For those of you who know German, you might be tempted to think that this post is about a cathedral in Hamburg, but you would be wrong. Hamburg still has a cathedral, but that’s not what citizens think of when you say “Hamburger Dom.” Instead, it is the name of a huge fun fair/carnival that happens three time a year, each time for one month. The roots of the fair go back to the 14th century, when tradesmen used the cathedral to stay out of the wind, rain and cold for the Christmas markets. It stayed in the cathedral until the early 1800s, then moved to Gaensemarkt, then in the late 1800s to the Heiligengeistfeld, where it is held today, but it always kept the name Dom. Of course, it’s very different today. It is surprisingly similar to an American fair; I guess carnivals are the same all over. The biggest differences are that the Dom is cleaner, with nicer bathrooms (you have to pay for them), slightly less ugly prizes for the same silly booths, and less fried food. I had to try to explain Twinkies to a couple Germans, and then why anyone would then attempt to deep-fry them. They kind of gave me one of those “Americans are so odd” looks.

The rides are pretty much the same, which was great. We went on the Ferris wheel, of course, then a roller coaster that was short but managed to pack in 5 vertical loops, and then two different rides that spin on axles and flip you every which way. Unfortunately the last one made a couple of us a little nauseous, so we’re going back on Tuesday to sample the food that we didn’t get to try yet, although we did already get “gebrannte Mandeln” which are almonds roasted with a sugary, cinnamony coating. Not healthy, but delicious! I’m sorry I don’t have pictures, but I try to bring as little as possible to fairs, which means no camera. Amy got some pictures of us before we went on the Ferris wheel as well as some from the top of the Ferris wheel, so if she posts those I’ll repost them here.

PS I’m tagging this as Culture & Arts because while it’s not high culture like the theater and opera, it’s a pretty integral part of Hamburg.

The Buffalo News staff reporter Tom Buckham wrote an article about the future of The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy role as manager of the city’s six Frederick Law Olmsted designed parks (Cazenovia, Delaware, Front, MLK, Riverside and South) and the adjoining parkways and roundabouts. Donn Esmonde has also written a subsequent editorial about the pending relationship between BOPC and City Hall.

Erie County is slated to return charge of the city’s parks and recreational sites from The BOPC to the city at the end of the year. The origin of the group began in 1978. The BOPC is a “not-for-profit, membership-based community organization”; you can read more about The BOPC here.

The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy has done a wonderful job with the maintenance and beautification of the city’s parks and parkways. The maintenance of the Olmsted parks system by the Conservancy and its volunteers is not the issue of contention.

The issue is the lack of diversity within the management and administrative components of The Conservancy.

Implementation of work programs for disadvantaged youth, women and men does not justify devaluing the important issue of a comprehensive diversity plan that includes executive management and administrative staff as well as jobs and training programs for the economically disadvantaged.

Does The Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy have a comprehensive diversity plan? If so, what is that plan? If not, what efforts are being made for the creation and implementation of a comprehensive plan?

Voice your concern and opinion. Thomas Herrera-Mishler, CEO and President and The Conservancy may be reached by email at info@buffaloolmstedparks.org, by telephone at 716.838.1249 or by snail mail at The Parkside Lodge, 84 Parkside Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14214.

]]> http://conservativechristianity.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/cry-elitism-and-let-slip-the-dogs-of-war/ Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:10:30 +0000 David http://conservativechristianity.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/cry-elitism-and-let-slip-the-dogs-of-war/

T.S. Eliot wrote a book called Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. He wrote this book because he believed (correctly, I think) that the meaning of the word culture was being lost through careless use. Eliot’s primary thesis was that culture is the incarnation of a religion.

“We may go further and ask whether what we call the culture, and what we call the religion, of a people are not essentially aspects of the same thing: the culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people. ” (p27)

“The conception of culture and religion as being, when each term is taken in the right context, different aspects of the same thing, is one which requires a good deal of explanation. But I should like to suggest first, that it provides us with the means of combating two complementary errors. The one more widely held is that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion. This error may be held by the Christian in common with the infidel, and its proper refutation would require an historical analysis of considerable refinement, because the truth is not immediately apparent, and may be contradicted by appearances: a culture may linger on, and indeed produce some of its most brilliant artistic and other successes after the religious faith has fallen into decay. The other error is the belief that the preservation and maintenance of religion need not reckon with the preservation and maintenance of culture: a belief which may even lead to the rejection of the products of culture as frivolous obstructions to the spiritual life. To be in a position to reject this error, as with the other, requires us to take a distant view; to refuse to accept the conclusion, when the culture that we see is a culture in decline, that culture is something to which we can afford to remain indifferent.  And I must add that to see the unity of culture and religion in this way neither implies that all the products of art can be accepted uncritically, nor provides a criterion by which everybody can immediately distinguish between them. Esthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended in esthetic sensibility and disciplined taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art. To judge a work of art by artistic or by religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing: though it is an end at which no individual can arrive (pp 27-28, emphasis mine).

