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“How”, said I, “is such a conversion possible, that there should be a sudden and rapid divestment of all which, either innate in us has hardened in the corruption of our material nature, or acquired by us has become inveterate by long accustomed use? These things have become deeply and rad-ically engrained within us. When does he learn thrift who has been used to liberal banquets and sumptuous feasts? And he who has been glittering in gold and purple, and has been celebrated for his costly attire, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple clothing? One who has felt the charm of the fasces and of civic honours shrinks from becoming a mere private and inglorious citizen. The man who is attended by crowds of clients, and dignified by the numerous association of an officious train, regards it as a punishment when he is alone”

(Cyprian of Carthage, Ad Donat. 3. Cited in: Christopher M. Hays, “Resumptions of Radicalism. Christian Wealth Ethics in the Second and Third Centuries.” Zeitschrift fur die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und Kunde der Alteren Kirche 102, no. 2 (2011).

I’ve just run across a particularly pithy summary of the classic critique of monetized economies in favour of a labour-oriented approach to economics:

One particularly prominent strand in Western discourse, which goes back to Aristotle, is the general condemnation of money and trade in the light of an ideal of household self-sufficiency and production for use. The argument goes something like this. Like other animals, man is naturally self-sufficient and his wants are finite. Trade can only be natural in so far as it is oriented towards the restoration of such self-sufficiency. Just as in nature there may be too much here and not enough there, so it is with households which will then be forced to exchange on the basis of mutual need. ‘Interchange of this kind is not contrary to nature and is not a form of money-making; it keeps to its original purpose – to re-establish nature’s own equilibrium of self-sufficiency’ (Aristotle 1962: 42). Profit-oriented exchange is, however, unnatural; and is destructive of the bonds between households. Prices should therefore be fixed, and goods and services remunerated in accordance with the status of those who pro-vided them. Money as a tool intended only to facilitate exchange is naturally barren, and, of all the ways of getting wealth, lending at interest – where money is made to yield a ‘crop’ or litter’ – is ‘the most contrary to nature’ (Aristotle 1962: 46).

“Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange” from Jonathan Parry And Maurice Bloch eds., Money and the morality of exchange (1989: CUP), p. 2.

I should also mention for those of you who won’t go on to read the whole book that this is not the author’s position, merely a very helpful summary of one in a spectrum of many options.

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Wendell Berry opens his latest collection of essays, “Imagination in Place” with the following:

By an interworking of chance and choice, I have happened to live nearly all my life in a place I don’t remember not knowing. Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately.

Berry goes on to suggest that this geographic rooting in a particular plot of land has guided his writing and reflection; by being anchored he has avoided a certain amount of unhealthy creative ‘drift’ and by being well-planted on his farm in Kentucky he grown to love not just for the generic ‘environment’ but a particular place guided by intimate knowledge of its geography.

I’m very convinced by the trajectory of Berry’s suggestions. This notion of what the monks once called ‘stability’: purposefully anchoring yourself to a place, could go a long way towards dissolving the anomie that so much of our generation suffers from as we come and go from nondescript places where we work and live. Berry and others suggest also that by unrooting ourselves from a particular place it has become far easier to despoil God’s creation and again, I think there is something to this suggestion.

My own life and experience is a nearly perfect inversion of Berry’s tale. The demands of a graduate education have led my wife and I to relocate numerous times, from the Puget Sound region to upstate New York, to British Columbia in Canada, and most recently to Scotland. Digging back into previous generations, I’ve spent some time reconstructing our own family history from old census records in hopes that might find a stable family farm hidden somewhere in my past waiting to be reclaimed. But my family also is an inversion of this tale of being rooted in place. For the past four or five generations, almost every branch of my family has moved away from their place of birth to a different state – in most cases a completely different geography. For me, there is no family farm. For that matter, my family has invested itself so lightly in place that there is no family legacy lingering in any of those places they formerly occupied.

