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On October 26, 2013 By Kuyperian In Books, Scribblings Like

Marc Hays: Lust of Flesh and Eyes & Pride of Life

In 2009, Athanasius Press published Peter Leithart’s commentary on 1 John. It is included in their “Through New Eyes” commentary series, and is entitled “From Behind the Veil.” In chapter 5, he elaborates on the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life:

“…John focuses attention on the relationship between the world and “desire.” He enumerates three evil desires, or lusts (epithumia): the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life.

The desires John lists are, first of all, variations on the desires evoked by the tree of knowledge. Eve saw that the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable for wisdom (Gen. 3:6); she was gripped by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life. Adam and Eve took the fruit of the tree of knowledge prematurely, but the things they desired from the tree were truly desirable, and God planned eventually to fulfill the desires of Eve’s heart.

In the Old Covenant, Yahweh offered Israel the tree of knowledge in the form of three gifts, and then stored them away in the temple, hidden in the Most Holy Place, until the fullness of time, until Israel became mature enough to receive her inheritance. These are the three gifts in the Ark: a jar of manna, the gift of food and life; the tablets of the law, written with the finger of God, the gift of instruction and wisdom; and the rod of Aaron that had budded with almond blossoms, the gift of authority, the gift of glory. Israel had these gifts in part: they had life in the presence of Yahweh, they had the wisdom of God in Torah, they had a share in the glory of God. But for Israel the fulness of these gifts lay in the future, and the life of each Israelite, and the life of Israel as a nation, was to be directed by the desire for these three gifts, by the anticipation that someday the veil would be rent and the gifts would be opened and distributed freely. Yahweh promised that when he came forth from his tent, he would bring these gifts with him.

That is the gospel, which is, once again, the gospel of the rent veil. In the fulness of time, God sent these gifts not in part but in full. God sent Torah in the flesh, his Eternal Word and Wisdom; the Father sent bread from heaven, the One who is the way, the truth and the life; he exalted humanity to heavenly places to share in his authority to judge. By his death and resurrection, Jesus tore down the veil where the gifts of God had been hidden away. By his death and resurrection, Jesus made these gifts available to anyone who trusts in him. Jesus is the life of God; Jesus is the wisdom of God; Jesus is the glory of the Father, the exact representation and image of his Father. In Jesus we have life and wisdom and royal glory. In Jesus, who is the ark of God, the gifts of God are freely offered to those who are united to Jesus and follow him. He is the tree of knowledge as he is the tree of life. Under the Old Covenant these gifts were holy, taboo, unapproachable. But no longer; now, it’s holy things for holy people.”

Good gifts to be thankful for as we enter into worship tomorrow morning, as we proclaim the Preface and Sanctus together with our kin in Christ atop His holy mountain.

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On October 15, 2013 By Uri Brito In Books Like

Giving Thanks for the Little Things

By Uri Brito

The results are in! Gratitude wins the day by a landslide. In fact, as a result of this monumental victory, psychology departments are developing entirely new areas of study on the little known fact of gratitude. According to Robert Emmons, author of Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier, “Gratitude is literally one of the few things that can measurably change people’s lives.” ^a There are measurable benefits. Did you hear that?

Linked to this discovery is the helpful suggestion made by Michael Hyatt that keeping a gratitude journal can be immensely beneficial as we build an arsenal of gratitude pages. Ending the day by listing the reasons for thanksgiving, however small, can actually serve as a rich spiritual exercise.

Of course, we are aware that psychological journals are behind the times. Gratitude has always been a Christian virtue. St. Paul had already broken the news. Later, in the 20th century, Bonhoeffer alluded to this in his remarkable little book Life Together. There, he takes us back to the glories of gratitude in community life. For Bonhoeffer, if you don’t know where to start in the gratitude journey, start with thanking God for your community. He writes:

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

The Christian faith is a food religion. The heart of it is found in the death/resurrection of Jesus the Messiah. He became for the world the bread of life. This bread then becomes the food for hungry souls to feed. In the Christian tradition, it is articulated most clearly in the table of the Lord. The table is a table of joy and gratitude; so much gratitude that it is usually referred to as the Eucharistisc Table. The word eucharistia means “thanksgiving.” Emmons says that “when we feel grateful, we are moved to share the goodness we have received with others.” ^b It is this sharing of food that forms this table of thanksgiving.