Or at least that’s what it sounded like when the loudspeaker voice said Lübeck. Lübeck is an old city, founded in the mid-1100s. It’s very cute, claims to be the invention place of marzipan, and is home to original JG Niederegger cafe, a sweet shop with marzipan shaped into a variety of other foods, along with many other desserts.

Pictures (click for descriptions!):

Last night we met our “big sisters.” They’re women who either spent a year at Smith doing the American Studies program, or more commonly, Smithies who did the same program before and moved back to Germany. Mine is Johanna, a Smithie who lived in my house (Ziskind!) last year after her junior year abroad in Hamburg, so we already know each other.

After going out to dinner with some of the other girls and their big sisters, Johanna went with 5 of us to the Alster-Vergnügung, a street-fair-type thing around the small lake called the Alster. I got some pretty pictures and saw the best cover band ever…

… That’s right. Apparently the Germans love Star Trek combined with American pop music.

Ciao.

There are some words, like nice or awesome, which have been so overused as to vacuum them of meaning. Whenever the speaker uses one of these words, the word is almost nothing more than an empty placeholder, where the speaker or listener can fill in almost anything he likes.

Sadly, one of those words is the important word culture. Nearly everyone uses the word today, to mean anything from a defense of an ethnic habit to the bourgeois feel of a classical concert, from a reference to popular customs to a serious consideration of worldviews. Everyone slips their own meaning into the word, the true meaning of which has important consequences for every one of us.

There are several books which could help us scrub off the barnacles of irrelevant meaning, and polish the word back to its original, true and useful meaning. The best and simplest start would by a seven-page article by J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Culture. Machen was a 20th-century Presbyterian scholar, and one of the reasons that Modernism did not totally decimate the church. His thoughtful analysis of the relationship between Christianity and culture went largely unheeded: just look at the mess around you. However, his analysis remains, and is worth reading, if you are interested in the scope of the problem, and concerned to think rightly about culture.

You can read it online here, or download it here.

When we discuss matters of meaning or value, particularly in matters of art, the almost inevitable comment thrown in will be something along the lines of, “Well, that is a matter of personal taste”, or “That’s my personal preference”, or “I happen to like it”. This seemingly humble admission is often meant to say something else, namely that the thing under question should not be judged for its value. In those cases, what the commenter has done, in an almost knee-jerk fashion, is to reveal how post-modern his or her thinking is. Post-moderns believe that absolute truth does not exist in any real form except in the subjective, personal sense. As Christians, we have all heard post-modern unbelievers tell us that religion is fine if it works for you, or that all religions are personalised ’styles’ of life, or that no one is authorised to say someone else’s faith is incorrect.

However, we do not escape this post-modernistic way of thinking in a day. We bring it with us into Christianity, and only the renewing of the mind with truth can rid us of it. Nowhere is this clearer than when a Christian says of things that can be ascribed a certain value, “that’s just a matter of personal taste”.

Now the problem with these kinds of statements is that they say something true while at the same time saying something untrue. The almost intuitively true statement about humans having different tastes and preferences seems so self-evident that it blinds us to its unstated post-modernistic conclusion, which is this: “…therefore, no judgement can be passed on the value of what I love.” Do you see the sleight of hand here? First, we have been drawn in to assent to something no one denies: human beings like different things. While staring at the fact of human idiosyncrasy, we have not noticed it has been swapped in for another idea: that no intrinsic meaning or value can be assigned to objects external to humans. If differences of personal preference exist, then no distinctions in objective value exist. This is pure post-modernism. “If I like it, it is true for me. If you don’t, then it is not true for you. The thing itself is neither true nor false.”

There is no question that judgement of the meaning and value of art is a matter of opinion, or a matter of personal taste. The point many fail to grasp is that such opinion can be right or wrong, and such tastes can be good or bad. The fact that one man has a taste for nail polish does not change its nature as a poor beverage. The fact that one man loves and enjoys rubbish dumps does not change the ugliness of the rubbish dump. In other words, Christians who believe in absolute truth must make a clear distinction between what is objectively true, lovely, beautiful or helpful in the universe outside ourselves, and our subjective taste for those things. God has created a universe which contains things that are objectively true, good and beautiful. He says so (Phil 1:9-11, 4:8). Whether or not I come to love what is lovely will not change the fact that such things exist. If I love what is ugly, it will not change the fact that they are ugly in God’s sight. Objective beauty exists, whether or not there were any observers around to perceive it.

And here is where we return to the truth of the statement, “It is a matter of taste.” It is a matter of taste. The question is, do I have a taste for what I ought to have a taste for? It may be that my tastes have been adjusted and shaped to love what is trivial, juvenile, clichéd and altogether unsuitable for spiritual and intellectual adulthood. In that case, to say “It is a matter of personal taste” is not only to state the obvious, but to act as if I am in denial of such things as objective goodness, truth and beauty. Christians ought to recoil when adulterous or immoral people defend their actions with the words, “It’s a personal choice.” Yes, but those personal choices are wrong choices. Likewise, we should not accept the same attitude in our own circles when objectively bad, ugly and false things are defended with the words “It’s just a style; it’s not about truth.”

