We're All Going to Die

“Much more to be condemned is that form of theology that tells believers they ought to be healed, and that if they are not, it is because they lack faith. As far as I have been able to observe, those who propagate such theology die at no slower a rate than those who do not adhere to such theology. The sad fact is that this triumphalist theology is not only theologically ungrounded, it is pastorally cruel. Thoughtful Christians must come to grips, not only with the truth that God can and sometimes does heal, but also with the truth that this side of Jesus’ return “people are destined to die (Heb. 9:27).” 

-D.A. Carson, How Long, O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil 

Beneath the Surface of "Ordinary" Homes

"You have no idea how many instances of domestic nastiness come before me in my mail: how deceptive the smooth surface of life is! The only 'ordinary' homes seem to be the ones we don't know much about, just as the only blue mountains are those 10 miles away."

-C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady 

The Dignity of Praying

“First, when a person prays, he represents the whole created order, of which he is the conscious, self-reflective part. It is in the prayer of human beings that creation becomes conscious of its relationship to God. Man is the thinking part of the cosmos. In the entire material world, the only thing that even thinks to pray is man. Human thought is the only place where the cosmos is self-reflective.”

-Patrick Henry Reardon, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth about the Humanity of Christ

 

James Q. Wilson (1932-2012)

"James Q. Wilson died early Friday morning at a hospital in Boston. The public policy intellectual who published a staggering number of books and articles on all manner of issues, including crime, politics, character and marriage, was 80.

Wilson was not a household name, but in the scholarly world he was a rock star. The first of his 17 books was published 52 years ago, and the 12th edition of his classic text on public policy, American Government, came out in 2010. He advised Presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2003. He also taught government and public policy at Harvard, UCLA, Pepperdine, and Boston College.

His impact made its way to the local level. Last week, my town paper included a long letter from a resident who was protesting the city's plan to distribute surveys in search of advice on the community. The writer suggested that it's pretty obvious what needs improvement, including better public safety. What we need, he went on -- and I'm paraphrasing -- is to address the small violations, which when left unaddressed contribute to an atmosphere of lawlessness. It would make sense for our policy makers to adhere to James Q. Wilson's "broken windows" theory of policing, he wrote.

Powerful ideas shape events, and Wilson's brainstorm altered the style of policing in American and European cities. Who knows how many individuals he saved from mugging or murder by virtue of this enduring principle of public safety? He probably received few letters of gratitude from those who were never attacked, but he changed the arc of their lives nonetheless.

This is Wilson's legacy. His decades-old idea is so ingrained in how we think about public safety that a good citizen in Summit, NJ, nearly 30 years after the theory was introduced in the Atlantic Monthly, alludes to it in the town paper. Wilson's original and public-spirited ideas continue to resonate, even today, among people he never knew or met.

A few years ago, a close friend introduced me to Wilson's daughter Annie. For months, I talked about meeting James Q. Wilson's daughter, and found myself asking about her in relation to her famous father. Since then, Annie has found her own place in my heart, and made plain her own distinctive identity. She has a dazzling mind and a soft soul, as well as a killer wit that must be useful to her as head of the School Committee in a cash-challenged town. Annie is the flesh and blood reminder that a person's legacy, even someone with the resume of James Q. Wilson, goes well beyond his professional achievements.

In The Moral Sense, Wilson thanked his wife Roberta for informing the thinking that went into the book. "She taught me by example what the moral sense is," he wrote. That example lives on in their children, and for the rest of us who admired his work. It may be too late to say so, but we thank you."

-Linda Flanagan,  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-flanagan/james-q-wilson_b_1317386.html

Alvin Plantinga on How We Believe in God

From my reading for Christian philosophy class.

"According to Calvin, everyone, whether in faith or not, has a tendency...in certain situations, to apprehend God's existence and to grasp something of his nature and actions. This natural knowledge can be and is suppressed by sin, but the fact remains that the capacity to apprehend God's existence is as much part of our natural noetic equipment as is the capacity to apprehend perceptual truths, truths about the past, and truths about other minds. Belief in the existence of God is in the same boat as belief in other minds, [belief in] the past, and [belief in] perceptual objects; in each case God has so constructed us that in the right circumstances we form the belief in question."

-Alvin Plantinga (b. 1932), "Reason and Belief in God" 

Mission to Read All of C.S. Lewis

If it appears that this blog is turning into a C.S. Lewis fest, here's why.

Having already read a good number of Lewis's books, and having noticed that he can make almost any subject interesting, the thought occurred to me: "What if I were to set a goal of reading all of C.S. Lewis's published writings?" After all, I've often thought of choosing some author and reading his or her entire corpus. Several reasons suggested Lewis as a good candidate for this goal:

(1) I already have a fairly good start on him (it's not as though I'd be starting from scratch).
(2) He's extremely readable (it's not as though I'd be reading John Owen for 40 years).
(3) His entire corpus is manageable (it's not as though he wrote 50 massive volumes like Spurgeon or Luther or Augustine).
(4) He would provide variety: his work is a unique mixture of theology (admittedly not always the best), fiction (almost always the best), and literary criticism.
(5) Since I can read Narnia and the Space Trilogy out loud to my kids, I'll be able to kill two birds with one stone with several of the volumes. :-)

So there it is. Sounds like a good idea. I'm young yet. I think I'll do it.

I've got a list of his published works, and the toughest part will be the three big volumes of personal letters, although I could argue that those shouldn't count since they weren't written for publication anyway.

I close with an excerpt from the man himself.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But the on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development: When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

-C.S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" 

A Foolish Brand of Nostalgia

"In most places, oral traditions eventually gave way to writing. Later, ordinary writing was transformed by the printing press. As great a blessing as writing and the development of affordable printing have been to human culture, even these changes came with trade-offs. People in oral cultures tend to memorize much more than people with written languages; but only a very foolish brand of nostalgia would wish all the printing presses destroyed and the secret of writing forgotten. The real question, here as with all technological innovations, isn’t whether there is a downside. There almost always is. The question is whether the overall benefits outweigh the costs.

It is easy to wax nostalgic about the "sacramental" value of working with the land to produce food and to conjure up an image of Hobbits peacefully tending their crops in the Shire. Appreciating the genuine good in such work is itself a good. But nostalgia is another matter. The danger in such nostalgia is seeing the past only benefits, and in the present only costs.  

--Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God (2009 A.D.) 

 "It is not improbable conjecture that the feeling that humanity was becoming over-civilized, that life was getting too complicated and over-refined, dates from the time when the cave-men first became such. It can hardly be supposed- if the cave-men were at all like their descendents- that none among them discoursed with contempt on the cowardly effiminacy of living under shelter or upon the exasperating inconvenience of constantly returning for food or sleep to the same place instead of being free to roam at large in wide-open spaces"

--Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, quoted in Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, (45).

Jay W. Richards

Arthur Lovejoy

George Boas