Well, that week went by fast

Ah, the weekend! I'm so happy I feel like thanking a labor union, just like the bumper stickers tell me to. I've never been part of a union; I wonder what it's like. If you've been a part of organized labor, what three words would you use to describe the experience?

How to waste your theological education (HT: JT).

This list was really funny until I hit number 31 and the points started hitting home. I could have stood to read this four years ago. But I would have read it and thought, "I know about all that stuff already."

Happy Birthday GKC!

No, it's not the birthday of the venerable Hebrew Lexicon, Gesenius-Kautzch-Cowley. It's the birthday of the Prince of Paradox, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. I encourage you to honor his birthday by making arguments that delightfully stand conventional wisdom on its head. I wish more people could argue like Chesterton. Even when you think that what he's arguing is pure nonsense, you can't help but appreciate the beauty of how he's arguing it.

I give you a random sample, something I have never read until a few minutes ago: The Twelve Men.

Notice how he can argue with passion, but without rancor; how he can entertain without sarcasm. If I were to write an essay about serving on a jury, I'd no doubt look for laughs by carping about the ridiculous, bureaucratic rigmarole and by making fun of my fellow jurors. This is the narrow humor of a sarcastic middle schooler, someone who thinks he's smarter than anyone in the room. But GKC is a grown-up; so he presents himself as being at least as ridiculous as the jury selection system he's participating in.

I don't know why I haven't read everything he's written; he never disappoints. This is my favorite section from The Twelve Men:

But the true result of all experience and the true foundation of all religion is this. That the four or five things that it is most practically essential that a man should know, are all of them what people call paradoxes. That is to say, that though we all find them in life to be mere plain truths, yet we cannot easily state them in words without being guilty of seeming verbal contradictions.

(HT to Justin Taylor for alerting me to GKC's birthday. The argument JT excerpts from John Piper is a great example of standing conventional wisdom on its head. Who would have thought of the new Calvinists as the heirs of GKC's love of truth-and-mystery? Well, I still don't think so; the Arminians I know love truth-and-mystery just as much as the new Calvinists I know. Calvinism's biggest draw has always been the steely deductive logic of TULIP. But I'll consider Piper's argument an appropriate homage to GKC.)

How many things do you know how to do?

Does anyone else remember learning in 11th grade Brit Lit (the Beowulf unit) about how epic heroes embody the values of their culture? Now we have lists like these. Sort of a grown-up version of The Dangerous Book for Boys. It's a list from Esquire, so be warned, in some ways it's a little too grown up; it also strikes me as very culturally bound, a list that might be on a website called Stuff White People Want To Be Able To Do. What would a list of things a man should know how to do look like in Africa? In China? Maybe your culture has to lose any self-confidence in manhood before you can self-consciously produce lists like these.

Prince Caspian

The new Chronic(what?)les of Narnia film, Prince Caspian, is an enjoyable movie, at least for people like myself who know the basic story line but aren't so familiar with the details of the book that every little change gives you a jolt.

There are changes, of course. A major movement to the plot has been added (without which the story would probably have seemed too short). There are also several changes in the character's personalities and relationships. For the most part, these changes make sense for a movie (the Susan-Caspian love interest thing is played fairly low-key until the very contemporary good-bye kiss), but they do cause some interesting shifts.

For example, Peter and Caspian's roles are somewhat reversed. Caspian seems older than in the book, and Peter younger. Instead of saying right from the start that he's no threat to Caspian's throne, movie-Peter's main motivation is his desire to be in power again. All of the sudden, reviewers can call him "a stubborn hothead - Sonny Corleone to his younger brother's more rational Michael."





Well, the hair color is right, I guess.

My guess is that these changes will seem more striking/wrong to people who know the book better than I do. Just reading this interview with someone who knows the book very well made me regret some of the movie choices (HT: HogPro). On the other hand, Frederica Mathewes-Green and John Mark Reynolds think the movie is better than the book (HT: JT).