Now two things need to be said further.

First, our tastes are malleable things. They are always in the process of changing, depending on what we expose them to. I have a taste for certain things that I had no interest in five years ago, and the opposite is true as well. We cannot change our tastes in a day. We cannot simply switch off what we like, and gain a love for what we don’t by an act of the will. However, we can begin to discourage exposure to that which we know is unhelpful to Christian thought and piety, be it immoral, trivial, banal, sentimental, brutal or clichéd. We can begin to expose ourselves to what we sense (or hear from our betters) is helpful to Christian thought and piety, be it beautiful, orderly, true, serious, ordinate, or refreshing. As we’ve said before, we must push out from where we are, not too far to where the things become foreign, impenetrable and uncomfortable,  for that will no doubt have a backlash effect. Yet we must push out far enough to grow, so that our tastes do not merely remain where they are.

Let me also add, that within the bounds of what is true, good and beautiful, there is room for varying preferences. Amongst good hymns each of us will have different favourites. Amongst beautiful music we will have our idiosyncratic delights. This is quite acceptable. Let no one claim that our argument leads to saying that we should all love precisely the same things in the same way, like automatons.

Moreover, to say that Christians might have differing preferences amongst the true, the good and the beautiful is not the same thing as saying that personal preferences make all value distinctions obsolete. To say that Christians might prefer one type of music over another amongst good music, does not mean that bad music does not exist.

Second, no one can give you an appreciation for what is beautiful or lovely by explaining it in a clinical, discursive or propositional fashion. Beauty is not formulaic (although it is orderly). If you want these things given like equations, you’re barking up the wrong tree.  Beauty is pointed to, and through continual exposure, recognised. It is part of your spiritual growth. Sadly, the impatient will not stand for this very process of the sanctification of their tastes. They decide that if no chapter and verse forbids their current loves, then only Pharisees will forbid them, and so they continue to love at the juvenile level.

Tastes must be grown. The same care and time we give to growing in objective truth, must be given to growing in affective truth, the understanding of what is true, good and beautiful. If God has made things objectively true, good and beautiful, it is the obligation of the believer to find out what truth, goodness and beauty are, so that he or she can recognise such things when seen or heard, and give glory to God.

Yes, much is a matter of personal taste and approval. The call of spiritual growth is to approve the things that are excellent.

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If our affections are shaped by example and exposure, then we need to be exposed to examples of people with ordinate affection. We cannot create our affections, worship or tradition out of thin air. As we have said, the most powerful form of shaping the affections is the culture you dwell in. When a culture is stretched over a period of time, it can be called a tradition.

But what do we do if we are living in a dark time for the church, where the Christian culture is filled with inordinate affection? What do we do if the historic Christian culture and tradition was abandoned around the time of Charles Finney, and replaced with a innovated, pragmatic culture that sought to reflect the secular world back to itself? What do we do if our choices of modern examples of piety are between hysterical glandular worship on the one hand and stoic cerebral worship on the other? Where do we learn ordinate affection from if our modern examples are reflections of the sentimentalised, trivialised, and sensualised church of the 21^st century?

The answer is to adopt the second kind of attitude which should characterise conservative Christians: a familiarity with and respect for historical Christian tradition and culture.

When I am in a foreign country, people ask me where I am from, because my accent is different to theirs. They do not get asked that question, unless they board a plane and travel to another country. When we leave our own culture, and dwell in another one, we notice how different we are. We see that ‘they do things differently’. We begin to notice our own customs, ways, attitudes, speech, mannerisms, saying, expectations, likes and dislikes, which formerly we took for granted. Only once you have some distance between you and your culture can you begin to understand it.

We can never properly understand the culture of modern Western Christianity from within. We are too deeply engaged. We are embedded in it, and are not be able to spot its innovations, improvisations, or impiety, except where it seems particularly outrageous to us.

But if we were to spend time with the saints of old, we would be confronted with affections quite different to many of ours. We would notice some of their prayers, hymns, attitudes, aspirations, and disciplines are quite different from ours. By ‘living’ with these dead saints through their writings, we would be exposed to examples of ordinate affection. We would be confronted with ways of thinking and feeling and acting towards God, the world and humanity which would contrast with our own.  Furthermore, we would connect with a heritage which is the church’s birthright, albeit one sold by various Esau-like leaders for their pragmatic mess of pottage.

We may make the mistake of brushing ancient Christian culture off as ‘too serious’, or ‘melancholy’, or as ‘Roman Catholic-and-therefore-irrelevant’. This would be a great error. Possibly the only way a modern Christian can be shaken out of the complacency of modern Christianity is to be exposed to the example of Christians now gone. To read Christians before Charles Finney is to enter into a Christian culture which we both like and do not like, for it elevates us and intimidates us simultaneously. Their use of language sounds strange to us. Their writings appear obscure. They do not deal with what we think is ‘relevant’. They call for disciplines that seem harsh. But to dismiss them would be to remain prisoners of our own modern Christian culture. If, in fact, our modern Christian culture is riddled with inordinate affection, to remain bound to it is a horrible fate. As the saying goes, He who knows only his own generation remains forever a child.

