Is Alan an angel? No, he’s not an angel. But he is a saint. A saint with an extra 21st chromosome. For God’s own glory, for Alan’s good, and for mine, He gave Alan an extra one. I don’t know exactly what a chromosome is, but God has decided to create a fairly exclusive club amongst the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve (more…)
Abortion, Gay Marriage, and the Good Life
This Sunday, my pastor told a story about an occasion he had to protest at an abortion clinic. When he arrived, there were already activists present, representing both sides of the debate: pro-life and pro-abortion. The former was lined up on one side of the sidewalk, the latter on the other. Each side had its array of signs declaring the evils or virtues of abortion, respectively. What he noticed, however, was that the pro-abortion crowd was fiercely and angrily yelling and screaming at the pro-choice crowd, fists pumping and obscenities flying. When he glanced over at the pro-life crowd, to see their response, he saw a crowd of activists, just as angry, yelling back with fists in the air and obscenities accompanying them.
He realized, at that moment, that if a non-English speaking person appeared, he would have no way of differentiating the two. Without being able to read the signs or understand the words being yelled out, the two would be utterly indistinguishable.
It is with this story in mind that I think back (more…)
Gay Marriage and Christian Values
Last night, Douglas Wilson debated Andrew Sullivan on gay marriage. Peter Leithart summarized the debate and the difficulties Christians will face in that debate. He noted:
It will take nothing short of a cultural revolution for biblical arguments to be heard, much less to become persuasive.
Wilson’s [argument] was [came across as] a fundamentalist, theocratic argument.
The claim that legalizing gay marriage will make the legalization of polygamy easier, as Wilson repeatedly argued, is coherent, but doesn’t have much purchase. Nobody seems to be much worried about a polygamous future for America, and making polygamy the centerpiece of opposition to gay marriage looks too much like fear-mongering.
In the end, these dilemmas may not matter. Perhaps Christians are called to do no more than speak the truth without worrying about persuasiveness.
Whatever the political needs of the moment, the longer-term response to gay marriage requires a renaissance of Christian imagination. Because the only arguments we have are theological ones, and only people whose imaginations are formed by Scripture will find them cogent.
Leithart is right. We live in a world, always have, that doesn’t want to hear what God has to say about anything, especially the love between two people who want nothing more than equality with the rest of us.
It is at this point that one might wonder if the best way for Christians to handle the debate is to let it go. When Constantine reformed Rome’s laws, it happened in an empire that had a Christian leader. Whatever one might believe about the founding of America, to call it a Christian nation today would be laughable, even to Constantine. Constantine, however, saw the value in Christian law because he saw a Christian culture living by it and knew that was what Rome needed.
Maybe the best response for Christians would be to simply live out Christian laws and values, offer a competing polis and culture, that the rest of the nation will someday see the value in. Rather than imposing our values on a nation that doesn’t want them, maybe it would be best to live out our values and show the nation they are worth wanting. Maybe, just maybe, the world will see the righteousness of the Law and start wondering who it is that gave us these laws. Then, the nation will have an imagination formed (or, at least desirous to be formed) by Scripture and will begin to understand our arguments.
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Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?
We have often heard it said that, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This is often said in response to a disagreement in artistic preference and does help maintain a sense of “agreeing to disagree.” Being able to look past disagreements and maintain civilized, social order is a habit that many of us would do well to nurture, but is there any truth to the old adage? Is beauty indeed in the eye of the beholder? Is there any such thing as objective beauty? Something that’s beautiful even if no human had ever said, “Wow. Pretty.”
One way to pursue an answer to this question is by studying patterns in philosophical thought. The three major branches of philosophy are: Metaphysics (the study of stuff and its origin, whether physical, spiritual or otherwise), Epistemology (the study of knowledge and how mankind comes to acquire knowledge), and Ethics (the study of the evaluation of human conduct). Theologian John Frame makes a wise assessment when he generalizes this third branch into “Value Theory” instead of just “Ethics”. Value theory steps beck from merely assessing rules and codes of conduct to encompass traditional descriptive, normative and applied ethics, as well as aesthetics (the study of beauty) and economics. Aesthetics fits nicely as a sub-category of “value theory” but might be a tight fit under the category of “ethics”, or would it?
