While the laws that we live under matter a great deal, Christians need to recover the primacy of the personal over the political more than anything else. If we can’t love our neighbors in a personal, politically agnostic, face-to-face way, they’ll turn to synthetic and unreal ideological communities to fill the gap left by the loneliness of their daily lives.
The road back to sanity, solidarity, and social trust on both sides of the political spectrum will involve turning away from this ideological cul-de-sac and back toward personal communities once more. If Christian churches won’t do this, they risk being exploited as political playthings of the powers that be. — Christianity as Ideology: The Cautionary Tale of the Jericho March
Kevin Williamson on the college debt debate
You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites.
They don’t.
The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle
Wharton vs Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age Novel
Wharton’s novel was little appreciated in its time, and it hasn’t benefited from the same revival of interest that eventually rescued F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, another Jazz Age novel. Maybe it’s because our culture is created and largely controlled by latter-day Pauline (and Paul) Manfords. Gatsby’s novel is held to reject the American dream itself as a falsity, obscene wealth as corrupting, and the WASP ruling class as a permanent source of oppression, despite its evident decline. Compared with Wharton’s novel, which cuts deeper and is more personal, Gatsby looks like a cheap attempt at scapegoating. For Twilight Sleep is a satire of the modern age, but it targets some of our permanent temptations. If we’re about to embark on a new Roaring Twenties, Wharton’s book will remind us that we’ve been there before.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
Yuval Levin on The Path Back From Conspiracy
If I could select on person to rule as a benevolent dictator it would probably be Yuval Levin. He has the knowledge, wisdom, experience and temperament to make a great leader (which is why he is not so stupid as to run for office but that is another post).
If you are seeking some sense of how we might get out of the mess we find ourselves in, I recommend his piece at The Dispatch today (BTW, you should join The Dispatch): The Path Back From Conspiracy. Building on his must read book, A Time to Build, he locates the solution in institutions but crucially rebuilding the integrity of institutions.
This requires a realistic understanding of human nature:
To imagine we don’t need responsible elites—or that the desire for institutional integrity is a naïve and over-earnest fantasy—is actually to deny the limits of human reason, power, and ability. It is a kind of utopianism masquerading as realism. It ultimately depends upon the fiction that corrupt elites are exceedingly competent, so that what the people need is their own hyper-competent champion to fight back. In truth, however, neither the elites nor their opponents are particularly capable. They are all human beings, and to imagine that human beings can seamlessly pull off a sophisticated, multilayered, sinister conspiracy over an extended period in a free society is already to lose touch with reality.
But our institutions seem corrupt and useless:
That sort of corruption of our professional institutions has grown pervasive. Not only in politics but in journalism, the academy, public health, federal law enforcement, American religious life, and beyond we have lately seen the lure of political expression overcome the strictures of professional formation, and the result has been a cratering of public trust and a growing detachment from reality.
The solution, however, is not to burn it down as so many seem to want, but build it up:
We should criticize elites for failing to live up to professional and institutional standards, not dismiss those standards as a sham. We should demand integrity, not deny it is possible. We should fight for the professions and the universities, not against them. We should want our institutions to be worthy of trust and authority, not seek to burn them down.
The corruption of the American establishment doesn’t mean we can do without elite institutions, it means we need to help them recover their integrity.
We desperately need leaders and communities who can take up this important work. Particularly in the areas noted above that so warp our perspectives these days.
Me in the University Bookman on Breaking Bread with the Dead
Mental Anchors for Information Overload – my review of Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs
The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson
For those of you not following along, I’m reading the Wingfeather Saga to mark the release of new collectable hardcover editions being released this year.
And so we come to the much anticipated final book in the series: The Warden and the Wolf King:
All winter long, people in the Green Hollows have prepared for a final battle with Gnag the Nameless and the Fangs of Dang. Janner, Kalmar, and Leeli are ready and willing to fight alongside the Hollowsfolk. But when the Fangs make the first move and invade Ban Rona, the children are separated.
Janner is alone and lost in the hills; Leeli is fighting the Fangs from the rooftops of the city; and Kalmar, who carries a terrible secret, is on a course for the Deeps of Throg. Monsters and Fangs and villains lie between the children and their only hope of victory in the epic conclusion of The Wingfeather Saga.
Perhaps not surprisingly given the continued improvement book to book, I found book four a satisfying conclusion to the series. It was a happy ending of sorts but not without some serious sacrifice. Quests, epic battles, twists and turns and some resolution (but not everything tied up in a neat bow).