Gratitude builds us in love and compels us share in the shalom of God with others. To whom much is given much is required. To those of us who partake of God’s goodness often and daily, we are called then to compel others with our own lives and words to share in this community of gratitude formed by the God who gave us His own life.<>разработка промо а яндекс реклама на е

Thanks! page 2 (back)
Ibid. 4 (back)

On September 27, 2013 By Kuyperian In Books, Theology Like

Why Virtue?

Click to see the book at Amazon.

N. T. Wright has a wonderful book called After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters. I would strongly recommend it to anyone, whether a new Christian, or one who has been in the faith for many years but wants to grow in discipleship and faithfulness.

WHY BE VIRTUOUS?

One of the key insights that Wright brings to light in the book—and there are many—has to do with the Why? of Christian virtue. In other words, what is the reason for pursuing holiness, discipline, character, and virtue? What is our motive? Here he offers something fresh—something that I think moves us further along than many of the common answers to this question, and it does so by inspiring the imagination.

Often the answer to such a question seems to boil down to brute command: Do it because the Bible says so. Which amounts to: “Do it because God says to. Just obey. Don’t ask why, just get to it.” There is, of course, a certain amount of validity to the notion that God as creator has the authority to command, and that we as creatures have a duty to obey, whether we understand or not; however, that kind of misses the point. God is not like the exasperated parent who says, “because I said so,” in response to a sincere search for understanding. After all God doesn’t want a bunch of brow-beaten children; he wants us to grow up in doing his will and to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom. 12.2). He wants us to know why we obey, so that we can obey with wisdom, discerning not only the letter, but also the spirit of the law of liberty. (more…)

On September 19, 2013 By Kuyperian In Books Like

God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades

Atheists love the Crusades. Liberals love the Crusades. Heck, even Muslims love the Crusades. And why shouldn’t they? The Crusades are the chronic chink in the Christian’s historical armor. Is some Christian pestering you with some highfalutin talk about Biblical ethics or Christian virtue? Then just remind them of the Crusades. After all, everybody knows how wrong the Christians were in that instance, and since the Christians were so obviously wrong that time, then they must be wrong now too.

And for the most part Christians acquiesce. “You’re right. You’re right. I know. I know. And I’m sorry for my forefathers’ brutality and insensitivity. Can we just move past that?” The resounding Non-Christian answer is, “No!” And why shouldn’t it be? They say they’ve got us over a barrel. We say they’ve got us over a barrel. Case closed.

There is an antidote to the situation described above, which is simply to know something about the Crusades. 99.9% of everything your opponent knows about the Crusades they learned from a friend who heard it on Oprah, but do you know any more than they do? If you’d like to know more than you do, then I have an option for “Step 1” of that process, which is to read God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, by Rodney Stark.

The case FOR the Crusades? What? Now I’m just talkin’ crazy talk. Who would ever be willing to say publicly that there’s a case FOR the Crusades? Answer: Rodney Stark.

Published in 2009, God’s Battalions leads the reader through significant portions of Eastern and Western history from the migration of Muhammad in A.D. 622, through the Muslim invasion of the next several centuries, and into the Western response to those attacks beginning in the 11^th Century.

Here’s the flap copy from inside the dust jacket of the hardcover edition:

In God’s Battalions, award-winning author Rodney Stark takes on the long-held view that the Crusades were the first round of European colonialism, conducted for land, loot, and converts by barbarian Christians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. To the contrary, Stark argues the Crusades were the first military response to unwarranted Muslim terrorist aggression.

Stark reviews the history of the seven major Crusades from 1095 to 1291, demonstrating that the Crusades were precipitated by Islamic provocations, centuries of bloody attempts to colonize the West, and sudden attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. Although the Crusades were initiated by a plea from the pope, Stark argues that this had nothing to do with any elaborate design of the Christian world to convert all Muslims to Christianity by force of arms. Given the current tensions in the Middle East and terrorist attacks around the world, Stark’s views are a thought-provoking contribution to our understanding and are sure to spark debate.

I commend it to you.

You can buy it here.<>online rpg mobile game реклама гугл на

On September 14, 2013 By Kuyperian In Books Like

Neil Postman’s Description of Reading

If you have not read Neil Postman’s, Amusing Ourselves to Death, it’s not too late, but don’t put it off. If you love TV, you must read it now before you’re completely brain-dead. If you still watch TV, but it irritates you to no end, then you probably have foresight into Postman’s argument. If you abandoned TV years ago, then Postman will bolster your sagacity with a host of historical, philosophical, anthropological, and sociological insights. Whichever category you fit in to, the time has come to read Postman.

