Tim Stafford's Blog, page 28

Benghazi

I’d strongly recommend the New York Times’ long article on the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi. It’s not that any particular lesson is learned. The US government’s early claim that the riot was inspired by an internet film slandering Muhammed turns out to be not quite true but not quite false either; the claim of some Republican politicians that the riot was in fact a well-planned Al Quaeda attack turns out to be quite wrong. What becomes clear is that craziness dominated, and dominates still, in Libya. The man who quite probably led the attack is said by many who know him to be mentally unstable; and yet many of the same people are quite prepared to defend him. Amid the madness of mad men the US–CIA, State Department, military–all seem to have been naively optimistic, thinking that they could talk sense and build toward democracy.

Reluctantly I am led to think that it is fortunate we have stayed mostly out of Syria. If the Islamists there bear any resemblance to the Islamists in Libya, nothing good can come.

Getting Religion Right

Reading Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver I was struck by a passage in which she describes a church service. The book is set in the Appalachians and many of its characters are outspokenly evangelical Christians. I appreciated that Kingsolver portrayed them sympathetically, in a way that she manifestly failed to do in The Poisonwood Bible. But her description of a church service demonstrates rather dramatically that she has spent very little time in evangelical church services. She just gets it wrong, in a tin-eared way. She’s like a fundamentalist trying to describe the talk in a gay bar.

Truthfully, you could read a lot of award-winning fiction and not find any such attempts. Religion–evangelical religion, in particular–just doesn’t appear. It’s clearly a foreign world to the literati.

It’s true of Hollywood too. If church is going to feature in film, it will be Catholic. I assume that’s because the liturgy is pretty easy to duplicate. The nuances of Protestantism–the precise ways of speaking and moving–are unscripted and probably much harder to fake. Most movies don’t try. The few that do make me cringe. (Remember the uplifting church scenes in “The Color Purple?”)

One wonderful exception is Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle.” This is a movie you either love or hate. I’m not pushing it. It’s a strange movie. I love it because (among other reasons) Duvall has clearly been in a lot of holiness church meetings. He precisely, lovingly brings their ways onto the big screen. The apostle (Duvall) even walks like a Pentecostal preacher.

Can you think of other examples? I’d love if you would contribute movies or books that get religion right–and movies and books that get religion wrong. (I don’t mean theology. I mean the portrayal of culture, speech, appearance.)

The Adam Quest

Two weeks ago one of the scientists I profile in The Adam Quest, Mary Schweitzer, was featured in The Economist Magazine. Here’s the article. Do you know how rare it is for any scientist to get this kind of recognition? She’s certainly on top of the world in paleontology. And her research is really full of surprises! Very interesting stuff.

So is her life’s story, which I tell in The Adam Quest. She was a housewife raising three kids when she decided to take some courses at Montana State for personal enrichment. She took a class on dinosaurs because she remembered being interested in them as a child. (She was also a Young Earth Creationist who believed that the earth, and thus dinosaurs, were only a few thousand years old. And she had never taken science classes, because they were too hard.)

Mary’s story may be the most interesting and surprising of the scientists whom I profile, but they really are all quite fascinating people.  The theory behind the book is that it’s much harder to demonize people whom you get to know. It certainly worked that way for me.

The book comes out in two weeks. It features profiles of eleven scientists who are Christians and involved in creation-evolution discussions. They are all (or have been) working scientists, defined as science PhDs who have published papers in peer-reviewed journals. They come from different points of view regarding the age of the earth and whether God used evolutionary means to create. I think you’ll find it a very interesting read. Some of my pre-pub readers told me they couldn’t put it down.

The Argument for Listening

I’ve heard from several people thoughtfully disagreeing with the premise of my FoxNews.com piece. They doubt that anything can be gained by talking with young earth creationists. As one person put it, “almost all [Young Earthers] at my S. Baptist church have a HS diploma at most and do little if any reading beyond devotionals. It is a big jump to assume they could even understand a scientific worldview or how science works. Those who begin by assuming the Bible was written to be literally interpreted by a 21st century person instead of for folks who lived totally different lives 2 to 3 millennia ago are hardly likely to listen to nor understand scholars or scientists. My survival mode as a believer is simply to avoid raising the subject and keep my scientific views to myself.”