So with regards to being rooted in a place, I cannot escape the post-modern ‘blessing’ of self-construction. I suspect that I’m not alone in this predicament, both in desiring a place to call my own which I can commit our family to inter-generationally and in lacking an obvious option. What’s more, former generations have re-engineered the American labour market to support transience. Many employers are now trans-national and they often expect a person to pick up and move at some point over the course of their career. The notion of local business has nearly disappeared into unplaced options such as Wall-Mart, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and McDonalds. These workplaces may offer excellent compensation and benefits, and even invest in local community projects, but they remain decidedly un-parochial – and at best impostors. Local musicians, artists, writers, and local government struggle to capture the attention of the occupants of towns and cities. In the midst of these realities, to choose one’s “place” rather than inheriting it seems to represent a peculiar challenge, if not a fantasy.

While this essay might come across as a lament, I don’t mean for my tone to convey despair. It’s all well and good for Wendell Berry to enjoy his farm, but I’m in a different situation faced by a task that is perhaps more prefatory. I must first work to create the circumstances in which parochial life is again possible for my children and grandchildren. To this end, I have begun to search for ways to re-commit myself to those old parochial patterns. Here are a few that I’ve settled on thus far: finding culture generated by local people; ignoring presidential political theater until I’m confident that I understand and can participate in my local government and the issues it faces; spending my money at businesses which are not only staffed by local people, but which are owned and supplied by local people who choose to invest their wealth in their neighbourhoods. Finally, I’ve also begun to consider what features of their former homes led my family to leave their communities behind so that inasmuch as I can influence the shape of my future community it doesn’t suffer from these patterns.

If we are to address the ecological crisis that threatens the future of our children, we must commit to making decisions which are not just superficially ‘green’ but also pursue patterns of life which produce healthy locally invested communities.

Some Further Reading…

  • Berry, Wendell. Imagination in Place. Counterpoint Press, 2010.
  • Northcott, Michael. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming.
  • Gorringe, Timothy. A Theology of the Built Environment : Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  • Bouma-Prediger, Steven, and Brian J Walsh. Beyond Homelessness : Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub, 2008.
  • Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan. The Wisdom of Stability : Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2010.
  • Inge, John. A Christian Theology of Place. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 2003.
  • Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, in Kelvin Knight (ed.),  The MacIntyre Reader, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, 235 – 252.

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“I don’t know how it is, my brothers and sisters, but the spirit of the person who actually hands something to a poor man experiences a kind of sympathy with common humanity and infirmity, when the hand of the one who has it actually placed in the hand of the one who is in need. Although the one is giving, the other receiving, the one being attended to and the one attending are being joined in a real relationship.” (from Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 259.5)

The word charity has accumulated connotations over years past such that today doubts swirl around its use: Can we really give to another selflessly? Is charity really just a superficial way to ease my conscience and in the end enable someone else’s self-destructive habits? Given some of these doubts I’ve heard it said many times that we must accept that humans are driven towards self-maintenance and shape our good intentions around this reality.

Like many discussions in modern moral philosophy, this one ends up being circular. As long as you start with the conviction that we are creatures primarily driven by survival instincts, then it is reasonable to conclude that we must organise our societies and communities around the protection of mutual self-interest. As Augustine suggests in the quote I’ve opened with, however, we need not begin with this conviction. This is precisely the legacy of the long history of Christian moral philosophy, which is driven by another starting conviction – that we are made to give and receive love. It is no accident that the Latin word for “love,”  “caritas”… is the same root that gave us “charity”.

We cannot rehabilitate this way of talking about how people might live together while relying on a soporific version of love, however. What is required here is something more robust, a sort of loving that, as Augustine points out is inherently reciprocal and self-involving. Giving in love requires that we enter into another person’s experience in empathy. If we do not allow ourselves the chance to feel the suffering (and joy!) of our neighbour, then we may not actually be experiencing “true love.” The long-term consequence of this love is a mutual relationship.

