many black academics, that adoption of black foster children by white parents is a net gain on balance.

Here, in Sellout, he examines the phenomenon of the black man judged to be a traitor to his race, whether the slave warning the master of the rebellion, the black politician stumping for Jim Crow, or Clarence Thomas opposing affirmative action. Kennedy reasons that while there are in all races classic stories of betrayal by marginalized members of the group (think Ephialtes in 300), in black America, the betrayal is more likely to be made by the brightest stars, those with the greatest potential for success. However, Kennedy cautions against letting these accusations go to far; those who accuse a black man of treason should be accountable for their statements just as the traitor would be held accountable if judged treacherous. This absence of this accountability unnecessarily divides black America, he says, and, more importantly, deprives black America of open debate on issues - those who oppose the orthodoxy are damned without trial.

As a case study in giving this kind of fair hearing, Kennedy examines Justice Clarence Thomas, considered to be the biggest black sellout in recent history. Kennedy conducts a balanced analysis of all the criticisms of Justice Thomas, showing many of them to be without merit, but not sparing the Justice when he is found to be manifestly self-contradicted. As for Thomas' views on affirmative action, Kennedy first discusses their constitutional merit, giving the most persuasive argument I have yet heard for the proposition that affirmative action does not violate the equal protection clause (namely, that the intent of the framers of the 14th amendment was not to eliminate racial distinctions altogether). Then Kennedy proceeds with his analysis of affirmative action as a policy matter, which I quote at length:

Whether governments (or private entities) ought to establish or continue affirmative-action programs is a much closer question. On the one hand, affirmative action has strikingly benefited blacks as a group and the nation as a whole. It has enabled blacks to attain occupation and educational advancement in numbers and at a pace that would otherwise have been impossible. These breakthroughs engender self-perpetuating benefits: the accumulation of valuable experience, the expansion of a professional class able to pass its material advantages and elevated aspirations to subsequent generations . . . .

Furthermore, the benefits of affirmative action redound not only to blacks but to the nation as a whole. . . . The racial integration of police forces through strong affirmative-action measures has often led to better relations between minority communities and the poice, a result that improves public safety for all. . . .

On the other hand, Justice Thomas offers in opposition arguments that have been voiced by a wide range of intelligent observers. These commentators have argued that affirmative action entrenches the idea that blacks are unalterably inferior to whites; that it puts a pall over the achievements of all blacks (whether or not the received a boost from an affirmative action program); that it assists those who are relatively privileged while providing little or no assistance to those most in need of help; that it nourishes visceral resentment in whites . . . ; that it reinforces the status quo by deflecting attention from the root causes of disparities in education and occupational achievement; [and] that affirmative action is defended dishonestly in terms of "diversity" when in fact the real basis for the program is reparations . . . .

These are weighty objections that warrant close attention. But these objections should be assessed in a realistic context that asks whether American society is marginally better off with affirmative action (despite its drawbacks) or marginally better off without affirmative action (despite its benefits). I conclude that the former is more likely, given the limited set of plausible alternatives. I readily concede, however, that there is ample evidence for a reasonable conclusion that goes the other way. I disagree with that conclusion. But judgments the other way are surely understandable.

It's this last paragraph that most impresses me. Rarely does one see this kind of honesty and integrity in debate over such a politicized issue; we are too accustomed to demagoguery, whether from the liberals describing affirmative action as a moral imperative or the conservatives who lack any compassion for those whom affirmative action is designed to help. Here, Kennedy has fairly represented both sides of the debate - he is not contending with a straw man. That Kennedy frankly acknowledges the merits of the opposing view renders him eminently credible, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

He's always wanted to be Thom Yorke . . .

2008-04-28T11:20:00.001-04:00

. . . but Chris Martin just looks like a bandwagon-jumper with this nonsense.

Published

2008-04-25T19:10:00.004-04:00

As of today, I am. My comment, Judgmental Neutrality: When the Supreme Court Inevitably Implies That Your Religion is Just Plain Wrong, was published in Volume 38, Book 2 of the Seton Hall Law Review. However, this might count as something of a vanity press, as I am the Executive Editor of that august publication. If you'd like to read the piece, in all its over-footnoted esotericism, you may download it here.

Cut your losses

2008-04-21T15:53:00.000-04:00

An interesting article on settling for Mr. Good Enough.

You have to win the war before you write the history books

2008-04-14T19:42:00.002-04:00

A recent survey of historians indicates that 98% of them think Bush's presidency has been a failure. An astonishing 61% say it is the worst presidency in American history; this seems to show either a woeful ignorance of how bad things have been (Johnson, Grant, or Harding, anyone?) or some unrelenting pessimism about how things are. Now, I'm not crazy about Bush, but I think we should wait to see if history will vindicate him in reflection, not whether contemporary historians, biased as Bellesiles, choose to vindicate him. What would Thucydides think? Where has the detached, balanced style gone? A responsible historian wouldn't even express an opinion on the subject. When historians pull this sort of thing, just like their famous move to, as a profession, oppose the war in Iraq, I have a tough time taking them seriously and trusting them when they tell me that Columbus did, in fact, sail the ocean blue in 1492.