There is something quite conceited and egocentric about members of a 2000-year old institution who have no interest in its past, and a near-obsession with its present. To listen only to contemporary Christian leaders, to read only contemporary Christian authors, to sing only “contemporary Christian music”, to follow only contemporary models of ministry is a kind of narcissism. We are so in love with our generation, so convinced that we are the furthest point on the scale of Christian piety, so enamoured with novelty, so impressed with ‘progress’, and so convinced of the inherent merit of contemporaneity, that we dismiss a study of the church triumphant as merely the ’subject’ of Church History. We are convinced that our piety is ordinate, our prayers are humble, our worship is reverent, our liturgies are pleasing to God. How do we know? Because the big churches we admire all do it that way. And so the dog chases its tail.

To embrace the attitude of respect for historic Christian culture, we will have to do several things.

First, we will have to deal with the ’suspicion of tradition’, so prevalent in many evangelical and fundamentalist churches. We will have to have the right approach to evaluating Christian tradition, neither giving it blanket approval, nor ignoring it altogether.

Second, we will have to set ourselves the goal of deliberately exposing ourselves to the Christian church of the past, parsing it for meaning and evaluating it carefully. This will not be a book here or there, but a deep saturation with the writings of saints now gone.

Third, we will have compare our current Christian culture with the ancient one we absorb through immersing ourselves in it. From there, we can make better (ordinate) judgements about our worship, liturgy, piety and general Christianity.

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When we first saw Nicholas Kristof's op-ed in the New York Times ("Mistresses of the Universe"), WVFC's editor and publisher each thought instantly:  “Finally, someone is saying what we at WVFC have been saying all along!” We even dropped a note to Kristof right away, telling him how much we admire the work he and Sheryl Wu Dunn have been doing this past year "for the women experiencing violence and
oppression worldwide," adding that "this piece is in its own way
just as important."

Below, are some WVFC responses to Kristof's important essay. We hope you'll write in with your own!

Barbara Olsen, School of Business, SUNY-Old Westbury: As the economic picture turns dire (as Kristof opines), all we can do is use hindsight — to see where it all
went wrong and yes, try to prevent such disasters in the future. How
did it all fall apart? What were the causes? How much did our
chemistry, i.e., testosterone, have to do with it? Or might it have
been a combination of chemistry and socialization? A couple of years
ago,  Kristof or another Op-Ed writer wrote about how
the current middle-eastern wars of discontent were fueled by
misdirected testosterone (preference for male children and not enough
mates for them, nor jobs to contribute positively to society).
Misdirected testosterone is aggravated by cultural socialization.

Cecilia Ford, Ph.d:  As a sophomore at Stanford University in
the early 70’s, I took a course entitled the “Psychology of Sex
Differences” with Sandra Bem, who along with her husband Darryl Bem,
was one of the leaders in gender research at the time. This was at the
height of the early Women’s Liberation movement and the entire course
was devoted to studies that purported to show that there were no innate
psycholoical differences between the sexes whatsoever and that all
measurable differences were explainable by culture and environment.
Given the same circumstances, in other words, women and men can perform
exactly the same; psychologically and cognitively our innate potential
is exactly equal and alike.

We’ve come a long way (the ads for “liberated women’s” cigarettes used
to say). Research, as cited in Kristof’s column and elsewhere, has
shown over and over there are in fact many innate differences and women
have come to accept that this is a very good thing, indeed. Women’s
competencies complement men’s in many areas and sometimes exceed
them.(Perhaps there’s a good intuitive reason for repeatedly picking a
woman for Secretary of State). Kristoff quotes studies showing that
diverse groups are better at problem solving, and other studies have
supported the idea that co-education is a definite advantage for boys
(although not always for girls, interestingly).

While my experience at Stanford probably proves Kristoff’s point that
social science research (or at least the selection and interpretation
of studies that are widely quoted)is more easily biased by the
prevailing winds than physics, many recent studies are backed up by
brain imaging and other sophisticated “hard science” tools that have
been developed since the dark ages when I was a student. The emotional
and psychological differences between men and women have real
physiological correlates in the brain, and as shown in studies such as
the one measuring testosterone levels in traders, endocrine systems, as
well as others. Personally, I wouldn’t want my world ruled by
testosterone alone.

Erica Jong summed up the issue beautifully this week, in a recent review of review of Diana Athill's new memoir  Somewhere Towards the End. In the famed Ursula Le Guin essay “the Space Crone," Jong explains, "Old women would make the best space explorers."

If more women had been running Wall Street and Washington, I’m sure our
grandchildren’s futures would be looking a lot brighter right now. 