For Augustine and other Christians reflecting in this tradition, it must be noted, this way of approaching our conduct did not apply exclusively to one’s personal life. This same sort of mutually involving Love could be expected to drive the interaction between societies as well. As we have seen over past decades, efficient calculations of mutual self-interest do not necessarily lead to more healthy societies or offer us the tools to truly confront the defining moral issues of our time – including the environmental crisis in which we now find ourselves. An ethic of love provides us a starting point which pursues not mere survival but a principle of self-giving which can seek to help across borders and across generations. This is surely a complicated matter, but it is nonetheless crucial to affirm a starting point by which we can expect to reliably guide our interactions, and the Christian tradition offers us exactly that.

Jeremy Kidwell

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Online digital media, especially software designed specifically for pedagogical use, presents comparable obstacles in terms of connecting to that which is outside their purview. Educational platforms like Blackboard[1] and Finalsite[2] are inward-looking systems that have a conventional relationship to content and whose interaction design tends to encourage navigators to remain within the confines of the system, directing their attention back to its many nodes, pages, plug-ins and modules. Although internally consistent and relatively comprehensive in its features, these systems tend to feel closed off. Ask anyone who uses Blackboard to describe it, and the words “sterile,” “clunky,” and “institutional” are invariably invoked. What is underlying these sentiments is the frustration that these interfaces do not participate in society, but form an enclosure from which to observe its workings from afar. (from “Crowdmapping the Classroom with Ushahidi” by Kenneth Rogers in Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy Edited by R. Trebor Scholz)

Based on this observation, which I consider fundamentally right, Rogers offers “ten guidelines I always try to follow to effectively select and critically employ digital tools in the classroom.” Here they are:

  • Do not use digital tools gratuitously or teach them as if learning the tool is an end in itself.
  • The selection of a digital tool should always be determined from an immediate social issue or local problem that is the larger concern of the class and for which the tool might have some relevant impact. Repeatedly ask the question, is this tool relevant to address the issue or problem posed to the class?
  • Select digital tools that are being used by social groups other than a classroom. Always demonstrate the connections of the digital tool to spaces/environments outside of the classroom. Who uses it? What immediate social purpose does it serve?
  • Illustrate the direct cultural, social, political, historical and economic context out of which a given digital tool arose. This must be understood as part of its functionality.
  • Avoid digital tools that replicate classroom space; seek tools that reconfigure it.
  • Dispense with the laboratory method of teaching digital tools that privileges the tool’s problem-solving capacity over and above the problem to which it is applied. Let the tool itself be reshaped by the problem.
  • Wherever possible and appropriate, encourage the creative repurposing of a digital tool against its original intent.
  • De-emphasize digital tools that are overly oriented around an individualized “user.”
  • Emphasize digital tools that have collaborative capacity and that produce cultural situations that facilitate collective engagement.
  • Identify digital tools that can help sustain participation in a project long after the class is over.

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There are a number of tech-savvy academics reflecting from the cutting edge of technology and teaching. Among these is the ProfHacker blog, the Institute for the Future of the Book and (the more web elusive) “Digital Humanities” which each represent a community of creative faculty in higher education with an interest in the thoughtful and thorough use of new technology in their teaching. Faculty use twitter, blogging, and other internet applications in the classroom, with a critical eye to whether this technology augments or impacts their teaching. There isn’t nearly the same energy invested in digital theology, ethics, or biblical studies, but I’m hoping to be a part of changing that! This is my first, in what I hope to be many posts casting a critical, but interested gaze on the thoughtful use of technology in theological pedagogy and a proper Christian contribution to the digital public space.

One of the reasons I like the Digital Humanities is because of their emphasis on “Open Access.” I’m convinced that I participate in the scholarly life standing on the shoulders of many benevolent people. This includes many people that I’ll likely never meet, including the Scottish taxpayers who have been incredibly generous in funding my PhD. With that in mind, I am keen to make sure that my output as a scholar is freely available when possible and appropriate.* But it’s not enough to just put stuff up online where it will never see the light of day, so my interest is to find the best possible way in which to contribute to existing online collaborative research and learning.