Stuff White People Like

2008-04-12T15:52:00.002-04:00

Ok, it will now become completely obvious that I, logjammed in my legal studies, am way behind in all things relevant to young urban culture, because only today did I discover "Stuff White People Like." The subject matter of this ultra-hip, satiric blog is self evident. I know I'm way behind the curve because the site has already engendered several spinoffs: Stuff Jewish Young Adults Like and Stuff Desis/Brown People Like, for instance. But, to my taste, these sites aren't that funny (which may be because I'm neither Jewish nor South Asian), so I will focus on the things beloved by my racial group.

"Stuff White People Like" is dead-on: you can read here the full list, continually updated, of that of which we are fond. There are some listings, like #2, Religions their parents don't belong to, #62, Knowing what's best for poor people, and #80, The idea of soccer, that make me laugh aloud at their exactness, where others, such as #14, Having black friends, and #73, Gentrification, provoke an embarrassed giggle as I realize how emphatically white I am.

I wonder if, taking the list as a whole, it is possible to come up with consistent theory of the New Whiteness. Perhaps the central organizing principle of Whiteness is obsession with the other: thus our fascination with Study Abroad, Having Gay Friends, and Awareness. For American whites especially, who have, standing on of the last century's one-thoughted devotion to economic and military domination, been raised not in a culture but in the absence of culture, we simply need something to fill the inner vacuum. Sushi fits nicely.

The Most Provocative and Important Cultural Critique Since "Shortbus"

2008-04-11T14:08:00.002-04:00

I jest.

Dubs

2008-04-09T09:38:00.002-04:00

The first pages of the script for Oliver Stone's "W," a biopic about our President, have been leaked. You can read them here. At least Stone had the taste to wait a few decades before doing the Nixon flick, but we will find no such discretion here. Get ready for some propaganda.

The Spectrum

2008-04-03T21:26:00.001-04:00

This is worth taking a look at.

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!

2008-04-03T21:03:00.001-04:00

You absolutely must read this.

From "The Sacrifice," by George Herbert

2008-04-02T19:13:00.001-04:00

O all ye who pass by, behold and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me:
Was ever grief like mine?

Thanks to my Brethren

2008-04-01T18:33:00.002-04:00

Graeme and Gunn, good call on the Raconteurs' new album. It rules. Jason, you might even be forced to like it, because it's just too good. Just make sure you find some plausible way of explaining how you came to like it of your own volition, and not because of my influence, because I know you wouldn't be able to stand that.

Another thought: Jack White is a really great guitarist. By that, I don't mean that he's a virtuoso or a revolutionary - he's neither Van Halen nor Morello - but he has a style and a tone all his own; like a Hendrix or Santana solo, you can tell a Jack White solo immediately. And most of all, his solos really sing. They feel like an extension of the melody and add dramatic emphasis to the development of the song, rather than simply providing an interlude for the guitarist to flash his sweet chops.

Given that White has come into his celebrity via that which is called Indie, his instrumental prowess will probably be ignored while more attention is paid to how his works can be described with reference to one legendary artist and three you've never heard of, given Indie music journalism's characteristic disregard for all things related to technique that cannot be encompassed within the words "swirling" and "driving." But perhaps history will vindicate him.

Ewww

2008-03-30T16:39:00.001-04:00

Creepy creepy creepy.

On the Adversary System, per My Grandfather's Request

2008-03-20T15:00:00.000-04:00

"He who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him."

Proverbs 18:17

American society has long grumbled against our nation's courts, especially the criminal justice system. From Justice Cardozo's disdain for the technicalities of the exclusionary rule ("the criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered"), to outrage over defense attorney Frank Armani's withholding of the location of the bodies of two missing girls due to the attorney-client privilege, to the travesty that was the O.J. Simpson trial, many of us have the sense that the procedures governing our criminal courts have been long since divorced from any relation to valuable social policy, or even that these procedures have been devised by wicked or misguided philosopher-kings, who, due to their ill will or lack of understanding of human nature, have fashioned a system that does little to serve the interests of the people. This criticism is perhaps most fundamentally directed at our Anglo-American adversary system.

The adversary system is an alternative system to the civil law systems of much of Europe. Where our nation's adversary system charges each attorney to do his utmost in advocating for his client's wishes within the confines of the law, the civil system charges the judge to search for the objective truth. In our system, good (that is, qualified) attorneys will do whatever they can to deemphasize facts that hurt their client, to characterize the law in the way that best serves their client, and to appeal to the sympathies of the judge or jury who will hear their case. In a civil law system, however, the judge is an inquisitor who himself seeks for the Truth. Rather than the attorneys, he examines the parties, even examines the lawyers, and searches for the answer of what happened, and the judgment as to who should be put in prison, who should pay, etc.

