More on Rand v Christ

Andrew Sullivan has a piece by Joe Carter:

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[T]o be a follower of both Rand and Christ is not possible. The original Objectivist was a type of self-professed anti-Christ who hated Christianity and the self-sacrificial love of its founder. She recognized that those Christians who claimed to share her views didn’t seem to understand what she was saying.

Many conservatives admire Rand because she was anti-collectivist. But that is like admiring Stalin because he opposed Nazism. Stalin was against the Nazis because he wanted to make the world safe for Communism. Likewise, Rand stands against collectivism because she wants the freedom to abolish Judeo-Christian morality. Conservative Christians who embrace her as the “enemy-of-my-enemy” seem to forget that she considered us the enemy," - Joe Carter.

What took them so long?

That would be Christians to figure out just how distasteful it should be for a Christian that Paul Ryan is a big Ayn Rand fan, especially of Atlas Shrugged. Of all modern thinkers I can't think of another who is more diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and that includes Marx.

Seems at least one person has figured it out (from TPM):

Paul Ryan was chased by a protester waving a giant Bible and decrying libertarian author Ayn Rand on his way out of the Faith and Freedom Conference, a social conservative gathering in DC where he delivered a speech on his budget.

"Why did you choose to model your budget on the extreme ideology of Ayn Rand rather than the faith of economic justice in the Bible?" the blond, 20-something male asked.

But I am not 100% sure that was a real Christian or someone simply making a point.

but it is a good point. Atlas Shrugged is disgusting. From a Christian point of view.

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Religious tolerance at the academy

I am having great fun reading Alexandre Dumas' La Reine Margot about the St Bartholomew Day's massacre. But that was far away and long ago and we are more tolerant these days.

Here, by chance, is a quote from one of my 'Migration in World History' students essay on their family:

The family "converted from Catholicism to Christianity."

And I am sure they are better Christians for it.

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Advice for Christian students... or anyone

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this page of good advice from Stanley Hauerwas in First Things. It is good advice. Even if you aren't a Christian. You should read the WHOLE thing (as I tell my students), especially if you happen to teach at a college or university.

First, the inescapably Christian part:

“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”

I like that last part about history.

Here is the part Sullivan likes (me too).

But there is much more. Here is a part I like, partly because it has some relevance to my particular institution:

It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia.

And if you were going to boil it down to a few sound bites:

But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job.

And, of course, you cannot read enough Trollope. Think of books as the fine threads of a spider’s web. They link and connect.

You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual.

Also, go to the bookstore at the beginning of the term to see which professors assign books—and I mean real books, not textbooks.

Although many professors are not Christians (at some schools, most aren’t), many professors have a piety especially relevant to the academic life.

So read the whole thing. Even if you aren't a Christian, or aren't a very good one, the advice is good and provokes thought.

Hi-Tech Saints

This is amazing. Using new laser technology restorers working in the catacombs of Rome have discovered and restored icon paintings of Sts Peter and Paul, and several others. These are the oldest such icons yet discovered dating from around AD 375 or so.

For me, here is the amazing part, using the lasers to burn through several inches of calcium deposits without damaging the paintings:

Using the laser technique, restorers were able to sear off all the deposits by setting the laser to burn only on the white of the calcium carbonate; the laser's heat stopped when it reached a different color. Researchers then easily chipped off the seared material, revealing the brilliant ochre, black, green and yellow underneath, Mazzei said.

We will probably never invent a time machine, but short of that this will do. I can't wait to see what we can do ten or twenty years from now.

T E Lawrence has an encounter.

Lawrence, he of Arabia, was on campaign and climbed up an escarpment to bathe in a fresh pool of water flowing from between the rocks.

Upon the water-cleansed and fragrant ledge I undressed my soiled body, and stepped into the little basin, to taste at last a freshness of moving air and water against my tired skin. It was deliciously cool. I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream, and rub the travel-dirt away. While I was so happy, a grey-bearded, ragged man, with a hewn face of great power and weariness, came slowly along the path till opposite the spring; and there he let himself down with a sigh upon my clothes spread out over a rock beside the path, for the sun-heat to chase out their thronging vermin.

He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes at this white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sun-mist. After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, 'The love is from God; and of God; and towards God'.

His low-spoken words were caught by some trick distinctly in my water pool. They stopped me suddenly. I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God, indeed, unable to conceive such a relation except with the intellectuality of Spinoza, who loved so rationally and sexlessly, and transcendently that he did not seek, or rather had not permitted, a return. Christianity had seemed to me the first creed to proclaim love in this upper world, from which the desert and the Semite (from Moses to Zeno) had shut it out: and Christianity was a hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic.

This observation leads him into a dream like incantation of the progress of Christianity.

A most peculiar man.

taken from Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Witnessing for our Lord and Saviour

That would be Jesus the Christ. Lately I have felt my minimal faith growing ever weaker. . First the situation at St Paul's... the overwhelming support of the torture regime by American Christians. And now this.

