Faith in what?

Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich

It’s hard to give this book a rating. Tillich’s definition of faith as being “ultimately concerned” in such a way that one’s being is oriented around this concern was provocative and helpful, as was his argument that everyone has some kind of faith because everyone is has some kind of ultimate concern. On the other hand, Tillich’s “ultimate” doesn’t reveal itself to us and it is certainly not personal, thus making it difficult to know why pursuing the ultimate is worth the effort.

I’m glad that I read the book, though, as it helped me to understand more about 20th-century liberal Protestant theology.

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Non-canonical gospels’ influence on the Quran

Philip Jenkins has been writing a lot about the circulation of non-canonical writings about Jesus in the ancient and medieval worlds. Recently, he wrote about their influence in Islam. He begins:

I have been tracking the ancient “lost gospels” through the Middle Ages, when these alternative scriptures continued to exercise a remarkably wide influence. This was especially true in the cultures of Islam, which emerged in a largely Christian world fascinated by apocryphal writings. Even in the fifth century, Arabia was proverbiallyhaeresium ferax: the breeding ground of heresies.

A century ago, Jesuit scholar Louis Cheikho stressed that the pre-Islamic Christian East was “literally inundated” with apocryphal works of both the Old and New Testaments (Quelques légendes islamiques apocryphes, 1910). He listed some of the influences that he could trace in the Qur’an itself: the Apocalypse of Adam, Book of Enoch, the Cave of Treasures, the Protevangelium, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Arabic Infancy Gospel, and the Gospel of Barnabas.

Cheikho also warned that we should be very careful when reading Qur’anic citations to such seemingly familiar works as the Torah, the Gospel or the Psalms. In each case, he argued, we are not necessarily dealing with the canonical versions of these texts, but rather apocryphal versions or adaptations.

See his post for a few examples.

Discussing the future of Christian education

I found this blog interaction between Doug Wilson and Levi Heiple interesting, and you might too. Here are the posts:

1. Wilson 1
2. Heiple 1
3. Wilson 2
4. Heiple 2

A powerful narrative of redemption

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey Into Christian Faith by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a wonderful book that explores so much: conversion, repentance, adoption, family and church life, and living by faith.

Carl Trueman did a really nice review of it here.

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Reclaiming a wide definition of “art”

Following the thought of Eric Gill, Peter Leithart traces the history of the term “art.” For a long time, it did not refer to the fine arts, even if the Greeks made a distinction between the superior arts that produced intellectual products, rather than physical products. He quotes Gill’s descriptions: art was “human skill in making” or “the well making of what needs making.” Abbe Bateux’s conceptualization of the fine arts and the mechanical arts combined with mass production enabled by the Industrial Revolution mean that fine arts dominate the category of art.

The last three paragraphs are interesting:

As a result of these shifts in the way work works, “the word art is now almost exclusively associated, at least on fashionable literary circles, with the fine arts.” Painters and poets have “no ordinary job of work to do,” and come to “use the word art to mean, not human skill in making things, but the ability of certain special people, specially trained or specially gifted, to exhibit in paint or stone, or word or sound, their special sensibilities and fine feelings.” Art is linked with “aesthetics,” which Gill defines as “beauty mongering.” I think Gill is wrong to restrict this definition of art to “fashionable circles.” Working class people think of the fine arts in a similar way, and mock the elite artistes. The category of “fine arts” damages artists by encouraging them to think of themselves as prophets; it damages others because it discourages them from thinking of their own making as artistic.

The proper response to this situation is not to jettison the industrial system, impossible in any case.  The key is to reinvest what we think of as “non-artistic” work with the values associated with art. That involves looking for creative ways to give laborers more responsibility for their products. It means finding fresh ways to enhance the creative potential of all labor, so that it becomes drudgery divine. It also means recognizing the artfulness, and the beauty, that is always already there in any field of human endeavor. There is music in a humming engine; there’s a choreography to a well-orchestrated factory floor; the janitor can take aesthetic satisfaction from the cleanliness and order he leaves behind; mothers in the home are sculpting children; there’s beauty in skillful manipulation of a backhoe.

As Gill says, all men, because they are made in the image of God, are called to “collaborate with God in creating, to make all things good, that is to say beautiful, that is to say holy.” All men, not only the “artist,” are called to be and make the art of God. In Christ, the Father’s inspired Poem, Christians discover this artistic vocation.

That’s more like it

The Middle East in Modern World History by Ernest Tucker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the best textbook on the Middle East that I have seen so far. It recounts the important events but also touches on a lot of the important themes that can get lost in a “just the facts, ma’am” approach. It’s a bit dry, but still quite good. Even the brief early chapters on the Middle East before roughly 1700 have a good amount of detail.