At first blush, it would seem that the civil law system is far superior to the adversary system. As my grandfather has pointed out, there is something unsettling about the adversary system's failure to charge lawyer's with much of a duty to the truth. However, I submit that the adversary system is better, not only for society generally, but also for reaching truth, than popular sentiment would have us believe.

A. Truth as a Byproduct

Though attorneys are not charged with a general duty to "the Truth" in the result under the adversary system, it is designed to serve that end as a byproduct. The theory is that if the parties appear before a neutral judge, their attorneys will each put forward the best possible case for their client on both the law and the facts, incentivized by their pecuniary interest in the case. The judge or jury will then have the ability to choose between two fully developed cases for each party, and because the work of investigation and development has already been done for him, he is more likely to choose the right answer. He is the decisionmaker, not the inquisitor.

Treating truth as desired byproduct is similar to other successful structures in our society, for instance, corporate structure and the capitalist system. In a corporation, the board of directors is charged with the duty of serving the shareholders' financial interest, not with serving society in general, much to the scorn of the anti-corporate. However, the theory is that, since the shareholders cannot profit unless the corporation is successful, assigning the board of directors the highest duty of shareholder wealth maximization will result in maximizing the service to society--the corporation must successfully serve society in order to profit, pay a dividend, and see its stock price soar. Maximizing the bottom line maximizes goods for everyone.

Similarly, capitalism proceeds on the similar assumption that if you encourage people to pursue their own self-interest with minimal obstructions by society, you will, as a side-effect, increase goods for all society. As I have previously quoted Adam Smith saying, "[i]t is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." The adversary system encourages truth by providing the parties on either side of a disputed issue the incentive to make the best possible case available within the facts and the law.

B. Pragmatic Truth

The idea of pragmatic truth also underlies the adversary system. While we recognize that truth is to be desired, we also recognize that it is not the only thing to be desired. In any system of governance, certain values, even primary values, are sometimes eclipsed by other competing values in society. How much do we desire the truth? Truth gives way to needs of economy (we don't want to spend huge portions of the budget pursuing some Platonic truth in every criminal trial), to notions of efficient justice (we want defendants to have a speedy trial, not something that lasts years on end in the search for justice), and to notions of individual rights (we don't want the pursuit of truth to interfere with the privacy of individual citizens; such brash invasiveness is often what characterizes totalitarian regimes). On the other hand, in civil law countries, truth is itself the central goal, such that even evidence illegally obtained from a defendant can be admitted at trial, thus incentivizing law enforcement to ignore the defendant's rights. The adversary system won't perfectly reach truth every time; sometimes we let a guilty man go, or we convict an innocent man. But it strikes a reasonable balance as pragmatic truth, reaching the "close enough" that properly stabilizes society and respects the other values we esteem.

C. Ethical Constraints on Lawyers

Lawyers do lie, and lawyers often do wrong, but much of society is under the impression that this is something the system cares nothing about, or something the system does not punish. On the contrary, while the adversary system does encourage attorneys to provide their client with the best possible defense in law and fact, it does not encourage the attorney to engage in dishonest conduct. Under the Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers may not bring frivolous claims or defenses, and are subject to discipline if they do. A lawyer is obligated to disclose controlling legal authority that cuts against him if his adversary fails to bring it up. Lawyers are not allowed to offer evidence that they know to be false, and if they come to find out that evidence offered was false, they must disclose it to the judge. If a criminal defendant intends to lie on the stand, and the lawyer knows of it, he has to permit the defendant to testify, but he cannot ask the defendant any questions, which would constitute an endorsement of the defendant's testimony - this kind of testimony will be clearly identified by the jury as false.

Naturally, this system does not work perfectly, and lawyers will bend the rules as much as they reasonably can and break them when they perceive that enforcement is unlikely. But this is the case with all rules, and it does not condemn the rules themselves, unless those rules are so idealistic that there is absolutely no realistic possibility of enforcement. In short, the ethical constraints as enforced by state codes of conduct for lawyers provide a reasonably suitable check on what can be the perverse, mercenary incentives of the adversary system.

***

The adversary system does not function perfectly, and it does not always lead to truth. But neither does any judicial system; men are frail, men are evil. Only God can judge perfectly. Perhaps at certain points the adversary system has struck the wrong balance between the various principles involved in the administration of justice, but it has nevertheless recognized which principles are involved, and come to a reasonable conclusion about how those principles can be accommodated by one system. And without it, I might be out of a job.

