If the primary sources produce false general impressions, such as that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet when he was not, or that Jesus was Israel’s redeemer when he had no such thought, then the truth of things is almost certainly beyond our reach. If the chief witnesses are too bad, if they contain only intermittently authentic items, we cannot lay them aside and tell a better story. Given how memory works, how could we ever feel at ease with a Jesus who is much different from the individual on the surface of our texts? Wrong in general, wrong in the particulars. In order for us to find Jesus, our sources must often remember at least the sorts of things he did and the source of things he said, including what he said about himself. If the repeating patterns do not catch Jesus, then how can he not forever escape us?
A nice double-chart, demonstrating both who is paying taxes, and how much they’re paying.
So now you see that the top 1% pay 40.4% of all taxes, but you also see that 1.8% of those earning $500,000 or more pay no taxes at all. The bottom 50% pay only 2.9% of all taxes, but amazingly, 0.2% of households earning less than $10,000 pay something!
Designed by Travis Pitts. “… I knew I wanted to make a certain teen detective her canine companion into the sole survivors of a Monsterpocalypse for the threadless loves Horror contest.” via truk77
The story of the Jews centers around— one might almost say that it stars—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better or worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham lech lecha: Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity, escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure.
This is why I keep going back to the concept of a “centred set”: the church being defined by its centre, not by its boundary. Now of course, the centre of the church is Christ, but in this discussion we’re concerned with the centre in terms of the church’s confession of Christ. (I also apologise now for my unsettling use of British spelling for “centre” (sw).)
This allows us to be both very detailed in describing the centre, but also very broad in who we accept as Christians (even if we regard them as “off-centre” to a greater or lesser extent.
To put this in concrete terms: if I’m asked to say where I think the centre is, I’m going to use a definition that will not be accepted by everyone. I’m going to choose the teachings set out in Luther’s Small Catechism, which I regard as the best exposition of “mere Christianity” ever written.
That would justly produce howls of outrage from those who disagree with Lutheran teachings on the sacraments, were I saying it represents the boundary outside which no-one can be called a Christian. But I’m not: I’m saying this is where I believe the centre to be. I’ll leave it to God to decide where the boundary is and who is on or other side of it, and indeed who is closer or further away from the centre itself.
The thing is, when three quarters of America are obese, when half are dangerously obese, like me, years off our lives from all the fat—that tells you that this isn’t a will-power problem. We didn’t get less willful in the last fifty years. Might as well say that all those people who died of the plague lacked the will-power to keep their houses free of rats. Fat isn’t moral, it’s epidemiological. There are a small number of people, a tiny minority, whose genes are short-circuited in a way that makes them less prone to retaining nutrients. That’s a maladaptive trait through most of human history—burning unnecessary calories when you’ve got to chase down an antelope to get more, that’s no way to live long enough to pass on your genes! So you and Perry over here with your little skinny selves, able to pack away transfats and high-fructose corn-syrup and a pound of candy for breakfast at the IHOP, you’re not doing this on will-power—you’re doing it by expressing the somatotype of a recessive, counter-survival gene.
[Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Radio] likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’
For all their shortcomings, the Great Books—along with many other varieties of middlebrow culture—reflected a time when the liberal arts commanded more respect. They were thought to have practical value as a remedy for parochialism, bigotry, social isolation, fanaticism, and political and economic exploitation. The Great Books had a narrower conception of “greatness” than we might like today, but their foundational ideals were radically egalitarian and proudly intellectual.
As Beam concludes, “The Great Books are dead. Long live the Great Books.” And, I might add: Long live middlebrow culture.
— Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor. This would have to be balanced by what Lewis said about people reading for its hygienic value, which is not true reading but mere status seeking.