As an example of what you’ll be learning, here’s Postman’s analysis of what is required of the reader during the act of reading…

“Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency. The printing press makes rather stringent demands on our bodies as well as our minds. Controlling your body, however, is only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely thought to be stupid. If you have learned how to get to meanings without aesthetic distraction, you are required to assume an attitude of detachment and objectivity. This includes you bringing to the task what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence,” meaning that you are able to distinguish between the sensuous pleasure or charm, or ingratiating tone (if such there be) of the words, and the logic of their argument. But at the same time, you must be able to tell from the tone of the language what is the author’s attitude toward the subject and toward the reader. You must in other words, know the difference between a joke and an argument. And in judging the quality of an argument, you must be able to do several things at once, including delaying a verdict until the entire argument is finished, holding in mind questions until you have determined where, when or if the text answers them, and bringing to bear on the text all of your relevant experience as counterargument to what is being proposed. You must also be able to withhold those parts of your knowledge and experience which, in fact, do not have a bearing on the argument. And in preparing yourself to do all of this, you must have divested yourself of the belief that words are magical and, above all, have learned to negotiate the world of abstractions, for there are very few phrases and sentences in this book that require you to call forth concrete images. In a print culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.”

Maybe you’ve stopped to consider what reading requires of you, but before Postman, I never had. The above quote is one of my favorites, and there are others, but the richness of Amusing Ourselves to Death is actually not found in its quotability, but in the awareness that the reader receives of the general trends of culture around him, and how “show business” is pushing public discourse. It’s good stuff.

Here’s a link to purchase it on Amazon.<>download game java

On August 31, 2013 By Kuyperian In Books Like

The Power and Mystery of the Spoken Word

by Marc Hays

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was born in Berlin, Germany in July 1888. He received doctorates in law and philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1917 he served as an officer in the German army and fought in the trenches of The Great War. Upon Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, Rosenstock-Huessy immigrated to America, taking a position at Harvard, then later at Dartmouth College where he taught social philosophy until he retired in 1957. He died in 1973.

This being an internet blog post, you’re probably not planning on sitting here all day, so I’ll cut to the chase. The rest of the post will be a couple of quotes from Rosenstock-Huessy to set his flavor on your pallette, hopefully whetting your appetite for more. I’ll wrap it up with some thoughts about Rosenstock-Huessy by James B. Jordan.

This first quote is from his book, Magna Carta Latina: The Privilege of Singing, Articulating, and Reading a Language and of Keeping It Alive, which he co-wrote with Ford Lewis Battles, who translated and indexed Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. You can tell by the subtitle that this is not your average Latin grammar. The following quote is also a distillation of the second chapter of his book Speech and Reality.

Articulated Speech: When you yell “iiiiiiiih” and your chum yells back “iiiiiiiih,” you are two little animals making inarticulate noise. When you, however, say to him: “Now listen, Johnnie,” and he says, “I listen, Billy,” you are two people speaking to each other in articulated speech. What is the difference between the two cases? In articulated speech, the process of listening is clearly defined between another person and yourself. You summon him to act as a listener. The roles are distributed between you two, because one in the same act first is suggested as an order on your side; then, the same act is acknowledged as a voluntary reaction on his side. You and he enter in this specific relation. In answering you, “I listen,” he partly identifies himself with you since he admits that he knows exactly what you mean. Furthermore he preserves his personality by adding “I.” Speech is both identity with, and distinction between, people. It is like weaving a pattern out of several fibres. For his “I listen” is not the same sound as your “listen.” It has passed through his conscience and consciousness and he had to reshape it before he passed it back to you. Now the sentence “I listen” carried back to you something quite different from the noise “iiiiiiiih.” It was now a declaration of cooperation, of acknowledgement of his having heard you. A sentence is a personal relation between answerable people. Articulated speech is communication between responsible people.

Can you taste that? That’s the flavor of insight. But when he does his philosophy, when he passes this insight along, there is not an ivory tower in sight. His prose is dense, but soft, moist, and easily chewed. Kinda like a good pound cake.