Birthday 26

2008-03-11T11:40:00.013-04:00

Manisha planned a surprise party for me Saturday at an Cannonau, an Italian restaurant on the Lower East Side. I was led there by Andy after we had spent a couple hours at a beer garden in Williamsburg and then some time at the waterfront sketching the Manhattan skyline. When we showed up at the restaurant, I was delighted to find Manisha, Andy's girlfriend Rosa, our friend Yonaty, and a host of Fryetts there - Neal, Mary, Julia, and Tim - including Tim Fryett's girlfriend Liz. Manisha baked me a Scrabble cake as well, pictured below. She would have included the Moscow friends, whom she says she misses very much, but the commute was a bit too long.

On my birthday, Manisha gave me a nice new sweater and a lavender shirt (bring the pain, Jason), as well as a tangible Scrabble game (I've been addicted to the Facebook version) and a book on the history of race relations in Newark. She really takes birthdays to a new level.

I am very grateful to God for all my friends, for all of you who called me or Facebooked me yesterday. I tend not to take birthdays too seriously, but when everyone takes mine seriously, I feel undeservedly loved. Thanks much.

Solomon on Spitzer

2008-03-11T11:22:00.000-04:00

"Moreover I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for he has appointed a time for every matter, and for every work."

Ecclesiastes 3:16-17.

Reminds me of high school

2008-03-06T10:34:00.000-05:00

Observe.

Some thoughts on legitimacy

2008-02-23T17:11:00.002-05:00

I know that I haven't exactly delivered the political theory I had planned on writing this semester, and for that I am sorry. That sort of thing needs more disciplined, concentrated thought than I can now afford to give. So here's something semi-related in the meantime.

Suppose a member of society commits some kind of heinous crime, a brutal rape or murder for instance, and everyone knows who was guilty. If the community gets angry enough, it may take matters into its own hands and, forsaking the process of the courts, execute vengeance on the guilty party. He may find himself gunned down, A Time to Kill style, or perhaps swinging from a tree, without having received any formal trial or any of the procedural protections to which he was entitled under that society. But everyone knows he was guilty, and there will be little furor over his death.

Most of us aren't as bothered by this as we ought to be. That's why we would rather watch a movie about Mel Gibson exacting vengeance by killing the guys who killed his girl than we would watch a drawn-out legal piece about the successful trial of a man who was clearly guilty. The Gibson movie gratifies us viscerally, whereas the trial we merely approve intellectually. And when we have confidence that we've apprehended the guilty party, why waste time and money with a trial? Mobs and vigilantes may not always deal out justice accurately, but they always do it swiftly. If we know we've got our man, what's the problem?

The problem is the message; we've punished the right man, but communicated the wrong thing. Mob and vigilante justice communicate nothing more than the anger of the mob or the vigilante. That's no great matter to the man being gunned down, stoned, or lynched, because he won't be around to comment on that communication. But it's of great significance to society; mob and vigilante justice show the society that it is governed by passion, and that the central fault for which the criminal was killed was the crime of pissing off a group of people in possession of a length of rope and little discretion. This gives society as a whole scant assurance that justice will always be administered by the mob; the mob may deal out just desserts when it lynches the child molester, but what about when it decides to lynch the black man for no apparent reason?

True justice needs to communicate that some standard greater than the whim of a fickle majority has been transgressed, a standard that governs everyone equally. True justice needs to communicate not only that the transgression bothered people, but that it was wrong. Romans 13 teaches that governments are instituted among men to execute God's wrath on the wrongdoer. "'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, 'I will repay.'" God does bring vengeance through the sword wielded by the state, but mob and vigilante actions are a direct violation of God's prohibition of vengeance.

A government communicates its legitimacy to the governed by standing for something greater than the fleeting passions of its rulers or its prosecutors; by so standing, it commands both respect and submission. For this reason we formalize trials as a search for truth, we have extended the same procedural protections to all citizens, from the indigent immigrant to Mr. Nixon, and we seek to administer justice in a matter that is grave, serious, and dispassionate.

This principle also has relevance not only in the governance of the state, but also in the governance of the family. If a child disobeys his father on some clear command and the father, frustrated and bitter, lays hold his son and spanks him between screamed curses, the child has learned nothing of his father's legitimacy. He has learned only that his father is a powerful tyrant, the wrath of whose semi-predictable whims must be tactfully circumvented until the child reaches majority - his father is but a vigilante. I am grateful for the way my father punished me; it was always with the gravity of God's justice, never allowing me the faint sense that I had angered a mere man (indeed, my father remained dispassionate). Though he was loving in the punishment he gave, the justice he administered felt severe and impersonal, because it rested upon a standard much higher than he.

Rendition etc.

2008-02-23T14:34:00.001-05:00

Gibbs has some excellent thoughts on the clumsiness of the global-political-intellectual-Bush-sucks genre here.

A Preliminary Review

2008-02-18T10:36:00.002-05:00

The Bedlam in Goliath, by the Mars Volta, is their best yet.