Since I’ve just been working on this over the past couple weeks, I thought a good place to start would be with a quick look at the best way to share bibliographies (i.e. a list of books and articles on a particular subject) with others, and how to weave these into existing public conversations. I maintain two fairly substantial bibliographies related to my research on this blog, and because the hunting down of resources can take so much time, I’ve been working on getting them online. My hope is that this can save others some time and that this will enable them to pick up the subject more quickly and accomplish more in their research. Right now these bibliographies are just plain text pages hosted in this blog, but for this post, I surveyed several alternative services to see if there is a web-related technology that might offer a better way to post a bibliography online.

Mendely

Meant to be an open source replacement for bibliographic software like EndNote, Mendeley also adds in a healthy dose of social networking. You can synchronize your entries on CiteULike and your zotero database (see more below), and they have a web importer that you can use to import links while you’re surfing when you come across an interesting book or article. Mendeley has an open API, which means that anyone can create software interfaces for the databases you create. I initially tested Mendeley over a year ago, and their Desktop application was pretty feature-bare and buggy. Now they’re nearly at a full 1.0 release and have an iOS app for your iPod as well. Mendeley has recently moved towards a moderate-fee system to generate revenue for this non-profit project. You get allocated a certain amount of online storage space where you references and attachments are stored, and then you have to pay for additional space. I’ve got no problems with this model, as it allows moderate users to go free, and encourages heavier users to support the system they’re using.

For my purposes here, Mendeley doesn’t really have an online bibliography feature, but you can create research interest Groups, which others can join, and you can group references in folders which you can then share with others. On the plus side, it is possible to add any reference, books, journals, etc. Also, you can add tags to items, which, when viewed online by other Mendeley members who have joined your group, can be sorted on the fly by tags.

On the negative side, you have to be creative in adding summaries and comments to the papers, as all the data remains within your reference data. Further, only Mendeley members can access the bibliography and group once its is created. Also, because you’re not working with plain text, it is hard to identify relations between references, which in the case of John Zizioulas is quite significant has his works have been translated multiple times.

Zotero

Zotero started as a plugin for the popular firefox web browser. The idea was to create a quick and easy way of grabbing academic content while surfing online and then storing it in a lightweight database for the purpose of citation in academic writing. I was admittedly skeptical of zotero when it was first released a few years ago, but since then it has developed into a really mature project. They are close to a release of a stand-alone version of the software so you’re not restricted to your web browser. Further, they store the reference data in a standard sqlite database, which you can deposit wherever you like on your computer. This is open-source software being developed collaboratively by anyone who wants to contribute, and so their import engine is probably one of the best available. You can quickly grab an article and download its content from all sorts of major websites including google scholar, the New York Times, and so forth. Zotero has also recently adopted the same online storage model as Mendeley, for those who are interested in synchronising all your references across multiple computers.

For the purpose of this review, I found that Zotero has much the same solution for sharing references. You can create a research group, and associate references with them. This options follows roughly the same cues as Mendeley while offering slightly less, so unless you’re invested in Zotero for a particular reason I’d look elsewhere, while checking back in to see how this develops in the future.

CiteULike

Moving beyond the previous two options, which are anchored in a software program, CiteULike is purely web based, offering a user-generated catalogue of academic research, with a healthy dash of social networking. It is important to note at the outset that CiteULike is a free service, run by a for-profit venture, and supported by what are somewhat visually-intrusive google ads. You can link to friends who are also on CiteULike and stay on top of articles they add and recommend. Like most of the other services that are heavily web-connected, CiteULike is primarily used by researchers in the sciences (including economists and other business-school types), so the social features are less than impressive for someone doing work primarily in the humanities.

Connotea

Connotea exists in the same genre as CiteULike, while offering a much cleaner interface. One gets the impression, however, that they have a smaller user base and if you’re a scientist, this might mean that less of the articles you’re looking to add aren’t already there. Similarly, this meant that it could only import 11 of my references.
WorldCat
Still in the web-based, but in an entirely different genre, WorldCat is a service that aims to integrate public and university library catalogues. Along with this, if you become a registered user, you can add “book lists” which are bibliographies which link to books that are catalogued in worldcat, along with brief notes for each work you’ve chosen and global tags for the list itself.