Those who believe in a Young Earth often display a mirror image of this: they don’t see any point in dialog with people who don’t treat God’s Word as inspired and infallible. They believe the early chapters of Genesis, understood in a common-sense way, tell us what we need to know, and it’s not that hard to understand. Scientific “evidence,” they say, only takes us in circles, proving what’s already been assumed through naturalistic presuppositions.

Given such very different starting points, nobody can guarantee that any real communication can take place. Both positions are a counsel of despair, but sometimes despair is realism.

It’s a point of faith with me, however, that it’s worthwhile listening to people and trying to understand their point of view. I’ve done a lot of it as a journalist. As we are all human beings, there is often leakage between our air-tight compartments. Some common ground may be discovered.

It’s worth trying if only because it implies treating each other like fellow human beings. When people listen to each other, instead of lecturing each other, it’s amazing how often they find a measure of understanding.

I think of it like marriage counseling. No marriage counselor–my wife is one–can guarantee that a marriage can be saved. But for sure, if the two parties won’t listen to each other, if you can’t get them to try to understand each other’s point of view, it’s pretty hopeless.

We owe it to each other. Those of us who are followers of Jesus are obligated to it. We are told–no, commanded–to love our neighbor. I think that involves, among other things, really listening to him. And the stronger the feelings, the stronger the obligation to try to understand.

Live on FoxNews.com

A short opinion piece I wrote on Evolution-Creation is posted on FoxNews.com. I wrote it at the suggestion of my PR guy for my new book, The Adam Quest. 

N.T. Wright on Paul

Reading N.T. Wright’s scholarly work is like drinking from the proverbial fire hose. As far as I am concerned, it is a fire hose spouting good wine. I am a few hundred pages into his massive two-volume Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a book he has been pointing toward for decades. It’s a pleasure.

I won’t try to describe his argument, but I thought I would pass on a few memorable quotes.

p. 12 “For Paul, much as he valued freedom, the mutual reconciliation of those who belonged to the Messiah mattered more than anything else. For Philemon to have responded angrily to Paul’s letter by giving Onesimus his freedom but declaring that he never wanted to set eyes on him again would have meant defeat for Paul. Reconciliation was what mattered. That is why Paul wrote this letter [Philemon].”

p. 20. “Paul is not only urging and requesting but actually embodying what he elsewhere calls ‘the ministry of reconciliation.’ God was in the Messiah, reconciling the world to himself, he says in 2 Corinthians 5:19; now, we dare to say, God was in Paul reconciling Onesimus and Philemon.”

p. 32 “Slavery was, for both Philemon and Paul, simply part of the worldview. It was how things got done. It was the electricity of the ancient world; try imagining your home or your town without the ability to plug things in and switch them on, and you will realize how unthinkable it was to them that there should be no slaves.”

p. 42 “The distinction between ‘faith’ in the Reformers’ sense and ‘theology’ or ‘doctrine’ has by no means always been clear, producing as we saw the problem whereby ‘justification by faith’ has come to mean ‘justification by believing in the proper doctrine of justification,’ a position which, in attempting to swallow its own tail, produces a certain type of theological and perhaps cultural indigestion.”

p. 50 “The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage….”