This next quote is taken from Out of Revolution, an 800 page history of European civilization. Rosenstock-Huessy said that the thesis for this 20-year work was discovered while he was in the trenches during a battle in World War I. His historiography claims to be anti-Cartesian and anti-Comte, by which statements he intends to set his method apart from the mainstream presuppositions of how to do history. But even in history, or perhaps especially in his history, Rosenstock-Huessy’s emphasis on the sociology of articulate speech is unmistakable.

Every human being is endowed with the wonderful gift of speech. He can express his own secret better than anybody else. We rarely reveal our true selves in the market place of life. Words often seem to be made to hide our thoughts. But the more we try to avoid emphasis, or even truth, in our speech, the more the few moments stand out in which language has the full weight of self expression. A bride speaking her decisive “Yes” or “No” before the altar uses speech in its old sense of revelation, because her answer establishes a new identity between two separate offsprings of the race and may found a new race, a new nation. We are so dull we rarely realize how much history lies hidden in marriage, and how the one word spoken by the bride makes all the difference between cattle-raising and a nation’s good breeding.

His insight seems to be patently obvious once you’ve read it, but without him saying it, you never would’ve come up with it. In one sense he has a “firm grasp of the obvious,” which is often said in manner meant to be deprecating. But when your argument is one that is prima facie to any intelligent reader, I think the only adequate description of him would be “genius.”

In Biblical Horizons’ Open Book Newsletter 25, James B. Jordan concludes his brief introduction of Rosenstock-Huessy thusly:

…I recommend that anyone seriously interested in laboring in the intellectual arena become familiar with Rosenstock-Huessy’s insights. Now for a few observations.

1. Rosenstock-Huessy is always a surprise. One never knows what he will write or say on a topic, but it will always be something “different.” He tries to come at old things in new ways, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

2. Rosenstock-Huessy is rather a maverick as a Christian. He scoffs at the notion that the universe is millions of years old. He claims to hold fiercely to Nicene orthodoxy, and views the Bible as God’s inspired Word. He has contempt for liberal Christianity and for literary criticism of the Bible. He affirms that the four gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in that order. Yet he also thinks that the books of Moses were put together in the days of David. Also, he often speaks and writes as if the Church were going to wither away in the next millennium, but he remained an active church-goer all his life. (In fact, the coming age of international techo-tribalism will be a golden time for the local church, for the local church is the purest form of the tribe.)

3. Rosenstock-Huessy’s followers and advocates are, it seems, mainly composed of people who want some kind of religionless Christianity, or some kind of one-world order that is not grounded in the church. The antithesis between Christ and non-Christ, between “history” and the “world,” which is pretty clear in R-H’s own work (though not as clear as we would like), is not maintained by many of his disciples. In my opinion, the “liberals” who have taken up R-H’s insights are not being faithful to the master. Be warned, though, that if you begin to read the literature surrounding his work, you will sometimes encounter left-wing nonsense.

Any book recommendation made from any person to another is also no less than a bit of economic advice. I am making the economic assertion the sum of the monetary price of a book by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy added to the temporal price it costs you to read it will never exceed the profit you will acquire through this particular business venture. Many writers are worth your time and money. You will search long and hard before finding one more profitable than Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy.

p.s. If you finished this post, I want to say “thank you” for spending part of your life reading it. I hope you found it helpful.<>game mobi продвижение а купить

On August 29, 2013 By Peter Jones In Books, Worship Like

Book Review: Desiring the Kingdom

James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom is one of the harder books I have reviewed. The reason is simple: his main thesis is important and needs to be digested by Christians and especially pastors. But some of his details and unanswered questions left me queasy.

His main thesis, in my words, is that rituals or liturgies shape our desires and our desires cause us to do what we do. Therefore rituals, liturgies, and worship have tremendous influence over our lives. But the influence is subtle. He would argue, and I think rightly, that what we learn in the liturgies of our lives can undo what we learn in a classroom setting. This is one of the reasons why a parent can give a child all the correct doctrine and that child still leaves the faith. Often the parents’ daily liturgies undo their teaching. He does a great job of showing how the world has competing liturgies. In chapter 3 he lists the mall, entertainment, and the university as secular liturgies that compete with the Church. He then spends a long chapter discussing what a historical Christian worship service means and how it shapes our lives. He argues persuasively that the Christian life is more about formation than information. Here Dr. Smith is at his best. I really enjoyed his discussion of liturgies and desire, as well as how he illustrated his points. As I read, I thought about the liturgy at my church and what we are teaching. But I also thought about what I do at home. What am I teaching my children through our various family liturgies? I also thought about what I want, my desires and where they come from. Why do I want what I want? I do fear that many of my desires are shaped by secular liturgies and not by the Scriptures and Christian practice.

