Vicarious Blogging

- Michael Pollan has an open letter to the next president of the US in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Read it.

- Also in the Times today, David Brooks writes on the Republican Party’s self-defeating form of class warfare: anti-intellectualism. Here’s the conclusion:

Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

- NPR offers a free stream of the new Bob Dylan rare recordings collection, Tell Tale Signs. (HT: Ben Myers)

- Someone named Alex MacLean is doing surprisingly interesting aerial photography of American suburbs and suburban life.

Rights

One of the most telling questions in last night’s presidential debate was: “is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?” Of course neither candidate’s answer was very good, but what’s more interesting to me is how malleable this question really feels. Just what is the answer to this question tied to? Liberal thought, with its self-evident truths, equal individuals and inalienable rights has created such a nebulous concept of what it is to be human that we now have an environment in which it makes sense to ask questions like “is x a right?”. If being a person is just being an individual, an equal person in society, then rights are just things everyone has. And if being a person just means being equal to everyone else, then the most we can say about me is that I am equally equal as they are. And how are we supposed to discover what is or is not a right when this is all we have to work with? Maybe I was wrong a moment ago – maybe the environment we now have is one in which it no longer makes sense to say “x is not a right”. What would that even mean? That equality does not include it? But how would we know this? Equality means “just as human as others”, but humanity in the liberal state means “just as equal as others”. This isn’t only tragic, it’s vicious.

Eastern Orthodox Theology

For the past six months or so a group of students and professors (and an Episcopal priest) here has been studying Eastern Orthodox theology together. One thing that has stood out to me about EO theology is how differently centered it is from the Protestant theology I’m used to. Take, for example, this passage from Vladimir Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church:

The revelation of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the basis of all Christian theology; it is, indeed, theology itself, in the sense in which that word was understood by the Greek Fathers, for whom the word theology most commonly stood for the mystery of the Trinity revealed to the Church. Moreover, it is not only the foundation, but also the supreme object of theology; for, according to the teaching of Evagrius Ponticus (developed by St. Maximus), to know the mystery of the Trinity in its fullness is to enter into perfect union with God and to attain to the deification of the human creature: in other words, to enter into the divine life, the very life of the Holy Trinity, and to become, in St. Peter’s words, ‘partakers of the divine nature’” (p. 67).

At least as Lossky presents it, EO theology is relentlessly Trinitarian in its every emphasis and dogma, so much so that Lossky’s book is the first place I’ve ever seen the term christocentric used as a term of criticism. As a consequence of western thought on the Trinity (which, according to Lossky, privileges the common nature or essence at the expense of the three distinct persons):

The personal relationship of man to the living God is no longer a relation to the Trinity, but rather has as its object the person of Christ, who reveals to us the divine nature. Christian life and thought become christocentric, relying primarily on the humanity of the incarnate Word; one might almost say it is this which becomes their [western Christians'] anchor of salvation (pp. 64-65).

Actually, I think that is what we would say. Isn’t it? And is that a problem? When I come across passages like this one in Lossky, I have to remind myself that he really does mean what he says as criticisms: often his pejorative language is my language of approval.

As foreign as this seems to me, I think Protestantism would do well to spend more time thinking about the Trinity. And I can feel the force of Lossky’s criticisms: perhaps in our emphasis on union with Christ (which I want to persist in calling a good emphasis) we have missed an equally life-giving emphasis on union with the Trinity. We ought not let Paul’s “in Christ” distract us from Peter’s “partakers of the divine nature” (or vice versa). Are the two mutually exclusive? (No, they can’t be, that doesn’t seem right.) Does emphasis on one union require subordination of the other? (As in, “we are united to Christ so that we can be united to the Trinity in his divine life”.) And if so, is that a bad thing?

In the New York Times

The New York Times has a story this weekend on my school’s philosophy department, focusing in particular on my professor, Kelly Jolley. Included in the article are criticisms of Haley Center, potshots at the Auburn Creed, and obviously uninformed praise of my performance in Intro to Logic a couple of years ago. The highlight is the picture of Jolley, who is the scariest man I know. Read the article.

Analytic and Continental

Samuel Wheeler (Deconstrution as Analytic Philosophy):

One might suggest the following criterion for defining analytic philosophy: clarity. This criterion, however, is relative to one’s training. In the interest of “communicating across a schism,” I once gave Derrida a copy of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, which I regard as a nearly transparent text, absolutely clear and brilliant. Derrida said he had tried to read this before but had not been able to understand what was going on. In contrast, he said, Heidegger was very clear. So: You are an analytic philosopher if you think Kripke writes clearly; you are a continental philosopher if you think Heidegger writes clearly.

That explains a lot about Derrida.