I should also add a quick plug for the amateur librarian out there. Many of these public library catalogues rely on volunteers to keep their catalogues organized. I’m often submitting requests to the folks at worldcat.org to combine books and correct (the admittedly rare) data errors. I’ve also got a librarian account at LibraryThing which is a service similar to worldcat, though which promotes more along the lines of user based book reviews. You’ll find a similar, though less academic service with GoodReads.

Sente, Papers, EndNote, Bookends, etc.

The last category, not to be forgotten, are those software based applications you can use to organize bibliographies, but which lack a web-based component. I use Sente myself. But none of these applications offer any sort of web-based bibliographies. At best you can organize and format references in a software program, and then augment the references as plain text. This is what I’ve done for the blog, and a process I’m hoping to transcend…

My conclusion?

I like the smooth interface of Mendeley, which has something on Zotero, I think. But both present a very limited range of options for annotating your bibliography. I should note that many faculty now encourage their students to learn Zotero and provide bibliographies for their courses for the ease of student use. CiteULike offers a thicker set of options and a more sophisticated set of social tools, but their ads are intrusive, and their features are still limited. I love the degree to which WorldCat it plugged into public library catalogues, but their interface is quite limited and it’s hopelessly tedious to add references which are not books (i.e. journal articles, etc.).

This leads me to still prefer a blog post in which I can narrate my choices more fully, and add hyperlinks as appropriate. What I’ve decided, I think, it to stick with what I’m using currently on my two bibliographies hosted here (and the more to follow) and to augment them. What I’ve concluded here is that a software solution, at least what is currently on offer, cannot replace the basic art of writing. Along these lines, I’m encouraged by the work by the folks at the “Institute for the Future of the Book” to bring digital publishing back closer to the hand-written page by enabling marginal notes and comments on digital pages. The blog includes a comments space, and I hope to add the possibility of marginal notation soon as well. I’m looking to get some more independent web server space and port this blog to Joomla. Once I’m there, I can use the J!Research plugin. Or, I may stick with wordpress and use the CommentPress plugin (see the great in-depth article here and see a sample on display here). In the meantime, I’d be curious to hear from others who are either hoping to write, or looking to read bibliographies to hear what your experience with the services I’ve reviewed here has been. Have I missed anything? Are there features you’d like to see in public communication of research like this?

Notes:

* I’m actually fairly reluctant about the idea of self-publishing, not because I want to profit off books (ask most theologians and they’ll tell you that book sales hardly augment their salaries) but rather because I think that it is especially important for theologians to have their work scrutinised careful by editorial staffs that are cultivated by publishing houses. If anything, we would benefit from less and not more theological writing.

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Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

As the millionth bus drove past me with an advertisement for the latest installation of the Twilight saga (though this term seems generous as “saga” might usually imply a sustained plot line with a broad scope), my thoughts this morning turned to our recent obsession with vampires. Perhaps in contrast to some, I’m not all that opposed to the so-called Goth movement. I think that there is a great deal of honesty in people’s, often teens, dissatisfaction with this generation’s superficial notions of beauty and substance. What I’m not quite so sure about is the new flood of gothic romance novels (and now movies) which seem to have exploded on the shelves of my local bookstore.

This 21st century focus on ‘gothic’ fashion and sensibilities parallels some aspects of the earlier movement in 18-19th century modern literature which brought us such classics as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Following the new ‘Romantic ‘ focus on emotion, feeling, and the potential that we might find some glimpse of the sublime in the extremes of feeling, these authors sought to explore the contours of terror. Strangely enough, John Muir’s appreciation of the experience of standing before the extreme majesty of a mountain range arose out of the same basic interest which compelled the writers of gothic fiction to imagine the horrors of ghosts, phantasms, and monsters.