Manisha and I on Valentine's Day

2008-02-16T18:16:00.002-05:00

Her work, not mine.

A Late Reply to Tom, Nolan, and Matt, with Apologies

2008-02-16T15:04:00.003-05:00

Tom,

Perhaps what unites modern man's love of romance and pursuit of career and mammon is individualism. Revering romantic love as the greatest human emotion is to delight in the individual; the lovers need not regard family, need not regard current spouses, need not regard social custom, for they are in love and they owe it to their own individuality to reject that which constrains them and seek their own greatest happiness in that love. The same goes for career. People will get divorced because of what they consider to be their duty to pursue their own needs and goals in life, and often our society commends this. In both the love of money and the love of love, individualism controls.

Nolan,

As I noted to Tom above, I think that the cause of the glorification of romance is glorified individualism, which is perhaps something of a vestigial philosophy. Under a Darwinian philosophy, every organism will seek its own survival and the gratification of its desires, but Darwinism has no reason to call it "good" that organisms seek this survival.

Darwinism says, at most, seek your own highest good, because that's all you've got; it doesn't say "praise your neighbor for seeking his own highest good." Our love of individualism, that we think it noble when another individual goes out pursuing his or her own wants and needs, is a relic of the Enlightenment, now rendered inconsistent with Darwinism. With the Zeitgeist's lack of any substantive belief in Deity, individualism has no grounds of legitimacy outside of Darwinism either, but it remains a default ideal for most.

As for the thoughts on ecclesiology, I think we get a clear picture of what's going on when we reconcile the passages on Christ and the Church with the passages on salvation. We know that the soul that sins shall die, that there is one intermediary between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, and that if anyone confesses with his lips and believes in his heart that Jesus is Lord, he will be saved. The salvation relationship appears to be strictly individual.

As for the church, Paul describes in Romans 7:4 that we are joined to Christ and to one another in Christ's death; our individual salvation unites us as one body, in which we are members. The metaphor of the body is effective, for, as Paul says elsewhere, we all have different gifts and different functions, and the unity we have with Christ and in the body allows us to use these gifts in a way that most benefits the group.

In short, I take my father's view of ecclesiology; that there are corporate metaphors for the relationship of the individual to God does not mean the enterprise is wholly corporate. Closer scrutiny clarifies.

Matt,

Sorry for the late reply. To say that "our every longing is met in Christ, and therefore our sexual longing is met in Christ" is an equivocation of sorts. When we state that Christ satisfies our deepest longing, we are saying that all desire is, at its root, a desire for God, and that all desire points us toward Him; it is not to say that if we desire a ham sandwich that truly, we shall find our ham sandwich in Christ, nor that, if we desire sex, that we find sex in Christ. Christ answers the deeper longing of which romantic longing is a type; he does not answer romantic or sexual longing in romantic or sexual terms.

Concerning Romans 7:4, I might be reading it wrong, but to me it looks like Paul is saying that we, the brethren, are joined to one another in Christ's death, through his body, and also joined to Him. But I'm no Greek whiz.

As for the Corinthians passage, context reveals the corporate nature of the metaphor. In verse 15, Paul rhetorically asks, "[d]o you not now that your bodies are members of Christ?" This is consistent with the other metaphors Paul uses, that each of us is a member of the body of Christ, the church, joined to Christ in marriage. The language about being one spirit would be confusing, but for the context in the prior verse.

Customized Marriage

2008-02-13T18:48:00.002-05:00

From the introduction to the article by James Herbie Difonzo:

Americans have always taken their pursuit of happiness to the altar, and the frequent failures of our marital enterprises have diminished neither our efforts nor our expectations. In a 1930 essay entitled Romantic Divorce, Katharine Fullerton Gerould identified "the American habit of acting promptly on our marital dissatisfactions," a predilection stemming from "our seeing marriage as an intensely personal and an intensely romantic affair." Connubial individualism has a lengthy pedigree. The legal theory of marriage insisted that once wife and husband wed, the legal status of their marriage was placed almost exclusively in the state's hands. But this formulation was honored only in the breach and in the halcyon rhetoric of appellate opinions. For at least a hundred years, argued Gerould, Ameericans "have envisaged marriage as a purely individual, not at all as a social, contract, and have refused to consider any marriage successful that did not maintain, for both parties, a high romantic satisfaction." We pay a price in this quest for "white-hot emotional perfection," of course. And Gerould judged the matter correctly, for her generation as for its successors: "As long as personal happiness is made the only desideratum in marriage, the divorce courts will be full."

God as Lover

2008-02-10T16:15:00.000-05:00

I visited Origins church on the Upper West Side this Sunday with Andy and assorted others. Having been in a Presbyterian atmosphere for couple years now, it was interesting to return to the traditionally evangelical, meeting in a grade-school auditorium with a worship team and PowerPoint slides. The sermon was very good, discussing the meaning and significance of sin in the context of the Genesis account of the Fall. Incidentally, the pastor also gave us a great quote from Kierkegaard, though not necessarily one I agree with:

"Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth, look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment."