Here’s what I mean by patterns in philosophical thought. As Christians, when it comes to metaphysics, we do not leave the answers to the big questions about reality, existence, minds, bodies, God, space, time, causality, etc., up to the one asking the questions. If someone says, “what’s true for you is true for you. As for me, reality is in the eye of the beholder.” That’s not an answer that receives much support from orthodox Christianity. In fact, most folks would scoff, right before questioning the person’s sanity.
And what about epistemology? How can I have knowledge of myself, the external world, and God? As Christians, is there some other point of beginning for knowledge and wisdom besides the revealed Word of God? If God has said, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”, do we allow for some neutral zone where people can acquire knowledge on their own terms? How is it that we have the possibility of knowledge? Should we be rationalists or empiricists, or both, or neither? Tertium quid, anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
What about ethics? Is moral human conduct up to the individual? Is it a social contract? Is it the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Is the greatest good even recognizable? When it comes to ethics, Christians are famous, if not notorious, for not allowing ethics to remain in the eye of the beholder. We have the ten commandments, the two greatest commandments, Psalm 119, which is a really long song about loving the law, the entire Pentateuch, the law of God written on our hearts, etc. The answer to this question of value theory rests in the revealed Word of God which contains His Law. No eyes of any beholders here.
So, I mentioned a pattern earlier. Metaphysical questions? Objective answers revealed by God. Epistemological questions? Objective standards revealed by God. Ethical questions? Ditto. What about questions about beauty, another branch of value theory? Does God have an opinion on what is beautiful and what isn’t? Does He delight in some things and find others detestable? If ever there was an opportunity to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, this is it. God sees. God assesses. God beholds and declares beautiful or ugly. God weighs in the balances and finds some things wanting.
Once we’ve rejected the myth that all beauty is subjective, we can make some real progress towards a Christian aesthetic. So where do we begin? There is the difference between “beauty” and “preference” to consider. The smell of anchovies or the texture of sushi may come up in the conversation about preferences. There is the fact that everything that God finds beautiful may not tickle our fancy. Author Nate Wilson commends us to the reproductive patterns of the leopard slug, if we want to expand our horizons of aesthetic study. God created leopard slugs with all their mucous and odd protrusions, and God created bunnies and kittens. However, we often see bunnies and kittens on posters containing bible verses, but we never see posters with leopard slugs reproducing. Is there a verse somewhere in the Bible that extols the blessings of bunnies and kittens while condemning leopard slugs to eternal perdition? Maybe we do not yet see creation through the new eyes that we have been given.
Are questions concerning objective beauty the easiest questions to answer? Obviously not. Does the present author have an entire system of biblical aesthetics worked out? Uhhhh, nope. Is beauty one of those square inches of creation about which Jesus Christ says with great affection, “Mine!”? Yep. So, for those interested in embarking on the journey of Christian aesthetics, there’s a great article by Justin Hawkins over at FareForward. Here’s a sample…
In the Christian understanding, humanity was made for the contemplation and enjoyment of God, and since the beauty of creation is the shadow of the radiance of the divine beauty, it is no mystery that we are attracted to it as to the echo of a lover’s voice. In the beauty of creation, our Creator is speaking to us, and that is why we love beautiful things.
Ethics and aesthetics are too closely linked in value theory for one to be objectively true and the other to be left to individual preference. The non-Christian would agree with me and say that ethics and aesthetics are very closely linked, and they both ought to be based on individual preference. What should the Christian say?
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Death and Taxes
Death and Taxes: two things of which we can be absolutely certain we will experience.
Yesterday, I filed my taxes. As has been the case of late, I had to pay above and beyond what was collected from me throughout the year. I’m sure it’s simply a case of needing to perform some basic arithmetic so that more is collected with each paycheck and less, if any, will be due as a lump sum in April.
That is hardly the point, though, is it?
One of my favorite films is Will Ferrell’s Stranger than Fiction. In the film, there is a scene where Ana Pascal (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) explains to Will Ferrell (or Harold Crick, as he is known in the film) why she knew she’d be audited. She explains that she paid her taxes, but withheld a percentage of it, and attached a letter explaining that the percentage she withheld was withheld because she was not interested in supporting those particular government expenditures. Miss Pascal, as Harold addresses her, explains that she only paid 78 percent of her taxes because she’s not so big a fan of “national defense, corporate bailouts, and campaign discretionary funds.”
