The Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have a Super Bowl bet…the loser loans a significant piece of art to the winner for three months. The directors of the two museums trash talked back and forth via email and Twitter before agreeing on the paintings to be loaned.
“Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let’s up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!”
Just met someone who came into the store who is starting a new CSA in Moscow! It’s June-October, and limited to 15 spots. It’s under the auspices of Backyard Harvest, so your CSA subscription will also provide one for a local underprivileged family. Gyah, I’m so excited! Let me know if you want more details, or want to split a spot.
Calvin on the appearance of truth among the profane:
Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the Giver (Institutes, 2.2.15).
As a way for doing penance for my scattershot of a post regarding abortion the other day, I thought I would share this excellent post from one of the best blogs on the Internet. You’ll note a much more careful treatment of abortion as it relates to the poor and politicians, and even more interestingly, a discussion of Playboy and the role of sexual shenanigans in all of this.
It’s a question pondered too often, yet it never seems to go away. Particularly in Christian circles. Even if it isn’t stated verbatim, it’s often the question that lurks behind most projects addressing the “state of the arts” or how Christians should “engage culture.”
But did you know that Plato had an eerily familiar answer? Eerily familiar, that is, for anyone who’s encountered these kinds of “culture” projects.
In Book 3 of The Republic, Socrates takes Homer and Hesiod to task for their poor behavioural models. To his reasoning, it is not right—let alone heroic—for a man to be caught weeping, mourning for the death of his friend. Why should we mourn something that is better for a friend, he asks. The solution? “We shall be right, then,” he declares, “to get rid of the heroes’ songs of lamentation, putting them in the mouths of women—and not even the best women, at that—and cowards.” Why? “We want the people we say we are bringing up to be guardians of our country to be appalled at the idea of behaving like this.” (388a)
And in case you’re confused about with this means, Socrates makes it quite clear earlier: “We shall ask Homer and the rest of the poets not to be angry with us if we strike out these passages, and any others like them.” (387b)
As the discussion continues, Socrates and his yes-men proceed to criticize all the “excesses” they can think of—over-laughing, over-eating, over-drinking, and over-sexing. Slowly, their reasoning emerges: men are too impressionable, too eager to imitate whatever they see without discernment. If you don’t want your men to be given to weeping, then make sure that their heroes are never weak. And don’t you dare tell any stories that show the gods at their worst: don’t you know what that’ll do to our people?
It should be noted here that the people in question are the guardians (those whom Socrates later refers to as the “gold” of humanity). These are the people born to lead and care for those who aren’t born well enough to guide the course of the city. If they can’t withstand these stories, who can?
Obviously, there’s something to be said for not immersing yourself in garbage. We are impressionable, which is why we’re each responsible to know our frames and our weaknesses. Yet, there’s something inherently wrong with the way Socrates is reading poetry. It’s not just that he believes poetry is only good for education—it’s that he never asks, “What happens in this story?” The problem is not that Achilles teaches young men to be first sulking and then heartlessly vengeful (something that Socrates probably wouldn’t find praiseworthy). The problem is that Homer focuses on Achilles’ bout of weeping. Socrates doesn’t take into account the rest of the story; instead, he focuses on one pitiful moment and decides that it needs to go, without looking to see why it’s there and whether or not Achilles would be worthy of praise without it.
It’s cliche to point that Christians do this sort of thing, a lot. Talk about “shit,” and it’s doubtful that your story will be read, much less respected. Talk about extramarital sex, and you’re guaranteed to be blacklisted. Unless, of course, the girl sleeping around is the whore of Babylon, and she gets properly punished by the end of the story.
But I think Plato offers us some insight into what we need to change. We are prudes with the best of intentions. Those who grew up without Christ remember the gunk they soaked up, and they’re determined not to let their kids make the same mistakes. And so the answer, of course, is to build an impermeable brick wall. Parents become Plato’s guardians, careful to make sure that their kids only know about the admirable things in life. Not because they think evil doesn’t exist—they know the opposite far too well. It’s a misguided act of love, because they know what it means to be impressionable.
But maybe that’s the point? Why else do we have the story of the dismembered concubine? Or the story of Judah and Tamar? Or the countless other distasteful moments in the Bible. Perhaps we live as if wisdom is the disappearace of nasty stories, when we really ought to be thinking that wisdom is knowing how to respond to nasty stories. And if that’s true, then a lot of our stories aren’t doing a whole lot of good.