Anyway, as much as I enjoyed the teaching, the worship music at Origins was difficult for me. Granted, I've never been too fond of praise songs, and much of the academic musician in me recoils at the very thought of it, but aesthetic objections are trivial, and differences in matters of taste shouldn't separate brothers and sisters in Christ. No, what gets to me is the way that praise music tells me I am supposed to relate to God, that is, as His lover.

We sing endless, longing choruses of how God will never let go, how he will wrap his arms around us, and each melody turns into tender agony as the performers close their eyes, clench their hands, and sigh out to heaven in rapture. The emotional color is more Italian aria than it is worship. Again, I don't here denounce the artistic merit of praise music, I criticize the sentiment expressed. God gives us several metaphors for His relationship to the individual in the Scriptures: He is our Father, our Saviour, our King, our Shepherd, our Friend. But the only sexual metaphor for the relationship is distinctly corporate: Christ and the Church, not Christ and Everyman. When Paul addresses this metaphor, he is calm and explanatory, describing that all marriages proclaim the mystery of Christ and the Church; we see none of the ecstasy of contemporary evangelicalism with which so many worship leaders proclaim their desire to be enfolded in His embrace. That this is a corporate metaphor is clear; individuals are not treated as the body in aggregate, but as individual members of it. Even in the Old Testament, as when Jeremiah berates the Jews for their harlotries with other gods, the metaphor remains corporate - God rebukes His people, not each of us, His lovers.

Of course, God does describe Himself to us in affectionate terms. Consider the parable of the prodigal son, the Good Shepherd, or Christ's cry that He longed to gather Jerusalem like a hen gathers its chicks, but she would not. Still, this affection remains paternal (even maternal), and never looks like Eros. The poets cast God as lover - consider "Batter my heart, Three-Person'd God," and "Jesu, Lover of my Soul" - but I'm not sure the Scriptures do. St. Theresa of Avila (rather explicitly) yearned for the Lover Jesus, but that doesn't make it right. If I'm missing something, let me know.

We further complicate things by importing our modern ideas about love and romance into our relationship with Christ. It would be one thing if we thought of Him in the Ancient Near-Eastern context as the glorious bridegroom who comes to take the bride who has been promised Him upon payment of so many cattle, but we instead cast Him as the oily-chested Fabio off the cover of some pirate-themed Danielle Steele bodice-buster.

I think this explains much of the infirmities in the modern church; it should come as no surprise that the male/female ratio in many evangelical churches is 1/2 or worse. The church says that a good relationship with God is rapturous and desperate, long walks on the beach, and glorious resolution after catastrophic misunderstanding - why would the average man want to sign up for a religion promising that? The men the church does draw then tend toward effeminacy, and those that don't so lean soon learn that if they want to be holy and devoted, they've got to get more feminine. Because of this, single women in the church are hard-pressed to find suitable men, because all the devoted ones practice the maxim that spinelessness is next to godliness. The single women then turn, likely as not, to the wolves in sheep's clothing in the church, or even directly to the bad-boy non-believer, who, strangely, seems to offer more security than the emasculated Christian. "Wild at Heart" may have been a cheesy read, but it serves a noble purpose in showing the modern Christian that his walk with God is not an erotic love story.

In the same respect, the erotic Jesus hasn't done a lot of favors for women either; they view Jesus as a substitute boyfriend when they lack a flesh-and-blood companion. Though all of us should surely be taught to depend on Christ despite what else we may lack in life, that doesn't mean we depend on Him to meet our sexual or romantic needs. In my experience, these girls are more likely to abandon or at least ignore Christ when a real man comes along, because the roses the real man gives her smell sweeter than Jesus' imaginary roses. If they always conceived of Christ as there to serve a romantic need, but that is not in fact what He claims to offer, then of course He won't meet their ideal - He is the Perfect Friend, the Wisest Counselor, the Mightiest King, the Good Shepherd, the Everlasting Father, but not the Most-tender Lover.

Modernity has us all sold on the proposition that romantic love is the most experience in our lives, and Christianity has taken the bait by selling Jesus in that context. But our relationship with Christ shouldn't just be a better version or replacement for the sweetness of a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie, it should be a superior, and other, experience altogether. He has endeavored to explain the nature of His relationship to us through several metaphors, and we ought to look to those metaphors to know Him better. But we ought not look beyond them.

More Justin Currie

2008-02-06T21:24:00.000-05:00

Call me sentimental if you will, but I find this compelling, especially the metaphor in the first two lines of the second stanza. As with most of Currie's stuff, some phrases are filler, but where he's lucid, he's insuperable.

The thing that I take from life,
And what I would take from here,
Is a second of all my time,
A moment I see too clear
In the rain.