I'm not ready to go that far. The book has a wonderful originality; it isn't just a repeat of its predecessor: "Nothing happens the same way twice, Dear One." On the other hand, you kind of feel like you've seen a lot of the shots from the movie before. Some of them look a lot like scenes from a certain trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. (Although I will say that the "Fighting Trees" scene in Lewis's movie has a better look than the one in Tolkien's movie.) Other scenes just have a feel of genericness, like Caspian's escape from the castle. (Character relationships have a little of this shopworn feel too, as in Peter and Edmund becoming Sonny and Michael.)

Luckily, they have another five shots to work out these kinks (I hope). And I hope someone involved in the movies reads Planet Narnia.

Quack

Dan Reid has a good post about that old canard, "taking the Bible literally." This is a wild guess, but it may have been inspired by his reading the first two paragraphs of Susan Jacoby's opinion piece about the recent Evangelical Manifesto. Jacoby in turn may or may not have read Alan Jacob's review of the manifesto in the Wall Street Journal, but she was obliging enough to prove one of his best points:

"[T]he heart of the document is a kind of urgent appeal: Please don't call us fundamentalists or confuse us with them. This strikes me as a regrettable tack . . . people who make the kinds of theological statements found in this document -- for instance, 'We believe that the only ground for our acceptance by God is our trust in Jesus Christ' -- are going to be called fundamentalists no matter what else they say."

So here's an interesting survey question: What kind of person is a "fundamentalist"? Describe a prototypical fundamentalist. I'm not looking for a precise definition, just a cluster of associations.

TEDS/TGS Graduation Update

Best quote from the commencement address, by OT scholar Walt Kaiser: "I have read the New Testament, and I like it. It reminds me of the Old Testament."

(My great-uncle, Msgr. Frank Klein, gave me Kaiser's Toward an Old Testament Theology, which I will read someday. My great-uncle was pretty cool. You should click that link.)

I love what the new editors have done with The Graduate Scrawl. It looks much cleaner than in the old days. Sounds like Mark Driscoll's chapel talk was a doozy (doesn't seem to be available online).

Some friends and fellow bloggers who graduated include Sterling C. Franklin and D. C. Cramer. You're welcome to congratulate them. Also graduating was the always-intriguingly-lowercase beau who comments here occasionally. And Eric McIntosh, who I still think is Fake Carson. Though he denies it. And I don't have any insider information on that.

Visual Math

+

=

See also, Chaka + Laundry = Heartache.

Candles and Cake!

Happy Birthday Chaka!

For Linus

I'm not really cynical, but I'd understand if you thought I was

I should know better than to start talking about a philosophical dispute that I don't have a good answer to, but I've been thinking about the problem of evil/suffering. It started with reading this dialogue between Bart Ehrman and N. T. Wright. It's a good exchange; both sides make really good points. Like I said, I don't have a good answer for my side (that would be the Yes-there-is-a-God side, in case you didn't know). It's not that Ehrman's arguments make me doubt the existence of God or his goodness; it's more like they leave me saying, "Well, it looks like he's got you there, God. I don't have any more arguments. How about you?"

What I've been thinking about in the last few days, though, is how the enormity of human suffering isn't just a challenge to the existence of the God of the Bible. It's also a challenge to the value of human beings (as put forth by Christian theology, our culture in general, and presumably other religions and cultures). Maybe the central challenge of suffering isn't to force us to justify God (theodicy). Maybe it's central challenge is to force us to justify our own sense that we matter (anthrodicy?). One can look at the vast amount of suffering for which no justification can be given, no advantage can be calculated, and conclude that a good, powerful God is an absurdity. But it seems just as reasonable to conclude that suffering doesn't count as much as we think it does.

