It’s really sary that a retin like Glenn Bek is one of the gatekeepers of what used to be alled ‘onservatism’ … Boy, it sure is good to know that a lever and reative lown like him is one of the prinipal framers of our national disourse on what it means to be really truly an Amerian itizen. I so believe he’s not just some hattering ukoo. For as we know, being onservative overs a multitude of sins and automatially makes you a ompetent and apable thinker and not a mere rabble-rousing lunati.
— Mark Shea (via ayjay) If you’re not in on the joke it’s a reference to this video.
8:35 pm • 29 August 2009
Tom Stoppard’s book satchel. Alas, the manufacturer stopped making them over twenty years ago. via more than 95 theses
10:34 am • 28 August 2009
As head of [a newly united Germany, Otto von] Bismarck saw that his historic role would be to create Germany not simply as a legal entity but as a political, financial, and cultural union. One way to do that was to provide benefits for people in every region of the Reich - to give Bavarians, Hanoverians, Frankfurters, and everyone else a sense of belonging, of gratitude, toward the new national government in Berlin. And thus Bismarck invented the welfare state. He pushed through an “Accident Insurance Law” – in modern parlance, a workmen’s-compensation system – to provide medical treatment and financial payments for workers hurt on the job. He created an old-age pension system – a social security system. And he authored the Sickness Insurance Law of 1883, to assure that any injured or ailing German could obtain medical treatment.
…
For the past century or so, historians have been debating why a crotchety, tax-averse, right-wing aristocrat like Bismarck would invest so much of his political capital in welfare benefits for the working class. Some of the explanations involve practical politics: Bismarck’s new national government needed to win the allegiance of the entire German population, and a welfare state helped do that.
…
Beyond all those pragmatic explanations, though, it seems that Otto von Bismarck was driven as well by a charitable impulse, perhaps a product of his Lutheran upbringing. When the chancellor first proposed his welfare state to the Reichstag, in 1881, he described it as a means for the more fortunate Germans to care for the least of their brethren; public welfare, he said, should be viewed as “a program of applied Christianity.” Defending his medical and unemployment insurance schemes in 1884, Bismarck argued that “the greatest burden for the working class is the uncertainty of life. They can never be certain that they will have a job, or that they will have health and the ability to work. We cannot protect a man from all sickness and misfortune. But it is our obligation, as a society, to provide assistance when he encounters these difficulties. … A rich society must care for the poor.”
— T.R. Reid, “The Healing of America”, pp. 72-74.
12:30 pm • 27 August 2009
The point of all this is to say that when the New Testament calls us to imitate God, it is clearly calling us to take on the agapeic qualities of Christ. For the New Testament authors, this is what God is like. To be like God is to live in and practice the radical agape of Christ through the Spirit of Christ whom God has sent to us.
As such, any image of God which seeks to curtail, modify, or circumscribe this vision of God-as-agape is to be rejected. Any portrait of God’s moral character that seeks to “balance” the love of God as revealed in Christ with God’s “other attributes” is to be rejected out of hand. The litmus test for this lies in the call to be imitators of God. Would anyone be pastorally comfortable calling people to imitate God’s supposed overflowing wrath against sinners? Of course not. The claim is then made that we are not to imitate “those” aspects of God—those are God’s prerogative, not ours, it is claimed. However, the New Testament does not make any such distinction between God’s supposed attributes. The New Testament simply calls us, as those led by the Spirit, to be conformed to God’s own moral character, which is the character of Christ. We are not called to imitate God’s “nice side” and leave God’s “dark side” alone. We are called instead simply to imitate God. And for the New Testament this means manifesting the radical agape of Christ. This is what God is like and anything that seeks to balance or mitigate this is foreign to the New Testament and the nature of Christianity itself.
In short, if your theological image of God is one that you’re not willing to call people to imitate, you probably have some false ideas about God. Any God that cannot be imitated in a way that is moral, righteous, and worthy of praise by human beings is not the God that the writers of the New Testament knew.