I wrote this review in March of 2012. Since that time my thoughts on the interchange between desires and thoughts have continued to grow. So I wanted to add this to the review. Rational, logical, thought has an important part to play in the Christian life. It is just as important as desires. These two play off of each other and feed into each other. My agreement with Dr. Smith’s main thesis should not be read as our desires are superior to rational faculties. Ideas and propositions change us in tremendous and dramatic ways. The value of Dr. Smith’s book is that it emphasizes a point that has been minimized among the reformed men. But the danger of his thesis is that ideas can be put in the back seat. Here are a few other points in the book I liked besides the main thesis mentioned above.

Dr. Smith is a professor at Calvin College, so his burden is for the university. One of the triumphs of the book is his plea for Christian colleges and universities to be rooted in the local church. He describes the Church as the sanctuary with the university being one of the small rooms connected to the sanctuary. For too long, universities have seen themselves as separate from the church, instead of an extension of it. Smith says, “The task of Christian education needs to be reconnected to the thick practices of the church.” (p. 220) This needs to be fleshed out some, but overall the concept is a good one.
Dr. Smith also does a good job of showing that the quantity of our liturgies matter as much as quality. Thus our liturgies Monday through Saturday must line up with our liturgies on Sunday. For most of the book this is implicit, but in the last chapter he makes the point explicit as he discusses the Christian university. (p. 226-227) I think quantity is also why people can have a wonderful, biblical liturgy on Sunday and yet, that liturgy not impact their lives. They are immersed in a Christian liturgy for 1 to 2 hours on Sunday, but swimming in secular liturgies the rest of the week. It is not a surprise that the secular liturgies win.
There is one other point, which I do not remember Dr. Smith making, but seems to follow from his thesis. What he describes works best in a local or parish setting. In other words, his thesis wars against impersonal classrooms and churches where the teachers and pastors have only limited interaction with the parishioners and students. I am not saying it can’t work with larger groups, but it would be more difficult. The formation he is aiming at would be hard without the personal connection between pastor/parishioners and teachers/students.

Here are the things I did not like about the book.

Despite his rhetoric about countering secular liturgies, Dr. Smith often sounds like he is reciting one. For example in his discussion of the confession of sin in the worship service he says this, “We create institutions and systems that are unjust, not only because of individual bad choices, but also because the very structures and systems of these institutions are wrongly ordered, fostering systematic racism or patriarchy or exploitation of the poor.” (p. 178) This sounds like a list of talking points from a liberal Hollywood actor. It is hard to see how this is counter acting any secular liturgy. Also there is no discussion of abortion or sodomy in the book, despite the fact that these two sins are a primary part of the current secular liturgy. I agree that racism and exploitation of the poor are sins. But is racism more rampant than our culture’s hatred of children? Yet abortion goes unmentioned. It seems that Dr. Smith has been selective in which secular liturgies he is willing to call out. Liturgies such as feminism, the pro-choice movement, environmentalism, and sodomy all get a pass. Of course, the church has been influenced by our consumerist, materialistic culture, which Dr. Smith addresses. But he leaves out obvious sins that accompany greed, like abortion and sodomy. His failure to address prominent secular liturgies, left me raising my eyebrows.
There is little emphasis on the Bible as the check on our liturgies and Christian formation. This is why Dr. Smith can say with a straight face, “The minister raises her hands.” (p. 207) He does quote from the Bible from time to time, but it does not seem to guide his thinking. There will not be true Christian formation without a deep love for and obedience to the Scriptures. His first chapters are filled with philosophers and sociologists, but very little Bible. It is precisely because liturgy is so powerful that it must be biblical. We cannot merely say that we are doing Christian liturgy. We must prove it biblically. Dr. Smith did not need to do that in his book. But he did need to show more clearly that the Scriptures were guiding this thinking. If a Martian read his book, he would never know that the Bible was the compass that guided Dr. Smith’s thinking.
There is little discussion of the role faith in Christ plays in being formed by liturgies. One thought that kept pounding my head was. “Yes, I know liturgies are powerful. But I also know men and women who have sat under biblical liturgies for decades and yet live rotten, evil lives. How do these two truths fit together?” The deciding factor in our lives is a growing, vibrant faith in Christ that works itself out in obedience to his word. Christian liturgies can become instruments of death when someone participates apart from faith in Jesus Christ, the only Savior of sinners. On page 208, he briefly addresses the problem of good liturgies not transforming people. He plans on discussing it in volumes 2 and 3. But even in the footnote there is no mention of faith as a factor. Maybe he assumed that faith in Christ was an understood prerequisite to a faithful liturgy. However, I did not get that impression. His failure to speak of faith in Christ as the key to liturgy transforming us was a glaring omission.
Finally I disagreed with the quote from Stanley Hauerwas, which Dr. Smith approves of. “Becoming a disciple is not a matter of a new or changed self-understanding but of becoming part of a different community with a different set of practices.” (p. 220) Paul and Jesus are constantly trying to tell Christians how they are to view themselves. You are salt and light. You were dead, but now you alive. You have been raised up with Christ. Our self understanding shapes our practices. And our practices also shape who we are. I know Dr. Smith’s focus is on the latter of these two. But the former is true as well. A proper self-understanding is essential to Christian formation. Proper self-understanding is believing what God says about Himself, the world, and us. However, one of the great acts of the Christian imagination is to view ourselves how God views us. If I have understood Dr. Smith correctly, then I think he overreaches. This might seem picky, but it isn’t. Christian formation is not simply about new practices and a new community. To say that is inadequate and can lead to a presumption that taking part in a Christian liturgy automatically forms me into a Christian.