While I’m certain Miss Pascal is appropriately named “Pascal”–think Blaise Pascal–it is a different point to be made altogether. The point here is that Miss Pascal is identifying what we all seem to know: there are things for which we each believe the government to be necessary or at least desirable. And insofar as they work within those constraints, we are willing–generally–to support them financially. Miss Pascal is fine with potholes, swing sets, and shelters, but she is opposed to the government funding the other endeavors previously mentioned.
I, on the other hand, would oppose even what she supports, but I suppose I’d be less inclined to fight them if the only thing they wanted my taxes for were potholes and shelters. Instead, they want our money for everything, and so I am inclined–rightly or wrongly–to fight them on everything.
If only the government operated on market principles. If I believe them to build the best and safest roads, then I voluntarily give them tax dollars instead of another firm attempting to build roads. If I believe them to provide the best security services for my family, then I I voluntarily give them tax dollars instead of another firm. If I don’t, I withhold those dollars and give them to someone else.
Some might say this is untenable. Others wouldn’t compete for my money to provide those services because too many people could take advantage of the services without having paid for it. Miss Pascal, for example, lives in a country that is safe precisely because others are paying for the national defense she objects to. But is it true that companies wouldn’t compete for those funds anyway?
The objection, while seemingly sound, isn’t necessarily so. Men have written multitudes of books explaining how the most necessary and basic governmental services could be offered by the market. Books like Chaos Theory by Robert Murphy or Anarchy and the Law by Edward P. Stringham explain quite effectively how it could work.
The question shouldn’t be whether the government is the only one who can do it, but rather if the government has the duty to do it. Rights, after all, exist only insofar as they are connected to our duties. I have a duty to protect my family, therefore I have the right to bear arms. I once heard a Constitutionalist explain: I have the duty to protect my family, therefore I have the right to either perform it myself or delegate it (along with my neighbors) to an organization–the police department–to do it in my stead. I have the duty to feed the poor, therefore I have the right to perform it, but I do not have the right to make someone else do it for or with me. My question to the Constitutionalist is, “Why, though, do I have the right to make my neighbors help fund the police department to which I am delegating my duty to protect my family, but not to make them help me feed the poor?”
What are the government’s duties and what rights does it have in order to execute those duties? This is the question of the hour. So long as we aren’t answering that question–and maybe even if we do–the government will continue to assert its duty and right to do whatsoever it chooses. And so long as that continues, it will be death and taxes for us.<>
Just War as Christian Discipleship – Part 1
Bell’s book isn’t perfect, and there are a few areas where I think we are left with more questions than answers, but overall it is a very good introduction to just war history, theory, and practice from a distinctively Christian perspective, and its benefits and usefulness far outweigh its flaws.
While Bell avoids partisan debates for the most part he pulls no punches in speaking straightforwardly about what justice demands in the Christian tradition as it developed from the Augustine and the fathers (modified from Plato and the Greeks) through to Aquinas, Vitoria, and Grotius in the early modern period.it is an excellent introduction to the Just War tradition from a distinctively Christian perspective, and its strengths are much more prominent than its weaknesses.
After a brief history of Just War thinking, and making an important distinction between modern, secular, just war theory, what he calls Just War as public policy checklist or Just War (PPC), and Just War as Christian discipleship or Just War (CD), Bell asks the question, “Has there ever been a just war?”
Such is the history, in brief, of the just war tradition since its adoption and adaptation by Christianity. What the history reflects is that war is not one thing always and forever, that it is no necessarily and inevitably “hell” as Sherman and others would have it. To the contrary, it is a human practice and as such is capable of being waged in different ways, from the highly ritualized and almost game-like wars of medieval chivalry that were minimally lethal (my favorite example being a yearlong war involving one thousand knights in the 1127 CE during which five died, four of those being the result of accidents), to the limited wars of attrition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the total wars that characterized significant wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At the outset of this chapter, the question was raised as to whether war could ever be just. Both pacifists and realists suggest the answer is no. While the historical overview suggests that war need not be total, it does not provide an entirely satisfactory answer to the question of whether war can in fact be just. By itself it does not refute the skeptics. These skeptics sometimes pose the question of just war in a more pointed manner by asking, Has there ever been a just war?