One good Christian's take on the Haiti disaster.

Que vadis, domine, indeed.

I'll probably feel better about this tomorrow.

Update: Nope.

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Thomas Starr King - gone and probably forgotten

Every state in the union gets to put up two statues of memorable people from that state that it wants to commemorate in the Statuary Hall of the United States Capital building. As Carmen and I once discovered to our great delight, Florida has a statue to the man who invented air conditioning (as well it might).

California has just dethroned one of its favored sons, Thomas Starr King, in favor of Ronald Reagan. I don't mind honoring Reagan, but for a moment lets look at the guy who gets bumped, via the New York Times:

He was a Unitarian preacher, and an amazing one at that; spellbinding, said people who heard him. He spoke up for slaves, for the poor, for union members and the Chinese. Most memorably, he spoke up for the Union, roaming the state on exhausting lecture tours, campaigning for Abraham Lincoln and a Republican State Legislature, imploring California not to join the Confederacy. He succeeded, but he did not live to see the Union victory. He died of diphtheria in 1864, age 39.

“He saved California to the Union,” this paper wrote, quoting Gen. Winfield Scott.

Today the conservative movement would probably drum him out of the Republican Party, which would be a shame, not least because he is an example of social and political activism based on deep religious faith. At a time when the Civil War armies lost many more men to disease than to combat his death at such a young age was not unusual. Every life has something to tell us if we listen.

Well, at least he still has two mountain peaks named after him.

I just had to add that last line from the general.

Christian missionaries at work.

According to Wikipedia, there is a new concept out there called "the 10/40 Window". Better let the article speak for itself (though the emphasis is mine).

The 10/40 Window is a term coined by Christian missionary strategist Luis Bush in 1990^{[1] [2]} to refer those regions of the eastern hemisphere located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator, a general area that in 1990 was purported to have the highest level of socioeconomic challenges ^{[3] [4]} and least access to the Christian message and Christian resources ^{[5] [6] [7]} on the planet.

This quite explicitly includes Portugal and Greece.

As one of my fellow Mediev-L commentators said, "I hear that the NT hasn't been translated into Greek!" I'm sure they are working on it even as I type.

Well, at least they let Italy off the hook Jack. Spain too, apparently, so Carmen's ancestral home is safe.

Memory, the cross, and the role of Jesus

Andrew Sullivan has a thoughtful post on the 'cross in the sand' story that is exercising more comment than it ought. Memory is a totally plastic thing. Anyone in their sixth decade is aware of its impermanence - there are days when I have trouble recalling names of people I have known for years. What we are not always aware of is how easily our memories change. What we are absolutely certain is a concrete fact, we saw it happen, we know we did, we are certain. Then we look at an old photo, or see an old film, or read our diary, or talk to an old friend - and suddenly realize we had it all wrong. Worse, we allow our memories to change from outside pressures we are not even aware of.

So hyperventilating about whether or not McCain's cross in the sand story actually happened is one thing, thinking he consciously invented it to deceive us something else. What I find more interesting here is Sullivan's attempt to trace the development of this theme, starting with Solzhenitsyn, retold by Billy Graham in 1975:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was over here recently, remember? And he toured around the country. And he told a little story that everybody ought to hear, if you didn’t hear it. He said when he was in that prison for so long there came one time, and one time only, when he thought of suicide. He said he was not allowed ever to speak to his cell-mate. For weeks on end, they could not speak to each other. And he said that his cell-mate saw him growing weaker and weaker and more depressed and more discouraged all the time. And he said his cell-mate took a little stick and in the sand, or the dirt, in the cell, he drew a picture of the Cross. And Solzhenitsyn said, “At that moment, the whole purpose of my existence dawned upon me. Because,” he said, “I realized that Jesus Christ shed His blood for me on that Cross.” And he said, “That gave me the courage to live through my imprisonment.

Fascinating, as is a similar story quoted from a witness in the Sudan in 2002. But would someone from an Orthodox Christian phrase the role of Jesus as Saviour quite this way? This is a genuine question by the way: I am at a loss and it is an interesting question from an historical point of view.

Anyway, always remember that there is a big difference between truth and mere accuracy.

Thank God no one fact checks the anecdotes I add to my lectures. And with that, I am off to wrestle of few syllabi into shape for the new semester. ugh.

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World's Earliest Church?

Jordanian archaeologists have reported an intriguing discovery:

"We have uncovered what we believe to be the first church in the world, dating from 33 AD to 70 AD," the head of Jordan's Rihab Centre for Archaeological Studies, Abdul Qader al-Husan, said.
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"We have evidence to believe this church sheltered the early Christians -- the 70 disciples of Jesus Christ," Husan said.

These Christians, who are described in a mosaic as "the 70 beloved by God and Divine," are said to have fled persecution in Jerusalem and founded churches in northern Jordan, Husan added.

Not the least interesting fact here is that it was made in a Muslim country by that country's own archaeologists who are fully aware of the import of their discovery and are clearly proud of it.