I'm no doubt treading a well-travelled path here. There are many who have reached this conclusion, or at least observed (with far more art than I can) the wrenching gap between our sense that we matter and the universe's/God's seeming indifference. Stephen Crane. Shusaku Endo. Many observers would see the 20th Century as an era convinced of this point, that human beings just don't matter as much as we have been told; convinced of the point and lusting to prove it. Can you trace a straight line from the observation that "If God is dead, everything is permissible" to Auschwitz? (An observation that Dostoevsky may or may not have made. Now I need to re-read The Brothers Karamazov to find out. Or I could just watch the movie.) This isn't an argument, just a question: independently of trust in the words of God that assure us of his love for human beings (despite what we see of their suffering), how does one avoid the conclusion that human life is worthless? This isn't a "gotcha" question; I'm genuinely curious.

(Chesterton ridiculed the notion that the vastness of the universe made man insignificant, but why should we believe him just because he's a brilliant writer?)

I have one more thought to drop here. I make no attempt at coherence. It seems to me that the problem of suffering exposes the contradiction between our general claim that human beings are valuable and our general behavior. We (if you're reading this, you're included in the "we") are perfectly aware, for example, that people are dying for lack of food, water, and medicine. We are also perfectly capable of buying some of them food, water, or medicine. As they say in the appeals, "What if it were your own child about to die?" But who bankrupts himself to save a stranger's life?

I forget who proposed the following moral thought experiment. Suppose you knew that you could save a 1,000 lives on the other side of the world by crossing the room. Just get up, walk to the other side of the room, and 1,000 people are saved from a horrible death. We would think a person very wicked and perverse if he didn't cross the room. Now suppose you could save those 1,000 strangers by cutting off your pinky finger. It may just be my deep-seated fear of mutilation, but I can easily see myself deciding to keep my fingers intact.

It's not just an issue of money. We don't even have the emotional resources to make good on our belief that human lives are valuable. I shouldn't be so confident about this, since we barely make any effort to invest ourselves emotionally with people who are suffering; maybe it has been found too difficult and left untried. But my impression is that none of us could maintain the energy (or even the interest) to care about every person starving or being tortured or dying of thirst. With difficulty, we care about those that we know, those whose presence gives us pleasure, those who are like us.

As a Christian, this all makes a certain horrible sense to me. Caring only about myself is the way I am bent; it is the twisted shape we all share. I believe that human lives are valuable; that each is as valuable as my own. Yet my behavior, my real indifference to suffering, condemns me. The strange implication is, if human lives derived their value from my estimation of their value, or the sum total of people's estimation of their value, it would be undeniable that human lives have no value. Only if there is someone who could esteem each life equally would each life have value.

So let God be the one who speaks the truth, even if it makes every one of us a liar.

Hmong and the impossibilities of tonal languages

I've started taking Hmong language classes and after the first lesson I've learned one key lesson: I cannot repeat the difference between the 7 main tones!

If you happen to enjoy or understand linguistics, check out the very detailed explanations here.

If you want to hear the 'different' sounds and see if you can repeat them, go here. Choose one vowel and listen to each sound across the row for the different tones.

And lastly, pity me. I like to think I'm good at learning new things, but this Hmong stuff is tough! I feel so incompetent!

Engineers and cats

I just noticed that Professor Doctor Eco's watch face is on the inside of his wrist instead of the outside. Why does anybody wear it that way? Are they afraid of other people seeing what time it is?

If you like engineers or cats, or have ever heard of them, you will enjoy this video.

"I invented Dan Brown"

So says Umberto Eco, and who can argue with him? (HT: Hogwarts Professor.) Actually, I imagine it's rather difficult to argue with him about anything. After enjoying The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, I tried reading one of his works on semiotics, Kant and the Platypus. I don't know that I got past the introduction; the philosophical woods were too thick.

Richard Rhodes has a post about learning dead languages here. I was also disappointed that they spoke Latin instead of Greek in The Passion of the Christ. And now doing movies in dead/obscure languages is kind of Mel Gibson's thing, which means nobody else will touch it for awhile.

Or maybe not. (Though I feel like I've been hearing about a Vin Diesel-as-Hannibal movie for about six years, now.)

Also, John McCain, still trying to capture the hearts of Evangelicals, comes out against the construction of pagan idols with American tax dollars.