Such a question threatens to plunge us into the midst of the culture wars and the ideological battles of the current moment. After all, there is no shortage of persons willing to proclaim this or that war just or unjust in a manner that appears to be driven more by the political fortunes of the moment than by any deep familiarity with the just war tradition. From the longer perspective of history, there are historians of war and of just war who have argue that there have indeed been just wars.
From a Christian theological perspective, however, the question of whether there has ever been a just war is largely beside the point. From the standpoint of the Christian moral life, it is the wrong question. After all, the Christian moral life does not depend on whether that life has ever been lived faithfully before or not. If Christians are called to be a just war people by God then the proper response to that call is not to step back and ask, Has anyone else done it before us? Rather, even if it means going forth like Abram and his family into the unknown and unprecedented (Heb. 11:8), the proper, faithful response is to discern how our life should be so ordered in response to that call that we might be a people who wage war or refrain from waging war in accord with the precepts of just war. In other words, the proper response to the call to just war is not, Has it been done before? but, How then should we order our live so that we might respond to the call faithfully?
Perhaps the misguided nature of the question will be clearer if we put a similar challenge to another facet of the Christian life. Take, for example, the Ten Commandments. We might ask if there has ever been a Christian community that has embodied them perfectly? Has there ever been a Christian church that has succeeded in living out even one of them perfectly? Or take the Great Commandment that we love God and our neighbor. Has there ever been a church that has followed that commandment without flaw or failure? That the answer to these questions is no does not in itself render the commandments invalid, irrelevant, or unrealistic. That the Christian church has displayed and in the course of its life continues to terrible failures with regard to both love of God and of neighbor does not abolish that calling or erase the reality of that love in its life. That we miss the mark, that we continue to struggle with sin, does not diminish either the high calling to or the reality of holiness and virtue in the life of the church. Our failure as a people does not disprove God’s call; neither does our repeated failure establish that we are not in fact capable of accepting and embodying that call. All of this means that even if one could definitively show that the church had never even once embodied the just war discipline in war, that in itself would not prove that just war was neither the church’s calling nor a real possibility in its life.
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A Cup of Poison to the Lips of Liberalism
by Marc Hays
Are you a liberal? G. P. Grant thinks you’re insane if you’re not. In his 1974 book, English-Speaking Justice, he proposes,
Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good—‘conservatives’ included. In so far as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human good, it is difficult for me to consider as sane those who would deny that they are liberals.
Is this merely semantic quibbling? Without any more being said, I suppose, yes, it would be nothing more than a violation of Paul’s admonition to Timothy to “not quarrel about words” (2 Tim 2:14), but what if in the end it isn’t? To quarrel about words would be like quarrelling about anything else—fruitless. To be succinct with our words would be to be like God, who has revealed Himself using words that mean one thing, therefore not meaning something else.
In his 1955 work, The Defense of the Faith, Cornelius Van Til states, “the ‘what’ must precede the ‘that’; the connotation must precede the denotation; at least the latter cannot be discussed intelligently without at once considering the former.” In other words, how can we know what we’re talking about unless the words representing the ideas we’re discussing mean one thing instead of another? Van Til asks how we can discuss the existence of a god, if the god in question has no definite attributes. The ‘what’ must precede the ‘that’.
In our current political landscape, ‘liberal’ has become synonymous with ‘Democrat’, while ‘conservative’ equals ‘Republican’. G. P. Grant argues that perhaps the Republican relationship with conservatism is accurate, but the Democratic comparison should be with ‘progressivism’ instead of with ‘liberalism’. For the Democrat, liberty is not the goal as much as progress is, and if progress is the goal, then it is one that can never be reached. A traveler can never arrive at their destination, if the only reason to go on the trip is to be in a state of perpetual motion.
100 years ago, G. K. Chesterton summed-up progressivism in his work, “Heretics”. He wrote,
“It is not merely true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this ‘progressive’ age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have settled least what is progress are the most ‘progressive’ people in it. The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress, might be trusted perhaps to progress.”