Mary Moss Greenebaum: Jane Goodall must be having a heyday with Nicholas D. Kristof's piece.  I'm not sure whether she's tested the  drool of her chimpanzee friends or not, but the physical jockeying, shouting and arm waving of these herding males on the floor of the Stock Exchange, reminding one of children desperately trying to get their teachers’ attention, says it all. Legitimate or not, these guys in their little signature coats do, yes, bring to mind these beasts – our common antecedents – jockeying for prime place.
 
As for all the testing, it's doubtful that the secretions of females have ever been of interest to anyone measuring "success at decision making";   but it is rewarding to read that somewhere, someone,  in some study, noted women's ability to take singular decision making seriously, and in the process, be far less influenced  in their final actions by peers engaged in identical problem solving.
 
Further, the "testosterone thing" has brought us little to cheer about. Assassinations. Endless war.  Petty jockeying among most countries' political rulers for advantage.  This is why, in my own mind, women flocked to our new President, Barack Obama.
 
There is, in this most masculine of men, a very specific side, which allows him to march to his own drummer, and to urge from others  that they too bring their best selves to the decisions which this country must  now make.
 
Yep.  You got it. What is urging both genders to put aside this cancerous behavior we call "success"?  It’s our president’s feminine side.
 
Mary Moss Greenebaum is the Founder and Producer of the Kentucky Author Forum, a unique interview series, based in Louisville, Kentucky. . A former United Nations staff member, and first environmental and consumer TV journalist in Kentucky, Mary subsequently became Special Assistant to the Mayor of Louisville, creating the city wide and highly successful SUMMERSCENE, a 3-month, mobilized cultural experience for kids throughout city parks. She also founded of the city's first fee-free Scholastic Aptitude Training program for high school students. The corporately funded 6-week program served more than 500 students, resulting in the emergence of numerous in-house SAT programs now made available in local high schools today.

Diane Kaslow: Nicholas Kristof’s article “Mistresses of the Universe” suggests that
there is a biological and evolutionary basis for aggressive and risky
behavior in male-dominated organizations.  However, as intelligent,
thinking beings, I believe we have the capacity to accelerate the
evolutionary process.  Women have proven their ability to remove
themselves from the testosterone driven clutches of men.  They have
done this through intellect, hard work, and a feminine approach to the
world that is inclusive, rather than exclusive. 

If one looks at the thousands of years man has inhabited the earth, it
could be said that it is amazing that women have gained so much in the
last 50 years.  I think you could extrapolate that women will continue
to gain momentum, even without the benefit of high levels of
testosterone.  However, the path for women to the boardroom is still
pebbled with obstacles, including the hierarchical organizations that
reward characteristics in their executives that are considered “male”. 
Perhaps this latest financial debacle will be the next step in
elevating the role of women in the corporate arena and in the world in
general.

by Patricia Yarberry Allen

The economic news is dreadful.  Madoff stories are everywhere.  Winter blizzards are coming down from Palin's home state to freeze all the voters who dissed her in the election.   But there is always Paris and there will always be fashion.

Women's Voices for Change fashion followers have something wonderful to celebrate at the Paris Spring-Summer couture shows this week.  The Internet is buzzing with the news that the ever inventive Jean-Paul Gaultier broke the rules with one of our own. 

Ines de la Fressange, the  51-year-old stunner who used to earn her living on the catwalk, was chosen by Gaultier as just the woman to show off his highly sexual Spanish-themed clothes.

Photographs are everywhere of de la Fressange in a  long, black draped form-fitting dress with a deep neckline, fabulous hair that was styled but not done, and an extraordinary smile.

She clearly had a great time. In such a French way, she referred to the other models as "sexy little things".

We applaud Gaultier for his appreciation of  the beauty and form of the women in The New Menopause.

The following note just landed in the email boxes of WVFC's editor and publisher. We were both delighted, and agreed that it had to be shared. In a way, attorney Mary Faucher has written a manifesto for us.

This is neither a question nor a suggestion, but rather a
note to say: “Keep up the good work!”

I am a 56 year old lawyer in Manhattan, married, with two
children in college.  I am a long-time reader and look forward to the WVFC
daily email alert.  I repeatedly recommend your website to my friends (to
state the obvious, women in their fifties and sixties). 

I very much enjoy the breadth of the topics you cover, many
of which touch directly on issues I am confronting at this point in my life: health,
family (e.g., aging parents), meaningful work, not to mention current
affairs.  Like many Americans, I was caught up in our recent election; it
was my first time contributing money to a political campaign and I even
traveled to Scranton, PA to knock on doors.  I also poured over various
political blogs on the internet for news and analysis, but quickly tired of all
the partisanship and hyperbole.  The WVFC website has been a welcome alternative,
covering a wide range of topics of interest to me in an informative, engaging
way, with little of either the Fox News or Keith Obermann type rant.

I look forward to hearing more from WVFC on how people like me
can join the new administration’s call to pitch in to move this country
forward.

Sincerely,

 Mary Faucher, Esq.