The book was a wonderful, thought provoking read that made me evaluate numerous facets of my life, my family’s life, and the life of my church. However, there were some noticeable gaps in the book that I hope he addresses in volumes 2 and 3 of this series.<>

On August 23, 2013 By Kuyperian In Books Like

The Great Cigar Fraud – GKC

One of my favorite books by Gilbert Keith Chesterton is a collection of essays entitled, Tremendous Trifles. Within this favorite there are several favorites. One is called “A Tragedy of Twopence.” There’s nothing like a good story that ends with a good moral, especially if you’d have never seen that particular moral coming out of that particular story; hence, my undying love for Chesterton. Here’s what I mean:

“I was walking about a German town, and I knew no German. I knew, however, two or three of those great and solemn words which hold our European civilisation together—one of which is “cigar.” As it was a hot and dreamy day, I sat down at a table in a sort of beer-garden, and ordered a cigar and a pot of lager. I drank the lager, and paid for it. I smoked the cigar, forgot to pay for it, and walked away, gazing rapturously at the royal outline of the Taunus mountains. After about ten minutes, I suddenly remembered that I had not paid for the cigar. I went back to the place of refreshment, and put down the money. But the proprietor also had forgotten the cigar, and he merely said guttural things in a tone of query, asking me, I suppose, what I wanted. I said “cigar,” and he gave me a cigar. I endeavoured while putting down the money to wave away the cigar with gestures of refusal. He thought that my rejection was of the nature of a condemnation of that particular cigar, and brought me another. I whirled my arms like a windmill, seeking to convey by the sweeping universality of my gesture that my rejection was a rejection of cigars in general, not of that particular article. He mistook this for the ordinary impatience of common men, and rushed forward, his hands filled with miscellaneous cigars, pressing them upon me. In desperation I tried other kinds of pantomime, but the more cigars I refused the more and more rare and precious cigars were brought out of the deeps and recesses of the establishment. I tried in vain to think of a way of conveying to him the fact that I had already had the cigar. I imitated the action of a citizen smoking, knocking off and throwing away a cigar. The watchful proprietor only thought I was rehearsing (as in an ecstasy of anticipation) the joys of the cigar he was going to give me. At last I retired baffled: he would not take the money and leave the cigars alone. So that this restaurant-keeper (in whose face a love of money shone like the sun at noonday) flatly and firmly refused to receive the twopence that I certainly owed him; and I took that twopence of his away with me and rioted on it for months. I hope that on the last day the angels will break the truth very gently to that unhappy man.

…..This is the true and exact account of the Great Cigar Fraud, and the moral of it is this—that civilisation is founded upon abstractions. The idea of debt is one which cannot be conveyed by physical motions at all, because it is an abstract idea. And civilisation obviously would be nothing without debt. So when hard-headed fellows who study scientific sociology (which does not exist) come and tell you that civilisation is material or indifferent to the abstract, just ask yourselves how many of the things that make up our Society, the Law, or the Stocks and Shares, or the National Debt, you would be able to convey with your face and your ten fingers by grinning and gesticulating to a German innkeeper.”