pp. 96-7 “The Temple, and before it the wilderness tabernacle, were thus heirs, within the biblical narrative, to moments like Jacob’s vision, the discovery that a particular spot on earth could intersect with, and be the gateway into, heaven itself…. The Temple was not simply a convenient place to meet for worship. It was not even just the ‘single sanctuary,’ the one and only place where sacrifice was to be offered in worship to the one God. It was the place above all where the twin halves of the good creation intersected. When you went up to the Temple, it was not as though you were ‘in heaven.’ You were actually there. That was the point. Israel’s God did not have to leave heaven in order to come down and dwell in the wilderness tabernacle or the Jerusalem Temple. However surprising it may be for modern westerners to hear it, within the worldview formed by the ancient scriptures heaven and earth were always made to work together, to interlock and overlap. There might in principle be many places and ways in which this could happen, but the Jewish people had believed, throughout the millennium prior to Jesus, that the Jerusalem Temple was the place and the means par excellence for this strange and powerful mystery.”

p. 181 “Like Marx, ancient Jews seem to have thought that the point was not to explain the world but to change it.”

p. 203 “In the western world for the last two hundred years the categories of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ have been carefully separated, each being defined negatively in relation to the other. ‘Politics,’ for the modern west, is about the running of countries and cities as though there were no god; ‘religion’ is about engaging in present piety and seeking future salvation as though there were no polis, no civic reality.”

Predicting the Future

I heard a quote in a radio interview yesterday:

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

It was said in the context of Silicon Valley innovations. But it applies to our families, communities, neighborhoods, churches, and a lot else.

More on Patriotism

My friend Bill had a thoughtful response to my “Patriotism” post. Thanks, Bill, for taking these matters to a deeper level.

In case you missed Bill’s comment, here it is:

I don’t think most folks’ patriotism is motivated by abstract ideas such as equality.  It is largely based on love of country, home, and family–concretes, not abstractions.  And as to “contempt,” it’s too inflammatory a term: I freely admit that I dislike some people, but not because of abstractions such as race, national origin, or sex.  I dislike some people because of their values or because of the harm they have done to others or which their beliefs will entail.  We are required as Americans to respect the abstract equality of all persons because we are uncertain of our own ability to judge others fairly, but that doesn’t mean we believe equality, rather than goodness, is what we should honor.  I wish I could respect all who disagree with me, but frankly I do not.  I respect an honest person’s disagreement, but I don’t find all persons to be honest.  Some are malign, lazy, or thoughtless.  Indeed I think such qualities are unfortunately quite widespread today.  Such people will not, and should not, have my respect.

Bill puts his finger on the trouble with democracy. Fools and knaves persist, and we can’t honestly pretend we don’t notice. Yet democracy insists, as a matter of first principles, in giving them the same voice as me!

If you had suggested democracy to the royal family of England in the 16th century, this would have been their response: Respect the voice of peasants? Illiterate, dirty, uncultured brutes? Give to such the power of government? You must be crazy!

Similarly all those who have fought against giving the vote to black people. Or to women. Or to non-property holders. They believed–and had some grounds to believe–that such people lacked the understanding to properly govern.

Democracy is and always has been an act of faith, that government by and for the people–all the people–will be to my benefit, even while I know quite well the incapacities and foolishness of those people.

Democracy is therefore more than a set of laws and procedures. It is a faith in people. One can defend its rationality in various ways. (For example, the supposed good faith of the nobility, elite, landowners, males, whites is a fraud and a cover for oppression.) But it does require a certain willing suspension of disbelief.  That is why democracy cannot find its feet in so many societies today: riven by suspicion and prejudice, the various tribes cannot put aside their own loyalties and certainties to trust “the people.”

Bill is certainly right that patriotism is “based on love of country, home, and family–concretes, not abstractions.” It is not only so in America. It is so in Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria, and North Korea. But democracy calls us–so Lincoln insisted–to another kind of patriotism. And we can’t do democracy without it.

That’s where contempt comes in. It is a strong word. In marriage counseling, contempt can be identified by one partner rolling his eyes when the other party is speaking. The gesture expresses complete unwillingness to contemplate another’s point of view, or even the possibility that their point of view could have merit. It dismisses the other as worthless for dialogue. Contempt doesn’t even argue. It preempts argument.