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Six milliards d’Autres…

“Tout est parti d’une panne d’hélicoptère,
un jour, au Mali. En attendant le pilote, j’ai discuté avec un villageois une journée entière. Il m’a parlé de son quotidien, de ses espoirs, de ses craintes : sa seule ambition était de nourrir ses enfants.

Interrompu dans mon travail pour un magazine, je plongeais dans les soucis les plus élémentaires. Et il me regardait droit dans les yeux, sans plainte, sans demande, sans ressentiment. J’étais parti photographier des paysages, j’ai été captivé par ce visage, par sa parole.

Par la suite en survolant la planète pour réaliser « La Terre vue du Ciel », je me demandais souvent ce que je pourrais apprendre des hommes et des femmes que j’apercevais en dessous de moi. Je rêvais de pouvoir entendre leur parole, sentir ce qui nous lie. Car vue d’en haut, la terre apparaît comme une étendue immense à partager.
Mais dès que je me posais au sol, les problèmes commençaient. Je me retrouvais confronté à la rigidité des administrations de chaque pays, et surtout à la réalité des frontières instaurées par les hommes, symbole de cette difficulté de vivre ensemble.

Vivre ensemble…
Nous vivons une période incroyable. Tout va à une vitesse folle. J’ai soixante ans et quand je pense à la façon dont vivaient mes parents, c’est à peine croyable. Nous avons aujourd’hui à notre disposition des outils de communication extraordinaires : on peut tout voir et tout savoir, et la masse d’information en circulation n’a jamais été aussi grande. Tout cela est très positif. L’ironie c’est qu’en même temps, nous connaissons toujours aussi peu nos voisins. Aujourd’hui, pourtant, la seule démarche possible c’est d’aller vers l’Autre. Le comprendre.

Car dans tous les combats à venir, que ce soit la pauvreté ou les changements climatiques, on ne pourra plus agir seuls. Le temps où l’on pouvait se permettre de ne penser qu’à soi, à sa communauté restreinte est fini. Désormais, nous ne pouvons ignorer tout ce qui nous lie et les responsabilités que cela suppose.

Nous sommes plus de six milliards sur Terre,
et il n’y aura pas de développement durable si nous n’arrivons pas à vivre ensemble. C’est pourquoi « 6 milliards d’Autres » me tient à cœur. J’y crois parce qu’il concerne chacun d’entre nous, et parce qu’il est une incitation à agir. J’espère que chacun aura envie à son tour de faire ces rencontres, d’écouter l’Autre, et faire vivre « 6 milliards d’Autres » en ajoutant son témoignage pour exprimer l’envie de vivre ensemble.

http://www.6milliardsdautres.org

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
‘I will be sorry for their childishness.’

Voltaire (born Francois-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) is perhaps the best known of the Enlightenment writers and philosophers. His scepticism of biblical inspiration, opposition to the Church, and general criticism of religious matters began to embolden those who preferred a sceptical approach to matters of faith. A witty, incisive and brilliant writer was deriding the religious foundations of Western culture, and getting away with it. The thought of life lived outside of the shadow of the Church was inviting to many; the thought of life without accountability to a personal God is inviting to every human soul. Voltaire himself was a Deist – believing that a God created the universe, but did not intervene in the affairs of everyday life. Other Enlightenment thinkers were Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) , David Hume and Diderot.
By now, the Enlightenment ideas were gaining momentum – that the best hope for the betterment of mankind is the progress a society makes as it throws off all vestiges of ’superstition’ and ‘myth’.

Perhaps the tipping point of all these thinkers came in the person of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Philosophy post-Kant is an unrecoverable slide towards agnosticism, naturalism and secularism. Kant essentially called a time-out on the whole game. He stated that reason has its place – but its place is limited. It cannot help us with the largest questions of metaphysics – like the cause of the universe. Put simply – whatever is necessary to know is found inside our minds to begin with, whatever exists outside of that we cannot know with certainty, and shouldn’t bother with. In other words, stop worrying about heaven and hell, eternity and God. Live a moral life, and be happy.

The seeds have been sown for an all-out destruction of a culture built on Christianity. The Enlightenment thinkers just mined the world with thoughts that would explode in names like Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, Dewey and Sartre. These men didn’t come out nowhere. The land had been cleared by William of Occam, Francis Bacon, the Rationalists, the Empiricists and the Enlightenment thinkers.

The fuses had now been lit. The 17th century saw a number of philosophers build on the dissenting medieval philosophers to produce what is considered the lead-up to the ‘Enlightenment’. These philosophers can really be divided into two groups – rationalists and empiricists.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was the leading rationalist, whose thinking probably made the break from medieval thinking. Descartes despaired of ever knowing anything with certainty except in one area – mathematics. It was the kind of certainty found in the pure logic and reason of mathematics that led Descartes to teach that we should ‘accept nothing as true which is not presented to the mind so clearly and distinctly that there is no reason to doubt it’. In such a rigid search for certainty, Descartes found that the only thing that was certain was his own existence due to his reasoning faculty: “I think, therefore, I am.” Thinking – reason - was man’s only hope for enlightenment. Descartes’ skepticism was to have lasting effects. Beliefs are easy to undermine but impossible to restore.