I’ve been chewing on this post by Pastor Wilson. Like the last, I didn’t find it upsetting, but confusing. I like the argument that cultural sexual guilt creates pharisaical codes of righteousness, but the rest of it is a jumble. Here are a few examples:
“To take one hilarious example, on planet Earth, which is mostly water, we are in a panic over running out of water.”
This is amusing, but skirts the actual discussion. The Earth’s water is 99.9% salt water. Desalination is a very energy-intensive process. One of the main selling points of nuclear energy was that it would make wide-scale water desalination possible. An estimated one in eight people on the planet don’t have access to clean drinking water.
The difficulty is that prior partisan political commitments prevent us from looking at this issue with objectivity. Either we’re draining our aquifers, or we aren’t. The scientific process should be brought to bear in such a quantifiable issue. Conservative commitments prevent some from acknowledging that our irresponsibility might do harm to the created world (e.g., Pastor Wilson derides evangelical Christians who claim this is a “stewardship” issue), and see liberals as hopelessly confounded by their eco-guilt. Liberal commitments prevent some from acknowledging that the problem is solvable, or that man can affect creation for the better. Both get in the way of evaluating the issue Biblically and logically.
Where does Scripture tell us to beware of industralized food chains?
Here’s where the parallel between the Christian schooling movement and the current just economy movement come in handy again. Schaeffer established that the Bible speaks to all areas of life, not just a private religious life. Bahnsen illustrated that the application of the principles of biblical law are still morally binding. Our food system, like everything, can be evaluated in light of Biblical principles. Books like ‘Angels in the Architecture’ attempt to get Christians thinking about changing and creating culture.
And the people who are morally indignant about industrialized food chains are the same ones whose definitions of “natural” change radically as we move from the dining room to the bed room.
Pastor Wilson doesn’t say who he’s reading on the issue, but this statement does a disservice to almost every author I’ve read. Michael Pollan is a notable exception, but even he owes Wendell Berry for his best ideas, and Berry views his food ideas and his anti-progressive sexual ideas as cut from the same cloth (see his Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community). I also recommend reading Joel Salatin – a natural food pioneer, early homeschooler, and committed Christian. There is no disconnect between the dining room and the bedroom for either man.
Christians have been pioneers in this movement. But even if they weren’t, what difference would it make? Pastor Wilson is the person who introduced me to the concept of a co-belligerent (someone who fights alongside you in a cause but is not an ally because of fundamental differences of alleigance). But in this particular issue he does not see the co-belligerence, and accuses Christians I worship with on Sunday of being co-opted by a pagan movement created and sustained by unresolved sexual guilt.
Fortunately, the Christians I know working on this important cultural project are happy, grateful people. They are committed to creating a better way, and convinced that their results will speak for themselves. They are motivated by a divine discontent, yes (again, like the Christian schooling folks), but are fierce in their first loyalty to Christ’s Gospel and the promised renewal of all things.
This is a clever idea, and could serve as a stepping-stone to public acceptance of a local currency project. Here are two articles about the same idea:
This last weekend Doug Wilson urged us to keep our priorities straight, and I think that this is an excellent point to keep in mind, especially as economic and food security issues speedily crowd the intellects of some of us here on this blog. In particular, Wilson points out that the fight against abortion is not over, and the importance of this fight rightly eclipses many lesser issues.
Cruelty to an animal is one thing, but murder of a helpless child is yet another. These are both offenses of the same species – oppression of and cruelty toward the weak – but also of a different order. Abortion is murder, and all of our exulting about the sturdy yolks of our granola-fed chickens looks pretty silly in comparison.
So yes, we should be thankful for this reminder.
But.
I think it is clear by now that we require a mass shift in mores, a near-universal cultural and spiritual repentance, before abortion will go away. This will of course come through the Gospel. But since the Christian witness is an incarnational thing, it is legitimate to ask about practical ways that we can become Gospel for people who need to experience this change. I have been attracted to issues like economics, and eventually food, because I see in them an additional – and chronically underemphasized – tool for bringing about some of the cultural change that is needed in The West.
I think here specifically of the girls who decide to abort. Some do so because of uncaring callousness; others, many others, do so because of cultural and economic pressure. This is true especially for the poor. If you’re poor, having a baby means dropping out of school, perhaps your only way out of poverty. If you’re not in school, you are likely working long hours at multiple jobs to make ends meet, and you’re going to have to stop that. A baby is a game changer for the rich, but it’s often a total forfeit for the poor.
It’s true that these folks made certain recreational (and procreational) choices, and they should be held accountable for them. But it is the first place of the Christian to remove planks, and this includes broad-brush cultural judgments we pass on our society. Abortion is murder; we would do well to contemplate the many lesser murders in which we participate daily. Since we really do inhabit a culture of death, it is likely that this death has worked its way into the corners of our culture and lives as Christians.
