The Brooks

For the past year or so I’ve repeatedly felt a pull to go Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. I’m not sure why. I probably think that everything would be different (e.g., better) if I went over to one of the more ancient wings of the faith.

Currently, I’ve been feeling especially attracted to the East. The West seems to have too many problems. Perhaps more problems than evangelicals do. The East is different. Which Eastern Orthodox church is pro-abortion, pro-gay rights? Through my (limited) reading, I know of none. They also seem to be universally united against the ordination of women.

Especially significant is the austereness of their faith. There’s no happy-clappy let’s get “high” on Jesus sentiment. And thank God, they don’t have middle aged women with banners running up and down the aisles. No EO person would be caught dead doing liturgical dance.

As I’ve been reading up on EO, it’s significant that large numbers of men are converting to it. This is statistically significant as churches everywhere (including the Roman Catholic ones) are having problems attracting men. Some authors suggest that the services (and faith?) are more masculine than current evangelical representations.

For some good reading check out the National Review’s Frederica Mathewes-Green here and here.

After I’m done rereading Macbeth, I’m going to do some reading on EO and post on it.

April’s edition of First Things had a great piece on Radical Orthodoxy and economics by Stephen Webb. Webb points out that when Radical Orthodox authors speak about economics, many tend to uncritically adopt Marxism.

A great example of this is John Milbank. Webb writes that Milbank “thinks that grace is more anti-economical than economical, in that God sustains us beyond our earning potential and disregards our debts. This divine anti-economy, when applied to the human condition, favors socialism over capitalism because capitalism accepts the laws of economic exchange while socialism works agains them.”

Webb points out the perverseness of this argument: “We are expected to believe that socialism is better than capitalism at reflecting matter’s inherent longing for redemption despite the fact that socialism is so clumsy at transforming matter into social use.” Webb writes that “grace is excessive in the sense of being unearned, but human barter works best when prices are determined by the competition of the market.”

Great quote by Webb:

“Capitalism is uniquely human because it lifts us above the mere struggle for survival and forces us to reflect on our capacity to alter our environment. Capitalism is guilty of making our wants seem like needs and thus turning material objects into the stuff of our salvation, but it is also realistic in acknowledging that human solidarity cannot be achieved outside the making and trading of supplies and services.”

I think I understand why most people don’t pay attention to theologians. Milbank should stick to Augustine.

A pretty cool resource:

http://www.beliefnet.com/index/index_209.html

After listening to Ron Sider’s talk at this conference, I was impressed with the idea of micro-finance. Micro-finance typically entails loans of less than $100 US to poor people. These (by our standards) small loans help the poor in developing parts of the world expand their choices and reduces many risks. I’ve read some success stories where a $35 US loan has helped a single woman start her own small business and provide for her family. What is amazing about all this are the repayment rates. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, claims over 95% of people his bank lends to repay their loans (unfortunately I can’t source this - from my lecture notes).

Inspired by this, I’d encourage you to make a donation to a micro-finance bank or lending organization. I’m planning on doing so with World Vision. You can reach them here.

My roommate actually said this to his pastor today:

 ”I’ve decided to leave youth ministry for prison ministry. I want to maximize my time spent around desperate men.“

Gutsy joke. Wow.

In a recent article for the CBC, Neil MacDonald writes about the 100-odd Haitians that showed up on a Florida beach recently. The story is terrible. These poor Haitians risked all to come to America. MacDonald writes that they ran out of food after 10 days of a 22 day trip. The rest of the trip was spent surviving on toothpaste and water.

All of these Haitians will be sent back to Haiti because they arrived illegally. This goes for all Haitians, regardless of the circumstances. Interestingly, this is not the case for Cubans. The U.S. government has a wet foot/dry foot policy with Cuban illegal immigrants. If Cubans are caught by immigration officers at sea, they are sent home. If they evade interception and end up on U.S. soil, they are home free.

Now the real reason for this distinction is the powerful Cuban voting block in Florida. Haitians in Florida only amount to about 300,000 … hardly a noticeable voting block in that large state.

The reason given for this Haitian / Cuban distinction by U.S. senator Bill Nelson? Cubans are fleeing a dictatorship while Haitians have a democratically elected government.

MacDonald writes,

“Cubans have free health care and literacy and food in their bellies, she says, while Haitians live with extreme violence, no rule of law, police who are often criminals themselves, and the worst poverty in the hemisphere. In fact, the UN has had to take over as the effective government.”

In the words of Harry Frankfurt, I say bullshit.

After listening to more of Leithart’s lectures on postmodernism, I had a thought concerning the socialism/capitalism debate and the book of Ecclesiastes. As I explained more fully here, Shlomo believes that everything is vapor; it is like trying to shepherd the wind. Leithart points out that modernity was man’s attempt to shepherd the wind by trying to control the world conceptually and scientifically (amongst other things). The problem is …. it can’t be done. This is what postmodernity has been great at pointing out.

I am beginning to see ardent socialists and capitalists as people who are trying to shepherd the wind. Both have adopted a theory (hopefully through research) and are trying to impose that theory upon reality. The problem is that the world cannot be controlled conceptually. Things are not so nice and tidy. Both sides will encounter stubborn facts that refuse to fit into their nicy, tidy, compartmentalized view of economics. This is very Thomas Kuhn.

This is of course doesn’t mean that we need to adopt a silly relativism or skepticism. It does mean that we need to adopt a sort of chastened realism that cheerfully recognizes the stubborn facts that won’t fit into our system.

Having said all this, I’m still a capitalist.

Andrew Fulford is writing a thesis that compares the thought of John Howard Yoder and Oliver O’Donovan. Pretty slick. Richard Mouw has some thoughts on practical problems with Yoder’s thought … nothing that some good ol’ Kuyperian Calvinism can’t fix.

Dan went through a phase where he talked a lot about Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point was apparently a great read. From what I heard from Dan, I’d have to agree. I’m not sure about Blink after reading a review of it by Diane Ravitch in Education Next.

In Blink, Gladwells’ essential point is that intuition is far superior to critical thinking skills. “(He) celebrates instinct, first impressions, decisions made ‘at a glance,’ the power of the unconscious.” His book explores numerous case histories where decisions that relied on intuition were more accurate than decisions made by calculated thinking and research.

Ravitch points out that in each case history Gladwell offers “the person who makes the alleged snap judgment is someone who has spent years accumulating the knowledge to make a fast and accurate decision.” Now I haven’t read the book, but my “intuition” says that Ravitch is correct!

Ravitch also surveys some responses to Gladwell. Most humorous was Noah Tall’s Blank: The power of not actually thinking at all. Tall offers an ironic version of each of the case histories offered by Gladwell.

I especially enjoyed this one:

“Then there is Dr. Ian Plegg, who mapped out ‘the third hemisphere’ of the brain. Plegg, the first man to receive a doctorate in Scientology, discovered the ‘little-known lower sub-basement hemisphere, or the LSBH.’ He would have won a Nobel Prize for his work, ‘but some of his more envious colleagues pointed out that ‘hemi’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘half,’ and that technically you can’t have a third half.”

Matt McKean (long time no see) has commented on the discussion regarding logic and revelation. You can see it here and here.

Matt, I’m not so sure that her argument fails. If the positions complementarians espouse flow from complementarianism, then I think that there is a problem with complementarianism itself. Outside of just disproving Groothuis’ arguments, the only way around her logic is to bite the bullet and claim that men and women are not equal. I don’t know any complementarian willing to do that.

If you read Frame, I think he would say that certain paradoxes cannot be solved by human reasoning in this life.

I agree with you on the Trinity.