Along with Descartes was Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza continued the rigid skepticism of rationalism and questioned everything from the inspiration of the bible, to the question of moral freedom, to the very personality of God. Gottfried Leibniz was the third major rationalist of this time.

On the other end of the scale were the empiricists. Whereas rationalists taught that pure reason is the way to certainty, empiricists taught that sensory experience is the way to any kind of understanding. Empiricists teach that knowledge does not come from innate ideas, but from experience. Probably the father of modern empiricism is John Locke (1632-1704). Locke rejected rationalism, and taught the human beings are born with minds like blank tablets (tabula rasa). Our sensory experiences begins to write our ideas about the world upon these tablets, and these ideas form our understanding of reality.

Building on Locke was David Hume (1711-1776). He took matters further to say that reason really has no place in our beliefs, or even in our inferences about the world. Hume took skepticism to a new level.

If you step back and view the carnage of these bombs, it looks something like this: the average man no longer trusted faith, revelation or even the traditions of the past. Uncertainty about reality was spreading, and the only hope for understanding lay in human brainpower and sense impressions. Even with these, it might not be the ‘truth’ you were knowing, just some ideas being filtered through your mind. In fact, to the average man, it was beginning to look like truth does not exist.

You can see the soil where “Modern Science” will grow being heartily plowed up. The seeds of a worldview are being sown: Man is a product of his environment. The only things worth knowing are the things we have ‘proved’ (by sense experience). Man’s salvation lies in the continued application of his brainpower towards solving problems. Matters of faith are personal, private, unknowable – and a little foolish.

Sound familiar?

 As one explosion sets off another, the thinking of William of Occam led to the more direct and raw approach of Francis Bacon.

Bacon’s era (1561-1626) was still a time with little distinction between alchemy, magic and scientific enquiry. Bacon, building on Occam, changed all that, and laid the seeds for a naturalistic (and ultimately atheistic) worldview.

What Bacon claimed was that man was hopelessly chained to his own prejudices and judgements, through which he views the world. These views Bacon called idols – not in the biblical sense – but in the sense that they obstruct man from perceiving reality as it is.

His theory for understanding reality was essentially a step up from William of Occam. Individual things (particulars) must be examined – ‘taken to pieces’ – in his words, and, ’by a due process of exclusion and rejection lead to an inevitable conclusion.’

Bacon was suggesting something never consistently done before – a methodical interrogation of natural phenomena. Essentially – Bacon was advocating controlled and careful experiments. Moreover, his motive in doing so was to understand and control human life. By careful experimentation, one could arrive at axioms, hypotheses and interpretations – and predictable, controllable results.

This was a major shift from the haphazard investigations and experiments in ‘natural philosophy’ of Bacon’s time. This was the beginning of ‘modern science’ as we know it.

While his methods undoubtedly laid the foundation for many advances in quality of human life, we should note the drift even further from the Medieval consensus. The view of life as ordered by an Omnipotent God, Who rules by moral law, Who is to be known through faith in Revelation was rapidly being replaced by an altogether different view. The ‘real world’ is what we can test, experiment with and predict. The real world is the stuff of repeatable experiments – matter. The real world is material.

Forget the questions of universals, absolutes and the eternal. These are mere speculations, errors and fallible judgements built up over time through tradition, personal preference, human fallibility and the weakness of human language. What we can know with certainty is what we can prove by repeatable demonstrations.

Further, reality is not controlled by a sovereign, personal God to whom we owe obedience. It is controlled by natural laws. The more of these laws we discover, the more of them we can manipulate – and be the masters of our own destinies. Whereas faith and obedience used to be the keys to understanding life, knowledge through experience is now the true friend of mankind.

When looking around the ruins of Western culture, and while strolling through the dilapidated remains of the Western Christian church, we might do well to ask, “How did it come to this?”

In fact, it is no mystery how things came to be as they are. The real mystery is how to fix it.

One can trace our modern predicament back through a series of ‘thought bombs’. The thinking of several philosophers, politicians, psychologists and artists reshaped the world as we know it.

Probably the first bomb to begin the others was William of Occam.

To understand his influence, it is necessary to imagine life through the eyes of Medieval Man. To him, the world was a world created by, and ruled by, God. God was both transcendent and worthy of worship, while being involved in earthly affairs through Providence or miracle. Jesus Christ was the God-man. Man was sinful, dependent on God, and in need of grace. The universe was an ordered place, where God’s moral laws held sway over all.

Probably most significantly different from the modern’s was the view that the universe was filled with mystery and could only be understood by revelation. Thus, the primary way of understanding reality was not by observing it with the senses, but by faith in what God had revealed to be true of it. Though not all who held these views were regenerated Christians, this was the essential view of Western medieval culture.

William of Occam was a monk who lived from 1288 to 1348. William pioneered an altogether new way of perceiving reality. He contended that the universals which medievals regarded as giving the universe order (the true, the good, the beautiful) did not exist except in people’s minds. Knowledge was discovered not by using universals to understand particulars, but by examining particulars themselves. In William’s mind, particulars were the only things one could observe and know with certainty.