This Chesterton excerpt was copied and pasted out of the Project Gutenberg Ebook available here.

The Kindle version is available for free here.

Hard copies are available wherever exquisite literature is sold.<>pochtolom.com

On August 22, 2013 By Mark Horne In Books Like

“The State Against Blacks” by Walter Williams is a book every American needs to read

The only reason I didn’t give Walter Williams fine book five stars, when I reviewed it at Amazon.com, is because it is decades-old now. Why doesn’t Williams get his students to do some up-to-date research and come up with an expanded edition?

But the book is excellent beyond measure–easily (apart from datedness) worth six stars out of five. And because it explains really well why the average person of color came from a poorer family in the eighties, one could even argue that it remains quite contemporary. More importantly, the principles articulated here are quite easily applied to a variety of other situations.

The basic thesis (I’m going by memory here) is that even though “Jim Crow” laws have been removed from the state governments, that the federal, state, and local governments have in fact passed laws and (especially!) regulations that disproportionately hurt blacks and promote their poverty rather than their prosperity. One reviewer has already mentioned the taxicab example. At one time, if one had a car, one could offer one’s services as a taxi cab driver. But now the City government has made it illegal for a person to offer that service. Walter Williams discusses the proffered rationales for this use of state violence (Williams’s tone is not nearly as severe as mine, but what can I say?—All laws are statements threatening people with violence who don’t comply). But these rationales for government intervention are easily shown as bogus. The existing cab drivers are lining their pockets with money from all other potential cab drivers. This is a colorblind system of robbery, but it is not economically blind. It hurts those who have a car and can drive but who don’t have other more lucrative opportunities. Due to past injustices that were not color-blind, this injustice ends up not being color-blind either. Because minorities are disproportionately poor, laws exploiting the poor are laws that especially target certain races.

Basically, the relative poverty of those who are poor today cannot be addressed in the same way as it once was. Various laws have knocked many rungs out of “the ladder of success” that were once in place for the European immigrant waves of yesteryear.

Another example that especially sticks in my memory is Walter Williams’ historical analysis showing that poor black outbid richer whites at the same houses in the cities. The reason for this was that multiple families were willing to subdivide and share dwellings. Williams breaks down how much money a racist landlord would lose if he tried to be racist in his practices by refusing to rent to blacks. But those opportunities were no longer present when African Americans had an incentive to leave the inner city. The suburbs had passed laws denying landowners the freedom to control their property. It became illegal for more than one family to share a house.

Another intervention that cuts off African Americans from economic opportunities are the industry regulations for occupations such as beauty salons. It is horrible that there are discrepancies in the education that minorities receive, but it doesn’t help to arbitrarily demand unnecessary education accomplishments of people who want to offer the service of cutting other people’s hair in exchange for money. Again, this was a case of a law that simply artificially raised beauty salon prices by putting up barriers that kept the disadvantaged out of the market. It effectively added another disadvantage in order to keep them down. Why should (typically) better-educated whites make a living at the expense of blacks? Why should a black be threatened with fines and jail time for cutting a customer’s hair and receiving money in exchange for that service?

Readers will be surprised to discover what South African labor unions resorted to when they were unable to continue using blatantly racist laws to keep blacks from competing with them: minimum wage laws. In a racist culture, if you force everyone to be paid an artificially high level, racist employers can afford to be racist. But if blacks can outbid whites at their labor, a racist employer will soon be driven out of business if he tries to hire according to his preference. Of course, blacks should get paid the same as whites for the same work, and that is what we should all want. But which brings that vision closer to reality, blacks learning job skills and integrating in the work force, or blacks forced into permanent unemployment by laws that basically allow some workers to gain at the expense of other workers? Don’t whites have enough privileges already? The market is a force for integration if politicians will leave it alone.

Besides all this, minimum wage laws, unless they are set too low to matter, would discriminate against minorities regardless of present-day racism. Again, such laws hurt the poor for the sake of the better off. Those whose labor, due to lack of education and training, is not worth the level set by the law, are forced into unemployment. It is illegal to hire them. And because minorities are disproportionately poor, such economic exploitation is also race exploitation.