The claws of it clasped your face,
And your lips were a waterfall
In the doorway of Danny's place
You said "Angel," and that is all
In the rain.

Wal-mart wins

2008-01-30T21:21:00.000-05:00

My sister has a great post about it here.

Rambo (spoilers to follow)

2008-01-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

I watched Rambo today. It was pretty good. Before the praise, a couple criticisms--the lead actress was high-school-drama bad, and the movie's attempts to develop Rambo's character were pretty pathetic. But neither of these was really the point of the movie.

Rambo was violent. I mean, intestine-spilling, corpse-exploding, larynx-ripping violent. It really should have been sub-titled Rambo: There Will Be Blood. I haven't seen a movie that bloody since The Passion of the Christ. And that comparison is hardly coincidental; there are a couple notable parallels, which I'll explain after I summarize the plot. (Note: please don't think I have turned into Josh Gibbs and am seeing Jesus in everything.)

Rambo involves the interruption of the hero's peaceful life in Thailand catching snakes by a group of Christians from a church in Colorado (favorably portrayed) who are on a relief mission to Burma to bring medicine and the gospel to the Karen refugees who are victims of genocide, and who need Rambo's help to take them up the river into Burma. The movie begins with compelling actual news footage of the genocide, the sort that makes your stomach weak. Rambo initially resists their efforts to enlist him, thinking that it is pointless to try and change the world, but is ultimately persuaded by Sarah, the lead woman in the group.

In the course of the journey up-river, Rambo is forced to kill a boat full of Burmese pirates who demand that he hand over Sarah so they can rape her. His actions disgust the leader of the Christian group, who declares that, "you may have thought it was necessary to do what you did, but killing is always wrong!" Rambo drops the group at the Karen village to which they were traveling, and heads back down-river. However, while he is gone, the entire village is massacred by Burmese soldiers, the women are raped, and the Christians are taken into captivity (this is perhaps the bloodiest scene I've ever watched). Rambo discovers this when the pastor of the Colorado church comes to Thailand himself to try to save his missionary group. Rambo takes a group of mercenaries back into Burma, generally behaves in a Rambo-like fashion, and by the end of the movie pretty much all the bad guys have met their grisly death at his hands.

The two comparisons to The Passion of the Christ are best illustrated by Rambo's critical reception, currently a 30% at Rotten Tomatoes. Beyond the perfectly legitimate criticisms of the movie for its poor character development, there is a fierce animus among reviewers over two subjects: 1) the blood, and 2) the jingoism. The blood first.

As with The Passion, the critics basically go off on Rambo for how gory it is. And it is very gory. One critic notes that "[i]t makes you root for the wrong things." Another declares that Rambo is "pure gratuitous violence." But like those who criticized The Passion for its violence, the critics fail to understand the purpose of the blood--where there is a purpose, and not blood for the sake of blood, the violence is anything but gratuitous.

The leader of the Christian group in the movie is like these critics; early on he proclaims that killing is always wrong, but at the end of the movie, in the final showdown, he has the opportunity to save a friend by hitting a Burmese soldier with a rock. In one of the film's strongest moments, the Christian bludgeons the soldier to death, pounds his face to a pulp, and then looks away in horror, shocked at what his sense of justice and self-defense have made him do. The message of Rambo is that violence is not wrong in itself, but that it is sometimes necessary to bring justice and salvation; it is appropriate that the viewer delight in the horrible deaths that befall the Burmese soldiers, those who, in real life, have raped and murdered children. As with The Passion, where he was pierced for our transgressions, here the Burmese soldiers are pierced (repeatedly) for their own transgressions.

The second common ground with The Passion is the critical response to perceived racism in Rambo. One critic states that the subtext "embodies enough jingoistic Imperialism to make Kipling puff up his chest with pride." Another states, I hope hyperbolically, that "[n]ever, not even in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, has Hollywood depicted Asians with more prejudice." Mel Gibson was upbraided for his antisemitism in The Passion in a similar manner. While Gibson has turned out to be more than a bit of a bigot, the critics who accused him of antisemitism missed two crucial points: 1) he was telling the Biblical account like it was, and 2) the heroes in The Passion were Jewish as well.

It goes the same in Rambo--Stallone (who supposedly became a Christian during the making of Rocky Balboa) is not even adapting for the screen a historical account 2,000 years old, he is merely using the well-documented material of world headlines as background for his film. Rambo is in fact quite timely; just last summer we saw the march of the Buddhist monks in Burma end in their massacre, and in the suppression of all media in Burma. It is a simple fact that the government in Burma does these things; is it racist to acknowledge that? Moreover, how can this be a racist movie when the noble rebels that Rambo is trying to save are of the same race as the villains? By that standard, any movie with a villain is racist against the race of the villain.

