Fall Penitent And Laughing

Garlic has a strong tradition in Mediterranean countries as a cold remedy. I once tried a Tuscan remedy for cold prevention. At the first symptoms you take three cloves of raw garlic and a full bottle of Chianti. The results were amazing. The next day I woke with garlic breath, a bad hangover and the predictable cold symptoms. I later was told that I should have taken it before getting the cold.

Digitization—at the cost of the highest levels of quality—has enabled ubiquitous distribution, which has removed some of the cultural gatekeepers, which has made for a vast, eclectic corpus of new work: music, video, even literature. But even this broadening has a cost. There is no longer a central cultural conversation. We experience culture as a vast, quickly shifting archipelago. The same has happened to our public square. It’s in hundreds of bright fragments, assorted on numerous digital content-sharing platforms. It’s great that everyone can have a voice. The tradeoff is that if you don’t like what people are saying, you can delete, unfriend, or block them. Move to a different island in the archipelago—one that is friendlier to your way of thinking. I believe Jesus Christ understood the temptation to disembodiment: not only through obvious evils such as pornography, but through everyday technology. Hence, he created an oasis of reality in his Body, weekly worship and communion. We eat and drink together. We sing in each other’s presence, and in doing so we participate in the very life of the Body of Christ. God’s solution for our problem is commanding us to be together in the same space, incarnate.

When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.

Don’t use a neural network to name your next pub

But, when I reflect on these sorts of conversations – as I say, several over the past week – I notice that the bits and pieces of theological thought that turn out to be useful to someone are, as often as not, odd little corners of the tradition, and are not in any way predictable in advance. This is only at the level of anecdote, of course, but if it turned out to be a general observation – for theology, or for academic disciplines more generally – it says something interesting about the particular role of the academic, or at least of the academic theologian. Usefulness comes not from pursuing it, but from patiently gathering enough of a reservoir of material so that one has the quirky bit of knowledge about practices of iconography, or Catholic mysticism, or Reformed Christology, or ninteenth-century missions theory, or whatever, that turns out to be the key to unlocking the problem which someone offers. The academic theologian becomes useful to the church and the world by reading widely, and remembering broadly, across the tradition, by being and becoming a catalogue of what has been done before (and by being plausibly imaginative in how the tradition might be used to address contemporary problems.) (Does this apply beyond theology? I don’t know enough to say, but I reflect on overhearing chance conversations about advances in scientific disciplines that came from wondering whether this obscure bit of maths might model that observed physical phenomenon helpfully; this seems a similar dynamic to my, admittedly inexpert, mind.) By God’s grace, this week I have been reassured several times in chance conversations that the knowledge I have passed on has helped to change the world in good ways; not because I have sought useful knowledge, but because by seeking a breadth of knowledge I have had things to hand that turned out to be useful. My knowledge of theology is perhaps like the random assortment of tools and ironmongery that my neighbour keeps: the value of his collection is not in the utility of each piece, but in the likelihood that, somewhere in the whole, he has what is needed for any given job – and knows he has it, and is able to lay hands on it quickly.

Harry is stunned because he realizes for the first time that his confusion has been wrongheaded from the start: he has been asking the question “Who am I at heart?” when he needed to be asking the question “What must I do in order to become what I should be?” His character is not a fixed preexistent thing, but something that he has the responsibility for making: that’s why the Greeks called it character, “that which is engraved.” It’s also what the Germans mean when they speak of Bildung, and the Harry Potter books are of course a multivolume Bildungsroman—a story of “education,” that is to say, of character formation. In this sense the strong tendency of magic to become a dream of power—on the importance of this point Lynn Thorndike, Keith Thomas, and C. S. Lewis all agree—makes it a wonderful means by which to focus the theme of Bildung, of the choices that gradually but inexorably shape us into certain distinct kinds of persons. Christians are perhaps right to be wary of an overly positive portrayal of magic, but the Harry Potter books don’t do that: in them magic is often fun, often surprising and exciting, but also always potentially dangerous. And so, it should be said, is the technology that has resulted from the victory of experimental science. Perhaps the most important question I could ask my Christian friends who mistrust the Harry Potter books is this: is your concern about the portrayal of this imaginary magical technology matched by a concern for the effects of the technology that in our world displaced magic? The technocrats of this world hold in their hands powers almost infinitely greater than those of Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort: how worried are we about them, and their influence over our children? Not worried enough, I would say. As Ellul suggests, the task for us is “the measuring of technique by other criteria than those of technique itself,” which measuring he also calls “the search for justice before God.” Joanne Rowling’s books are more helpful than most in prompting such measurement. They are also—and let’s not forget the importance of this point—a great deal of fun.

When my daughter was young, she would often be asked, not usually by fellow homeschoolers, why she kept reading The Lord of the Rings. I told her to reply, “Because I want to know what’s going on in the world.”

It is impossible to know what people know about themselves. We assume they’re operating with full knowledge of their defects at all times, are even wielding their defects against us, but if you sat me down right now and told me my most glaring character flaw, the one that is most apparent to everyone else in the world, I would burst into tears from the sheer surprise of it, and also why are you being mean to me.

To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible.

Livestock farming is not merely an industry — it is a relation, in which man and animal are bound together to their mutual profit, and in which a human duty of care is nourished by an animal’s mute recognition of dependency. There is something consoling and heart warming in the proximity of contented herbivores, in the rituals of feeding them, catching them, and coaxing them from field to field. This partly explains why people will continue in this time-consuming, exhausting and ill-paid occupation, resisting the attempts by bureaucrats and agribusinesses to drive them to extinction. Anybody who cares for animals ought to see this kind of husbandry as a complex moral good, to be defended on the one hand against those who would forbid the eating of meat altogether, and on the other hand against those carnivores who prefer the unseen suffering of the battery farm and the factory abattoir to the merest suggestion of a personal risk. The life of the cattle farmer is not an easy life, nor is the relation between man and animal always as harmonious as it appears in the thousand children’s books devoted to life on the farm. Nevertheless, as with all forms of husbandry, cattle farming should be seen in its full context — and that means, as a feature of the total ecology of the countryside. Traditional livestock farming involves the maintenance of pastureland, properly enclosed with walls or hedges. Wildlife habitats spring up as the near-automatic by-products of the boundaries and shady places required by cattle. This kind of farming has shaped the English landscape, ensuring that it retains its dual character as producer of human food, and complex wildlife habitat, with a beauty that is inextricably connected to its multifarious life. In this way, what is, from the point of view of agribusiness, an extremely wasteful use of land, becomes, from the point of view of the rest of us — both human and animal — one of the kindest uses of land yet devised.

I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a 'long defeat'—though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him that is weary. Morning by morning he wakens, he wakens my ear to hear as those who are taught. The Lord GOD has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I turned not backward. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord GOD helps me; therefore I have not been confounded; therefore I have set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near. Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together. Who is my adversary? Let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord GOD helps me; who will declare me guilty? Behold, all of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up.