The Conservatives with whom Christians overwhelmingly identify have been busy for decades napalming indigenous peoples and bombing deserts to glass. Our food system reeks of death and trades the dignity of God’s creatures for efficiency and commerce. Our political discourse is inhuman and uncharitable. Countless racas are uttered against our political enemies, our denominational oddballs, and even those who share the pews with us weekly. Lesser murders are all around us, and it’s time that we got to work fixing them.
Moreover, our economics reinforce this problem in many ways. Modern American Corporate Capitalism has done much to harm the family, which in turn has eroded our sexual standards, the economic stability and centrality of families, and the economic safety of women. We must now have two working parents to make ends meet; we must now be mobile and more committed to career than family or family life; we must depend on paychecks, which is to say that our livelihoods often depend on shareholders reviewing balance sheets or a capricious market that may finally force the innovation that makes us obsolete. If the church were doing her job, many of these girls would have economic security, a community to fill the gaps in family security, and a robust morality upon which to base their decisions. If our economics promoted dignity and charity over merit and profit, the dividends for abortion could be huge.
It is worth considering that ministry to the poor – an aggressive ministry, central to the church – could be introduced as an important element of the battle against abortion. Here we find the vulnerable and oppressed, those who share a fellowship with the aborted fetus that the rich often do not properly understand. We have spent our days puzzling endlessly over even lesser problems of theological accuracy, and have delegated the problem of the poor to the economists and politicians. But clearly, voting Reagan in wasn’t enough. The ever-widening wage gap in the US tells us that the economists have blown it entirely for the last century. It is widely believed and almost universally undisputed that Pat Robertson, and much of the rest of Christian media, are out of their gourds, or at least ineffective.
When we come to the poor, politicians and economists cease to matter. We not only find some of the oppressed, but we find that these oppressed are also the oppressors of their unborn children. The opportunity for twofold good is apparent.
This is, of course, all tied to food. Economics is simply the ordering of a household. People consume water and food more than just about anything else, so in a very real sense an economic problem is a food problem. I won’t belabor this point, except to say that all of these issues are intimately related. The same corporations that are patenting our seeds and growing our food are feeding and employing our poor, and fixing our distributive problems will go along way to recreating a societal architecture that helps young vulnerable girls make the right decisions.
Please don’t hear me as saying that the poor just can’t help themselves, and that unless we repent of our economic or “food” sins abortion will not be conquered. Of course not. Abortion is murder. Food is, well, food. But the problems are related, and we should avoid the false dichotomy. My argument is that if we get to work fixing our food system and our economics – or, more simply, if we get to work helping the poor – our currently intractable abortion situation may become tractable. Put another way, only the Gospel will ultimately win this bloody war, but there are many types of soil in the famous parable, and our economics have much to do with how rocky, thorny, or rich and loamy our society is.
When ordering our problems and distributing our cool cups of water accordingly, we must take account of “the least of these.” Current wisdom counts the unborn as the least of the least, and I certainly agree. But next in line are often the poor who we then condemn as murders, abandon to the cities, and leave to be ravaged by the excesses of welfare and the predations of an upside-down food system.
Finally:
I present to you two problems. I say: “Your neighbor is having an abortion, and your other neighbor is abusing his beast and then selling it to you for food.” And I ask you: what do you do about it? The answer to the second neighbor is quite easy: buy your meat elsewhere. So that is what some have begun to do. The answer to the first neighbor is much more difficult. You may go and speak with this neighbor, minister to her, protest before her house with signs, write letters to your legislator; at the end of the day, she may still have that abortion.
One of the reasons I am going on about this food thing is because I can do something about it. It presents a very real way of “fixing culture,” and it is a way that I can deliberately pass on to my children. Not as in “I have guilt to atone for, and laying it on the Altar of Whole Foods seems like a hip way to go.” But I, and a growing number of people, look around and see all sorts of cultural sin. Like the many, I wish to do something about it. As with our fathers, I believe that the battle against abortion in our generation is an important one, but I also believe that there is utility in other pursuits like feasting, publishing magazines, starting schools, and fighting for strong families. These all contribute to culture; I wish, with no moral superiority or conviction that this is “the answer,” to contribute my garden to this project. With it comes gratitude, hard work, health, tradition, freedom of the individual and the necessity of community. My hope, eventually, is to share the real-live fruits of this garden with the poor, and in so doing bring them the Gospel, in order to set them free.