— Halden Doerge, “Imitators of God?”
8:42 am • 26 August 2009
Isaac Asimov's suggested reading order for his Robot series.
- The Complete Robot (1982). This is a collection of thirty-one robot short stories published between 1940 and 1976 and includes every story in my earlier collection I, Robot (1950). Only one robot short story has been written since this collection appeared. That is Robot Dreams, which has not yet appeared in any Doubleday collection.
- Caves of Steel (1954). This is the first of my robot novels.
- The Naked Sun (1957). The second robot novel.
- The Robots of Dawn (1983). The third robot novel.
- Robots and Empire (1985). The fourth robot novel.
- The Currents of Space (1952). This is the first of my [Galactic] Empire novels.
- The Stars, Like Dust (1951). The second [Galactic] Empire novel.
- Pebble in the Sky (1950). The third [Galactic] Empire novel and first novel.
- Prelude to Foundation (1988). This is the first Foundation novel.
- Forward the Foundation (1993). The is the second Foundation novel. [This title was not in Asimov’s original list because he had not yet written it.]
- Foundation (1951). The is the third Foundation novel but most of the world knows this book as the first book of the “Foundation Trilogy”. Actually, it began as a collection of four short stories, originally published between 1942 and 1944, plus an introductory section written for the book in 1949.
- Foundation and Empire (1952). This is the fourth Foundation novel, made from of two short stories, originally published in 1945.
- Second Foundation (1953). This is the fifth Foundation novel, made from two short stories, originally published in 1948 and 1949.
- Foundation’s Edge (1982). This is the sixth Foundation novel.
- Foundation and Earth (1986). This is the seventh Foundation novel. [Asimov’s list shows a publishing date of 1983 but this is a typo.]
Source:
Cool Science Fiction
10:43 am • 19 August 2009
Hell: The Nemesis of Hope?
Very helpful look at the idea of hell/Gehenna in its historical context. Also introduces (to me, anyway) the idea of “judgment unto salvation.”
11:01 am • 29 May 2009
I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked. As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday. Even if not, one feels responsible to one’s better self. Or rather, to the thing itself—craftsmanship might be defined simply as the desire to do something well, for its own sake. If the primary satisfaction is intrinsic and private in this way, there is nonetheless a sort of self-disclosing that takes place. As Alexandre Kojève writes:
The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself.
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering
interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.
— Matthew B. Crawford, “Shop Class as Soulcraft”
1:23 pm • 20 May 2009
We must learn to break the habit of taking a merely visible part for the whole. No one, comments Hinkelammert, has ever seen a company, a school, a state, or a system of ownership. What they have seen are the physical elements of such institutions, that is to say, the building in which the school or business functions, or the people who are its operatives. The institution, however, is the totality of its activities and as such is a mostly invisible object. When we confuse what the eye beholds with the totality, we commit the same reductionist fallacy as those Colossians who mistook the basic elements (stoicheia) of things for the ultimate reality (Col. 2:8, 20). The consequence of such confusion is always slavery to the unseen power behind the visible elements: the spirituality of the institution or state or stone.
If, then, the church must now make known the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers in the heavenlies, it cannot be content with addressing the material aspect of an institution alone. It must speak to the spiritual reality of the institution as well.
The early church understood this quite clearly. When the Roman archons (magistrates) ordered the early Christians to worship the imperial spirit or genius, they refused, kneeling instead and offering prayers on the emperor’s behalf to God. This seemingly innocuous act was far more exasperating and revolutionary than outright rebellion would have been. Rebellion simply acknowledges the absoluteness and ultimacy of the emperor’s power, and attempts to seize it. Prayer denies that ultimacy altogether by acknowledging a higher power. Rebellion would have focused solely on the physical institution and its current incumbents and attempted to displace them by an act of superior force. But prayer challenged the very spirituality of the empire itself and called the empire’s “angel,” as it were, before the judgment seat of God.
— Walter Wink, Naming the Powers, pp. 110-111.
9:03 pm • 14 May 2009
