Friday roundup

 Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a thought-provoking take on the Harrison Butker dustup at Instapundit:

Speaking to a graduation crowd at conservative Catholic Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, Butker took on Joe Biden’s performative faux-Catholicism, transgender ideology and – most shockingly – suggested to female graduates that they would find a better, more rewarding, and more productive life as wives and mothers than in corporate-style careers.

For this, he received a standing ovation from the crowd. (The full speech is here.)  The wider world, however, was not so appreciative. . . 

Unlike Harrison Butker, I’m not holding myself out as a role model here.  When I married Helen she was finishing her Ph.D., and I don’t think I ever had a single serious girlfriend who wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.  (And we only had one – terrific – kid, though we in fact wanted to, and tried to, have two or three, something that alas wasn’t in the cards.)

But what I want or favor isn’t the point here.  The point is that the population collapse that I was writing about nearly 20 years ago, and that Philip Longman was writing about in Foreign Affairs even before that, has now become obvious to everyone.  We’re headed for the biggest global population drop since the Black Death, and that’s going to produce dramatic social changes.  (As indeed did the Black Death.)

The future does belong to those who show up, and those who show up are likely to have the attitudes that caused them to do so.  So is Harrison Butker a harbinger?  Quite probably.

At Public Discourse, Nathaniel Peters asks "Why Should a Christian Study the Humanities?"   He offers several reasons, including this one:

. . . to cultivate a disposition of wonder, thanksgiving, and praise. These are the proper responses of rational creatures to the creator God. We should study so that when we encounter an equation or sculpture of great beauty, or an exquisitely crafted sentence, our response is one of praise or thanksgiving. So often in the academy, we’re trained to critique, to put ourselves over another author or book or work and make judgments from a position of superiority. This is necessary at times, but when it becomes our default, it can keep us from enjoying a work and allowing it to move us. A properly Christian kind of study leaves room for that vulnerability and enjoyment, for cultivating wonder and praise. After all, praise of God is at its heart restating the truth about who God is and what he has done. Study of the truth should lead to richer, more sustained praise.

"Two Reflections On the State of the Soul" by Darren Jonescu is good stuff:

Nothing is sadder than a profound statement reduced to popular cliché. “The unexamined life is not worth living” spouted by a million undifferentiated graduate students, as if “the examined life” were the simplest thing on earth, rather than Socrates’ final statement of defiance to a world he believed largely incapable of taking up the challenge. “What does not kill me makes me stronger” issuing from the lips of every infantile adult facing the abyss of a break-up after a two-month sexual relationship, or every student who suffers the indignity of a B grade on a test. Such reduction indicates the stifling of a liberating idea by a method far more complete and effective than the mere refusal to listen, namely by the absorption and normalization of the shocking and strange within the unobtrusive soundscape of comforting truisms, the voice of the rousing gadfly transformed into a soothing lullaby. Socrates warned that the voice of reason could not be heard amid the crowd. But his warning was less a lament than an enticement to the alternative setting, the realm of private conversation or quiet contemplation. When that realm itself has been conquered and converted into just another subsection of the popular space — when the language of wisdom has been reduced by the dynamic compression of technological democratization into just another shade in the general array of lifeless colors — then Socrates’ ironic stand against the chatter of the crowd, or Nietzsche’s brave acceptance of his spiritual agony before mankind’s approaching nihilism, become superficial routines, and the world, in turn, becomes an infinitely darker place.

At Firebrand, Rachel L. Coleman looks deeply into the significance of story, of narrative:

our Story is the story of the God who works redemptively in history, and it is centered upon the person and work of King Jesus. As Nijay Gupta (2024) puts it, “The crucified Christ is the vivifying center of our Story” (Galatians, 2). We are invited into this grand Story not just as readers but also as participants, equipped by the Spirit of God to join God in his redemptive work. Think of how many of the significant smaller narratives that make up the Story have open endings—Jonah, Mark’s Gospel, Acts. The very design invites us to step in and “complete,” as it were, the narrative.

The urgency of this is that we all, both as individuals and as communities, are shaped by a Story (big S), and if it is not the grand Narrative of Scripture, there will be other big Stories that usurp its formative and transformative role. These Stories are alternative ways of answering the fundamental questions human beings ask, and they can be so subtly and deeply woven into the generational and ideological fabric of our communities that we are not even aware of their controlling power. N.T. Wright and Michael Bird (2024), in a chilling phrase, call these alternative Stories “idolatries too large to be noticed by those who hold them” (Jesus and the Powers, 100). Their keen insight is a flashing yellow light for the church, calling us to the difficult and vulnerable work of examining our controlling narratives.