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Two nations, one land

The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War by James L. Gelvin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Gelvin is a great writer who excels writing about complicated history in a very readable way. I’ve read the second edition of The Modern Middle East: A History as well as The Arab Uprisings, and he has a similar style in each of these books: explaining the events in the context of world-historical developments, with a touch of humor.

This is mostly good, but sometimes the blow-by-blow of the story is sacrificed for the thematic focus. In this book, his major theme is nationalism, and how both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms developed. Like all nationalisms, he believes that both are invented in the context of the conditions of the modern world rather than natural. He also ties in the rise and fall of the Cold War order.

It’s a good book overall. Gelvin tilts toward the Palestinians, which is good for readers who have a difficult time seeing that perspective but would best supplemented with another point of view for those already tilting that way. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is definitely an issue where it’s good to hear the story from a number of different points of view.

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Postmodern military theory

Last month, Peter Leithart linked to a May 2006 article from Frieze magazine, which showed how the Israeli military used postmodern theories to fight against Palestinian guerrillas in Nablus in 2002. Check out Leithart’s post or the whole article (if you can deal with some postmodern jargon) for more.

Here’s one excerpt:

To understand the IDF’s tactics for moving through Palestinian urban spaces, it is necessary to understand how they interpret the by now familiar principle of ‘swarming’ – a term that has been a buzzword in military theory since the start of the US post cold War doctrine known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. The swarm manoeuvre was in fact adapted, from the Artificial Intelligence principle of swarm intelligence, which assumes that problem-solving capacities are found in the interaction and communication of relatively unsophisticated agents (ants, birds, bees, soldiers) with little or no centralized control. The swarm exemplifies the principle of non-linearity apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. The traditional manoeuvre paradigm, characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is transformed, according to the military, into a complex fractal-like geometry. The narrative of the battle plan is replaced by what the military, using a Foucaultian term, calls the ‘toolbox approach’, according to which units receive the tools they need to deal with several given situations and scenarios but cannot predict the order in which these events would actually occur.7 Naveh: ‘Operative and tactical commanders depend on one another and learn the problems through constructing the battle narrative; […] action becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes action. […] Without a decisive result possible, the main benefit of operation is the very improvement of the system as a system.’

This may explain the fascination of the military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, as far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate Postmodern form of conflict. Belief in a logically structured and single-track battle-plan is lost in the face of the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality. Civilians become combatants, and combatants become civilians. Identity can be changed as quickly as gender can be feigned: the transformation of women into fighting men can occur at the speed that it takes an undercover ‘Arabized’ Israeli soldier or a camouflaged Palestinian fighter to pull a machine-gun out from under a dress. For a Palestinian fighter caught up in this battle, Israelis seem ‘to be everywhere: behind, on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?’

Machiavelli reads the classics

Harvey Mansfield’s translation of The Prince includes Machiavelli’s letter to Florence’s ambassador to Rome, Francesco Vettori. Mansfield notes that the letter “has been called the most celebrated in all Italian literature” (107). In it, he describes a typical day and how he finally has a chance to read and the end of it:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them. And because Dante says that to have understood without retaining does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I have made from their conversation and have composed a little work De Principatibus [On Principalities], where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject, debating what a principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained, why they are lost. And if you have ever been pleased by any of my whimsies, this one should not displease you; and to a prince, and especially a new prince, it should be welcome. So I am addressing it to his Magnificence, Guiliano. Filippo Casavecchia has seen it; he can give you an account in part both of the thing itself and of the discussions I had with him, although I am all the time fattening and polishing it. (109, 110)

The work is, of course, The Prince. Mansfield notes that Machiavelli’s reference to Dante is from Paradiso, V, 41-42.

I first read or heard of this letter in grad school, and it was good to encounter it again.

The Hundred Years’ War

The Hundred Years’ War 1337–1453 by Anne Curry

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Curry does well in sketching out the events of the war in brief, but it is told in a rather dry fashion. More background on medieval warfare would have helped. The most useful part of the book was the explanation of how the war affected civilians, who were purposely targeted by both sides. They were often the target of cavalry raids or of routiers, unemployed soldiers who supported themselves by pillage. I also learned that French troops raided southern England quite a bit: for example, Southampton was devastated by a raid in 1338 that occurred during Mass (interesting tidbit: the soldiers took the town seal and over 95% of the wine). These raids and high taxes levied by the monarchies contributed to uprisings during the war.

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