Democracy doesn’t require that I like everybody else, respect their virtue or their opinions. Democracy allows for complete disagreement and radical argumentation. But it does insist on respect for the persons making the wrong arguments and lacking the needed virtues–respect for persons as persons, made in God’s image. We respect them by protecting their right to speak, maintaining the highly theoretical mindset that we could be wrong and we could learn something, even from such a person. We respect them by protecting their right to cast a vote. We respect them by sharing with them the ruling of our beautiful country. As Lincoln said, brave men gave their lives for this: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. It’s a faith we must guard. Contempt can undermine and destroy it.

Patriotism

A piece by Drew Gilpin Faust in my Sunday Press Democrat touched the sore spot in our current governmental dysfunction. “Is Government By the People, For the People, Threatened?” harks back to the Civil War and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Faust notes how astonishing it was in the day that millions of northerners, whose lives were not directly threatened by Southern secession, should fight and die. They were nearly all volunteers. Lincoln, he says, articulated the inchoate logic that sustained America in that horrific fight. It was not merely to preserve the Union, but to preserve a Union that represented the best hopes of humankind–a government of the people, by the people and for the people. (As the Constitution puts it in its opening sentence, “We the people… in order to form a more perfect Union….”) Such a government, Lincoln recognized, was unique on the earth and uniquely hopeful. Millions of Americans agreed, to the point of sacrificing their lives.

The exact political shape of that Union–in particular, that it must involve citizenship for all people, not just those with the right color of skin–became clearer during the course of the war. Thus slavery, which had always been the point for the South, also became the point for the North.

But Faust’s contention is that something very large and precious lay under that commitment to end slavery. It was a commitment to a government dedicated to the welfare of its people, as defined by its people. Lincoln had earlier described the war as, “a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life. … I am most happy to believe that the plain people understand and appreciate this.”

Do the plain people still understand and appreciate this? When we shoot off fireworks for the Fourth of July, and stand with hats off for the Star Spangled Banner at baseball games, is this what we honor? According to Lincoln, it’s not first of all “America the Beautiful” we should admire, with its spacious skies and productive fields, nor is it “the Homeland” which is worth defending simply because it’s our home. It’s a political philosophy known as democracy, by and for the people.

With all the grousing and suspicion (some of it very much justified) about government we may lose sight of what we are ultimately seeking. It’s not to beat somebody who has the wrong ideas. ( Lincoln offered very benevolent terms of surrender for the South because he was not fundamentally interested in victory, but in democracy.) It’s not even to have less government or more government, efficient government programs or strong free enterprise. It’s to decide matters together, through a political process that gives everyone an equal voice and thus is equally for everyone. This process represents fundamental convictions about the worth of every single individual, and also about the possibility of a shared welfare. It offers no space for contempt. Search the words of Abraham Lincoln and see whether you can find words of contempt for his enemies.

Today’s politics is full of contempt. It’s not just our representatives in Washington; it starts with us plain people. How can you have a democracy when you show contempt for your fellow citizens?

Someone

I read a lot of fiction, but I only post about it when I happen on something pretty spectacular. (If anybody is interested in my regular reading opinions, check out Goodreads.com, where I post minimally on whatever I read.)

The last novel I went gaga on was Wolf Hall. Not quite to that level, but really worth noting, is Someone, by Alice McDermott. It’s the unspectacular life story of an Irish-American woman, Marie, who grows up in Brooklyn This is not a family saga, but a portrait offered through a series of almost-still lifes. McDermott is not a showy writer, but she is extraordinary at depicting ordinary life. She’s subtle, detailed, devoted to faithfulness and truth. That’s what makes the novel so fetching: it’s reality, watched with attentive reverence.

Yet it’s quiet and unobtrusive reverence. The title, for example, comes from a line early in the book when Marie is heartbroken by a cruel jilting from her first love. She pours out her agony to her brother, asking who will ever love her–an awkward, myopic girl? Someone, he says, someone will love you. And the book is nearly at its end before you realize who that someone is. There is love, McDermott seems to say, but it comes from where we are not looking, and in forms we do not automatically recognize.