Whatever happened to raising awareness? Isn't genocide one of those things we are all supposed to know about and to hate? Every other movie about genocide is praised for bringing these issues to national attention, so why is Rambo an exception? Is it because Stallone was an action hero and is now a Christian? I still hold to the principle I did in fourth grade, that it is good and right and satisfying to see justice and retribution visited upon the transgressor, no matter how messy that comeuppance may be.

The Reason for God

2008-01-22T18:05:00.002-05:00

On Valentines Day Dr. Timothy Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, will release his new book, The Reason for God, published with Dutton, a subsidiary of Penguin. Pre-release copies were available after services on Sunday, so I picked one up and read it yesterday. I recommend it highly.

Preliminary to any of its content, The Reason for God is remarkable for its tone. Dr. Keller clearly tries to continue in C.S. Lewis' tradition of brilliant informality. While his prose is not as lucid as Lewis' (whose could be?), he communicates in the same kind, humble way, granting his adversaries legitimate points where he can, conceding unimportant issues, and always seeking the good of those to whom he preaches. Even the "About the Author" section is remarkable--an excerpt notes that "he learned most from his nine years as a pastor of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church in the small blue-collar town of Hopewell, Virginia. The congregation there loved him, suffered through his earliest days as a pastor, and taught an overeducated, egg-headed Northerner to be CLEAR." If only all leaders of mega-churches were so self-deprecating.

The Reason for God is much like an updated (though, again, less lucid) version of Mere Christianity. While Lewis wrote to the WWII generation in a world that was, through its faith in progress, becoming increasingly secularized, Keller writes to a world that is polarizing--in the Introduction, he notes that both the liberals are conservatives are right when they note that the other side is growing rapidly; ours is a world of increasing polarization. Secularism grows more vicious and concentrated, as expressed in the recent works of Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris, which demand that religion be expelled from the public square. Yet at the same time, the moral majority can still turn elections in America, and Christianity flourishes in lands where it was once barely named--China, Africa, and South America.

As for content, Dr. Keller begins with an emotional question to be answered by an intellectual framework. He describes his days in college, where he admired the social justice goals of his liberal professors, but wondered how those objectives could be sustained and justified with a framework of materialism and relativism. Was there a philosophy that answered both the love of the liberals and the righteousness of the conservatives? This question ultimately led him through existentialism and Buddhism and to Christianity, via a process of doubting his doubts about Christianity (for a doubt is but an alternate belief), and seeking out affirmative support for the claims of Christ.

He follows the same structure in The Reason for God; the first part answers the most common objections to Christianity (exclusivity, problem of evil, science, history, etc.), and, after a brief intermission, the second part supports the fundamental doctrines of Christianity (sin, gospel, cross, resurrection). Thus his path varies from Lewis--where Lewis argues from first principles through to the truth of the Scriptures, Keller first tackles the hurdles of post-modernity and then proceeds to affirmative support for the religion.

As for authority, Dr. Keller's work is copiously cited, which should be alluring to the intellectual. While Lewis drew on common experience, Keller does likewise, but also appeals to the elites. He cites his friends, who share his cause, his enemies, pointing out their common ground, and plenty of others for illustrative purposes. An abbreviated list of his authorities:

Camus
Bono
The Yale Law Journal
Jonathan Edwards
Annie Dillard
Pat Robertson
Stephen Hawking
Rocky
Sartre
Thomas Nagel
Miroslav Wolf
The Village Voice
Alan Dershowitz
Rick Warren
Flannery O'Connor
Foucault
H.G. Wells
Christopher Hitchens
The Stepford Wives
G.K. Chesterton
Plantinga
The New Republic
Dostoyevsky
Kant
Arthur Miller
Richard Rorty
I, Robot
And of course Lewis, Lewis, Lewis . . .

The Reason for God thus offers a comprehensive survey of the state of affairs for Christianity in the public consciousness. It graciously and compellingly leads its ideal reader, an open-eyed non-believer, through their objections to the faith through to the conclusion of the gospel. If you know non-believers with these kinds of questions about Christianity, or Christians who would like to get a fuller intellectual understanding of their faith, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Growing Old

2008-01-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The luster of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
--Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength--
Not our bloom only, but our strength--decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more! but not,
Ah, 'tis not what in youth we dreamed 'twould be!
'Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day's decline.

'Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion--none.

It is--last stage of all--
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.

Matthew Arnold

Tobacco Roasting on an Open Fire

2007-12-28T03:01:00.001-05:00

Sorry for the absence. I've been home in the last week, and before that, ridiculously busy. This will give you an idea of how we Wilson siblings do Christmas in North Idaho. Anyway, enjoy, and expect more substantive posts next semester - I'm thinking of developing a political theory.

How to resist conversion

2007-12-15T10:25:00.000-05:00

Don't ask me how I found this.

One more

2007-12-14T11:56:00.001-05:00

This is me before my last exam, looking like I've been studying hard.