So when Barak Obama ran on the monoplankular platform of “Change” in 2008, the election’s outcome showed that Americans were indeed progressivists and not liberals at all. “We don’t care where you take us, Mr. Obama, as long as you get us out of here.” As his two terms have progressed, we’ve found President Obama to be quite the conservative as he maintains many of Bush’s policies that he pledged to “change”, and quite the opposite of a true liberal as he’s sought to repossess American liberties granted by America’s Fathers in her Constitution. While admitting that the word ‘liberal’ has come to mean only ‘secular liberal’, Grant stresses that this does not change the fact that the underlying foundations of liberty and freedom remain constant. Since liberty is still the opposite of tyranny, the word ’liberal’ is has become a misnomer– a glaring misnomer that we’re now stuck with.
In Part IV of English-Speaking Justice, Grant gets to his most salient point by describing Roe v. Wade as the “cup of poison to the lips of liberalism”. He elegantly shows that between two members of the same species, the “right” of the one to exist should outweigh the “right” of the other to enjoy privacy and comfort. However, the high court’s decision to refuse the term ‘person’ to one still in utero, reveals that modern liberalism is not about human rights at all. Humans in the womb and humans outside of the womb are still both humans by scientific definition, but the modern liberal agenda set this empirically verifiable fact aside and replaced it with an abstraction of ‘personhood’ that allowed them to cater to a constituency that furthered their political agendas instead of one that didn’t.
Dr. Roberta Bayer, at Patrick Henry College, has summarized Grant’s analysis this way:
“Although the court claimed to be confining its decision to the categories given by the American Constitution, interpreted within a liberal world view, it still found a basis ‘for denying the most elementary right of traditional justice to members of our own species.” Thus, the justices must have held certain philosophical assumptions about being (nature) that were genealogically connected to some other philosophical tradition, a tradition neither guided by the Constitution, nor by what might be known scientifically about the development of the fetus in utero. In fact, the evidence of science would have made it more, rather than less, reasonable to hold that the fetus is a distinct individual with a given nature.”
Whereas American liberalism had been fighting for ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ for nearly 200 years, Roe stands in a stark contrast to those noble concepts. All that had been gained for equal human rights might as well be trampled underfoot, for the salt has lost it’s savor. All of the arguments for equal rights between slaves and free men; all of the arguments for equal rights between women and men; all of the arguments for equal rights between blacks and whites are totally eclipsed by the court-sanctioned murder of the most vulnerable members of our species. The 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, has to be the most inegalitarian U. S. document ever written, and it was the product of the liberal left–the ‘champions’ of equal rights.
Based on Grant’s definition of a ‘liberal’ as “someone who believes political liberty is a central human good”, the pro-life movement has out-liberalled the liberals by mammoth proportions. How can a so-called liberal deny the weakest members of its species the right to exist and still lay any legitimate claim to be a defender of liberty and equality? They can’t. They have placed the poisoned cup to their lips and drunk deeply. Liberalism is dead, and the death has been ruled a suicide.
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Television and Dominion
For anyone who watched the Grammy’s—I did not—or saw pictures and reports from the event—I did—it doesn’t take much to realize the importance of shock value when it comes to Hollywood. From the dresses—or lack thereof—being worn by the stars, to the language coming from entertainers during their presentations, one can see how much importance they place on shock value.
It seems the old fashioned way of introducing confrontations to our values has been replaced by shocking us into seeing those things that confront our values as the norm.
It used to be that television would never show, nor even imply, that a husband and a wife shared the same bed. Do you know what the first television series was to show husband and wife sleeping in the same bed? The Flintstones. It was the Flintstones that introduced the notion that a man and woman could share the same bed, and they introduced it slowly to a new generation of viewers (our children, rather us as children). Change the way they think, and when they grow up, that will be the new norm.
Of course, husband and wife do share the same bed, that is not necessarily the issue. It was not the norm, however, to show that on television and this is just an example of how that idea was undermined or subverted.
Nowadays, even Hollywood is too impatient to change our values that way. Now (its actually been awhile this is has been happening) they throw the most shocking thing they can in our faces. In this way, something slightly less shocking, but no less confrontational to conservative, Christian values of modesty, will be seen as the norm.