Reading this book was a life-changing experience in college, one that I tried rather ineffectively to share with my socially conscious peers. I can’t recommend it enough.

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On August 20, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Books Like

Book Review: Rod Dreher’s Little Way of Ruthie Leming

I recently read Rod Dreher’s remarkable book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. My expectations for the book were extremely high, as the near-universal praise of reviewers has been effusive, and Dreher is one of my favorite bloggers and writers. Reading his earlier book Crunchy Cons was uncanny: it explained a great deal of me to myself (why do my wife and I – evangelicals, Baptists, and conservatives – belong to a community-supported agriculture co-op??). The Little Way is a very different book, in which Rod Dreher explains Rod Dreher to himself. But it did not disappoint. Before I say anything else, let me get to the crux of my review: read this book as soon as you can. I have not read a more compelling, thought-provoking (contemporary) book in some time.

Some of you may know the Dreher family’s story from his blog or from other reviews, such as one at Patheos by Amy Lepine Peterson: as Dreher and his family endured the tragic death of his beloved sister Ruthie from cancer, they decided to move back to Rod’s hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana. It was a move for community and love of family. They wanted to help raise Ruthie’s daughters in her absence, and to help take care of Rod’s aging parents. They wanted to dwell among the remarkable family and friends who rose up to bless and honor Ruthie as her health declined. Although they had made friends in the big cities of Dallas and Philadelphia, they had found no community like St. Francisville.

Not that Dreher paints a rose-colored picture of his hometown, or even his relationship with his sister, which was loving but fraught with classic tensions between the carefree, self-sacrificing sister who devoted her life to that hometown, and the bookish, angst-ridden brother who could not wait to get out. That tension is one of the critical themes of the book: our culture celebrates the global, the technological, the place-less. But life in community – the kind that brings comfort when you’re dying of cancer – requires place, history, family, and settledness. Settledness that sticks even in the midst of frustration and despair.

This is the first main lesson of The Little Way: the importance of making decisions for place and community. I have now lived in Waco, Texas, for eleven years, and it is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere (we moved a lot when I was growing up). We’re just starting to feel like we’ve got a few roots here. Reading this book made me appreciate the value of having been in a church for eleven years, a house for eleven years. It’s made me think about the prospect of my children growing up in the same place their whole childhood, and having a place that is, without question, their “hometown.”

The second main lesson is the purposefulness of suffering. Ruthie’s death was shocking and incredibly painful – spiritually, emotionally, and of course physically – and Dreher does not hold back in his depictions of how his family grieved through her travail. (I defy anyone to read this book without weeping repeatedly.) But good things came out of her death, including charity, blessing, and reconciliation, that would not have happened otherwise. If you, like me, have experienced unexpected death in your family, you will find this book phenomenally helpful and redemptive.

I hesitate to raise any critical questions about the book, but I do think that some readers will find aspects of The Little Way unsatisfying. Most notably, the church, and the specifics of Christian belief, are very much in the background, and in a book on death, that is a little troubling. Perhaps the tension has to do with me being an evangelical, Rod being Orthodox (an adult convert), and Ruthie being United Methodist. Nevertheless, some Christians reading the book may realize that while they do not live in their hometown or have a tight-knit kin network, they have found true community, perhaps the most authentic community of all, in the ekklesia, among the called-out ones of the church.

I think of wandering Abraham, who left his home and lived in tents in the promised land because “he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” [Heb. 11:10] That’s the permanent hometown. Any place can feel like home if you have a good church. But this is not a either/or proposition – being rooted in your church and your broader earthly community are hardly exclusive.

Also, while remarkable spiritual experiences and divine manifestations populate the book (again, some Protestant readers might get nervous!), Dreher almost celebrates the non-theological, practical orientation of Ruthie’s faith (a faith which was clearly substantial and marked by spiritual fruit in the form of relentless acts of mercy, service, and charity). Some will wince when Rod describes her convictions this way: Ruthie “believed God existed, and loved us, and wanted the best life for us, though not necessarily the easiest life. That was all Ruthie knew about God, and all she wanted to know.” I suspect this is not literally true – did she read the Bible, or know and believe the Apostles’ Creed? God has made himself known to us, through the Word and the incarnation of Jesus. Not wanting to know more about God, then, is a bad thing. Doctrine and practice are not at odds in biblical Christianity.

But I quibble. Read this book – read it with a friend or family member. You’ll want to live differently when you do.

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