It’s hard to describe the explosion of this thought bomb in a few sentences. Richard Weaver took a whole book to describe it. It’s important you read this book at some point.

But if we are to try to capture the explosion with the limitations of our cameras, it might look like this: man’s focus moved away from the transcendent, eternal, permanent and absolute things towards the immanent, temporary and imperfect things. The organ of knowledge would inevitably shift away from faith toward sense experience. Man began to think of the universe with himself at the centre. God was bumped, and increasingly became something other than the purpose of man’s existence.

Thought bomb #1 would set off a chain reaction of other thought bombs.

The debris you call the world is the fallout.

 “The unexamined life is not worth living”  – Socrates in Plato’s Apology , 38a.

Socrates was teaching the need to live a life where all things are parsed for their meaning. A life lived on auto-pilot, following the great mass of humanity, takes most of life for granted. It is a life lived without reflection, without much meditation, and consequently, without much understanding. Life is reduced to a set of tasks to be completed – ‘the daily grind’. As reflection and contemplation wither, inevitably wonder, awe and worship suffer as well. On one level, examining life for its meaning sets us apart from animals, who also eat, sleep, mate, get food, build shelter. Animals do not look at the sky and simply ask, “Why?”

Since Christians believe we live in an ordered universe that was designed and created by an Intelligent Being, it only follows that we should examine all of life for meaning.

However, the Examined Life is not popular amongst modern Christians. Indeed, begin urging Christians to examine the meaning of their music, or the propriety of theatrical drama, or the impact of clothing on our moods and manners, or the uses of technology, or the values of pop culture, or the frivolity of entertainment-based living and they will go through a range of emotions.

First, amusement. “You’re kidding, right? You don’t seriously expect me to believe that God has an opinion on my [fill in the cherished idol], do you?”

Second, disbelief. “You must be some kind of cult. I keep up with the big names – Piper, MacArthur, Sproul, Mahaney – and I’ve never heard anything like this. You’re going off the deep end.”

Third, anger. “I can’t stand all this nitpicking about how I live my life. Who are you to say that my [fill in the cherished activity] is incompatible with Christianity? Show me a chapter and verse!”

Strange, as Kevin Bauder has pointed out, how some people are very attached to, and very defensive of,  the things they claim carry no meaning.

“This was never mentioned at my last church, and they were conservative, believe me!” Well, usually what such people mean is at their last church a generally biblical theology was taught, expository preaching was perhaps the mainstay, and corporate worship was tame in comparison to the rock-fests passing for Christianity everywhere else. This is ‘conservative’ to most Christians today. However, what is clear about such churches, judging by the members that come to us, is that no attempt was made to insist upon an examined life outside of the Sunday sermon. The pastor was too squeamish to touch the ‘hot-topics’ that get Christians all defensive, so he never did. Or, he was schooled in an environment which conveniently did a hop, skip and jump over such things, lest they be branded as fundamentalists. So, it doesn’t surprise me when people are puzzled by the Examined Life. Few Christian leaders seem to practise it; the chances of the average Christian knowing it are slim indeed.

Of course, to many, the Examined Life is ‘legalistic’.

Legalism is the easiest and most popular smear-word in modern Christianity. Not many people who use it to blackball their opponents would be able to define it if they were pressed. In most people’s minds, it means something like, “I’m being told what to do in very specific areas of my life, and it feels constrictive!” By that definition, simple obedience is legalistic.

True legalism, or better, Pharisaism, is turning from a Spirit-empowered walk in loving obedience to Christ’s Word, to an externalised, flesh-empowered conformity to please man. Despite what evangelicals will tell you today, it is not the specificity of the rule that makes it legalistic, it is the motive and the means through which it is performed. If you think legalism is getting down to the nuts and bolts of everyday life, I’d encourage you to read church covenants and rules of church membership from the 17th and 18^th century. You will brand the whole Christian church of the era as legalistic.

The Examined Life is not legalism or Pharisaism. But, it is probably true to say the Examined Life can feel constrictive at first. We are not, as a rule, a reflective culture. Worse, humans of all ages have been sheep-like. Questioning long-held practices and views is like turning people’s worlds upside-down. Forcing people to think about things that are taken for granted seems burdensome and onerous.

But Socrates’ comment is meant to have the opposite effect. The Christian who embarks upon the Examined Life finds he or she was missing the wonder of living when living an unexamined life. The mystery of the world, the wisdom and power of art, the fragility of the conscience, the worth and dignity of the human soul, the revelatory power of nature, the ongoing analogies of faith all around us, the preciousness of living life as the image of God in a universe made by God and for God – these come alive to the one willing to simply examine the meaning of all things.

So when called on to examine yourself or the meanings of things in your life in all areas of life – don’t see it as the invasion of thin-necked Pharisees into your personal freedom. Realise it is the entry point into the Christian life worth living.

“For in Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28 )