Wesleyan scholar Ken Collins calls this phenomenon “narrative displacement” or “narrative drift,” the shoving aside of the biblical Story by another controlling narrative. When this happens in our communities of faith, consciously or otherwise, the result is that we no longer interpret the world through the lens of the Story of Scripture; instead we read Scripture through the lens of whatever narrative has displaced the biblical Story. The results of this narrative drift are catastrophic for both discipleship and mission. As far back as 2008, Australian sociologist John Carroll painted a stark picture of the consequences, which have become ever more visible in the intervening years. As an outsider (not a professing Christian) looking at the decline of the church in the West, Carroll diagnosed the root problem as the church’s amnesia about its Story: “The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task—to retell their foundational story in a way that might speak to the times” (The Existential Jesus, 7). I encourage you to read that line again, allowing its gravity to sink deeply into your mind and heart. This Story-telling failure stands in sharp contrast to what we see in the pages of the New Testament.. As Wright and Bird put it:

Paul [and this could be said of all the apostles] was not a travelling evangelist, offering people a new religious experience, but an ambassador for a king-in-waiting, establishing cells of people loyal to this new king, and ordering their lives according to his story, his symbols and his praxis, and their minds according to his truth (21, emphasis added).

This would be a good point for each reader to do some clear-eyed diagnostic work, preferably in the company of trusted brothers and sisters. Can you identify the competing big Story (or Stories) that usurp the place and power of the biblical Story in the minds and hearts of your community of faith? What are those stories? Where do they come from? How are they shaping the beliefs, thinking, attitudes, and actions of people in your church and community? 

Ben Sears's weekly "POETS Day!" installment at Ordinary Times always provides fresh insights into the greatest craftspersons of that particular kind of writing.  Today he looks at Philip Larkin:

n the introduction to Philip Larkin: Poems Selected by Martin Amis, Amis writes of the poet, “Larkin is not a poet’s poet. He is of course a people’s poet, which is what he would have wanted. But he is also, definingly, a novelist’s poet.”

Larkin had a knack for evocative images. In a tight phrase, he could suggest a lifetime. The above poem, “Afternoons”, has one of what I consider the best examples with “And the albums, lettered/Our Wedding, lying/Near the television.” Like in the shortest story often attributed to Hemingway, “Baby shoes, for sale, never worn,” loose details leave much to us. It’s slight of hand, a storyteller’s trick, because when we give flesh to the tale we’ll do so with scenes that already resonate with us. There’s little risk in not relating to a reader that makes his own conveying connection. The talent is in knowing how to spur us to imagining. Larkin knew how.

He gives us a destination and a starting point and we don’t know the interim, but we do. There’s a couple that was full of hope and expectation, indulging in possibility, frozen and bound in a flash. What would be a cherished heirloom under different circumstances shares space with a box for watching other people’s lives. Captured images on the tv screen and in the book are a fantasy; unreal. It doesn’t matter what circumstances relegated the wedding album. There’s room for all manner of possibilities because it isn’t the story of one couple. There’s “An estateful.”

Amis highlights “mugfaced middleaged wives/Glaring at jellies” from “Show Saturday.” I know those women, and I suspect you do too. Larkin is brilliantly acerbic. He cuts cruelly because he cuts directly when mockingly describing habits and rituals of life he finds silly or undignified. When that insight is used to address his own shortcomings and failings, resulting circumstances, and his attempts to cope with them he’s often resigned and bitter.

Finally, I've been busy over at Precipice. A few recents:

 

What My Day Was Like the Day of the OJ Verdict folds the looming death of my beloved dog, ten hours of establishing a working relationship with a photographer with whom I'd been paired on a magazine assignment, watching the OJ verdict with a crowd in the lobby of the Circle Theater in downtown Indianapolis, witnessing, quite by surprise, a summit of two great jazz musicians, and much more.

On April 25, I looked at the consequences of Extolling Amnesia as a Virtue:

f the notion that the human being can define - indeed, invent - himself or herself continues to prevail, the most feral kind of defined self will be the one that holds sway. This will occur because self-defense in a state of lawlessness will return us to pre-human behavior such as traveling in packs and disregard for any kind of rules when it comes to such basics as obtaining food and a warm place to sleep. We’re already seeing some of the traveling-in-packs phenomenon with the degree to which militant identity politics has permeated everything.

In Friendship, I look at how our notions of what that term means change throughout the seasons of our lives. 

It looks to be a hammock kind of weekend. You now have an abundance of reading material for the occasion.