Steve Wilkins, in his book Face to Face, warns against having friends who are not seeking wisdom, Godliness, obedience to God’s Word, and increasing holiness. He then goes on to define friends as those who impact us and the way they think. He even identifies television show characters as a kind of friend, week in and week out speaking into our lives. Even those friends, though, must meet the guidelines for friendship. It seems, however, that the television industry isn’t looking to offer us friends who are seeking wisdom and holiness, but who can shock us into realigning our tired, old values.
In this season of Lent, maybe we ought to reevaluate what kind of friends we allow ourselves to have—especially those who make their way in through our television. Or, as Steve Schlissel once said, maybe we need to consider the impact television [and friends] have on our taking of dominion and discipling the nations.
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The One With the Squished Head
“That’s what I get from these guys–the permission to question everything.” Thus ends the new trailer promoting Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss’ film “Unbelievers”. It is scheduled to be released sometime in 2013.
If you’ve ever seen Douglas Wilson’s “Collision”, then you’ll recognize the trailer for “Unbelievers”. Apparently, the “Unbelievers” folks appreciated what Gorilla Poet Productions created a few years ago with “Collision” and have attempted to create their own anti-theistic version. The camera work, the music, the transportation scenes–all very reminiscent of the fantastic work by Darren Doane, Aaron Rench, Nate Wilson, and the folks at Gorilla Poet. Congratulations to them on being copied. It is the best form of flattery.
And how about that title? Did they intend to prove everything Douglas Wilson said in “Collision” all in one word? The only reference point they have is the truth. All they can do is oppose the God who created them by being UN-believers. As Wilson so aptly states,
“Atheism has two tenets: 1.) There is no God, and 2.) I hate Him.”
In the death throes of their leader–the one with the squished head–the atheists must continue to rely upon the only foundation that there is available, i.e. that God created them, as He did all of us, rational, moral image-bearers of Himself. Every word they speak speaks a word against themselves. Every beautiful image they capture on film displays the glory of their Creator.
So watch “Unbelievers”. Watch “Collision”. Work hard. Sleep well. The mustard seed continues to grow.<>
Giving Up Me for Lent?
Lent approaches (Wednesday, the 13th for those who aren’t following along) and many–but certainly not all–Christians will be deciding what to give up.
Many will follow the historic practice of the Church and give up animal products (meat, eggs, dairy, etc.) Others will follow the contemporary practice of the Church and give up something they like (chocolate, soda, alcohol, tobacco, etc.) Still others will follow a more recent, yet popular, practice of giving up something that distracts them (television, Facebook, the internet, etc.)
N.T. Wright, in one of his many good books on the Christian life (Simply Christian, maybe) mentions that Lent is a season of death, therefore we give up something. Easter follows as a season of new life and new creation, so we should take up something–something new and good.
It is not my intention to come across as smug, overly pious, or prideful–but I realize that what I am about to say is all of those things and contradicts the very thing I am intending to do–yet I hope to give readers something to consider for their own Lenten practices this year.
A friend recently shared Andrew Murray’s Humility with me. Then, I re-read C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Then, my pastor preached on humility and pride. Then, well you get the idea. Each of these books or sermons deals directly with humility and pride. It may just be that God is trying to tell me something. Thus, I’ve decided to give up myself for Lent. I don’t know if this is a legitimate thing to fast from during Lent–historically anyway–but it is my plan. From Ash Wednesday to Easter, I am giving up myself. I will strive to not tell any stories about myself, not to “out-do” anyone else. Just listen. Just ask questions about them. Just be interested in them. Just care about who they are. I’m not going to tell people how great I am, and I’m not going to tell people how despicable I am–both are cases of pride, although we often try to convince ourselves the latter is humility when it is not.
Whatever your view of Lent is, whatever your view of fasting is, I’m sure you agree that pride is a great evil for Christians and humility is a great weakness for many. Pray for me, that the Lord would have mercy. That I might give up myself for Lent.
I’d rather hope that I can ask this question without it turning into a competition to out-holy one another. So, if you are practicing Lent this year, what are you giving up?
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