Yet there is a contrast to be found, at least with respect to Frankenstein, in the posture towards monstrosity. Monsters in the earlier gothic sense were hazy and impressionistic. Frankenstein was the name of the inventor who made the horrible creature which bore no name. Our monsters now seem rather less monstrous and much more human. In a strange way, the two categories (human and monster) which the gothic writers mobilised with such success have begun to converge in the contemporary imagination. While those 19th century writers sought to produce an extreme state of fear, (which was thought to have a positive result in the long run) these contemporary monsters seem so much more pathetic and lonely. This sort of monstrosity offers a mirror by which we can look at ourselves, though the extremes of violence and capacity which they represent are not in the end extremes at all.

This is where I wonder whether the contemporary gothic movement might do with a bit more careful construal of its purposes. To be sure, false impressions of beauty are horribly deceptive, and deserve unmasking. Similarly, monstrosity can be a useful trope by which to examine our own capabilities and proclivities. But have our societies just grown comfortable with the fact that we’re monstrous on some level, and given up acting in protest against the violence, brutality, and ugliness which lies at the heart of monstrosity? This seems to me to be some of the more sinister message behind the characters’ persistent quest to sleep with a Vampire. Isn’t the purpose, at least as those older gothic writers saw it, to unmask monstrosity? To identify its otherness?

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Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

An accident unravelled before my eyes a few weeks ago. As I was walking down a quiet street with a busy intersection, it struck my ears first, which caught the unexpected combined sounds of a screech, thud, and then a weak cry. As I turned, my eyes found a sweet older woman lying in the middle of the street, next to her bicycle, cycle-basket and purse contents strewn across the road.

I feared the worst, as most likely did the driver involved, who left his car in a great hurry and knelt at her side. From my distance I couldn’t make out his words, and as nearby people seemed to have the situation well in hand, I continued my walk, unsettled but not wanting to be a voyeur. It turned out that I was going the wrong way (my usual me…), and as I returned 20 minutes later, the road was already clear. To my even greater surprise, I found the driver and cyclist standing on the side of the road, speaking, somewhat tenderly. As I watched, the driver gave the cyclist a gentle hug and they went on their way, apparently none the worse for wear.

I share this experience because the unfolding of it caught me by surprise. My thoughts turned to other accidents that I had witnessed and the aftermath that had ensued. Drivers, victims, or both, shouting at one another, each trying to establish fault by decibels. This incident struck me as so dissonant, precisely because the two involved were gracious and tender towards one another.

In the midst of a letter where he writes about freedom, Paul commends exactly this sort of mutually compassionate interaction. He suggests:

“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are
 thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:9–21 NRSV)

I know nothing about the faith of the two people involved in this accident, but that need not prevent their showing the truly authentic Christian love that Paul is writing about here. An accident has forged friends out of strangers; they not only showed care, but even affection, for one another. The hurt lady, especially, could be enraged by the accident, but, as Paul says, she overcame the evil of the situation with good spirit, and went home smiling instead of grudging, with a story to entertain people at dinner. Very often we write lofty poetry about love, and describes the heights of romantic rapture, but I guess love can be as simple as helping out a stranger, and being kind to those who have been careless and thrown us face down on the road.

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Much gets said these days about liberty and freedom across the political spectrum. At the heart of talk about “inalienable rights” is usually the notion of freedom, and in the contemporary context, we find political systems often construed as protectors of personal rights. Yet when the foundation for the notion of justice and right is personal liberty, or “freedom,” problems arise.

Let me give an example. Freedoms can often be pitted against one another: the exercise of one person’s right to free speech can enable the defamation of another person, impinging upon their right to maintain an accurate depiction of their character and reputation. Similarly, my right to affordable food can impinge upon the right of another person to just working conditions in a distant land. Amidst these sorts of troubles, it remains unpopular to suggest that religious faith might offer some sort of a solution, and while this sentiment is deeply rooted in Western history, it is not necessarily productive.

With the rise of Protestantism, the medieval notion of authority came under threat. Long-held convictions regarding the subject of moral authority were questioned, leaving people wondering whether they owed allegiance to the pope, the prince, or neither. After over a century of bloody wars and conflict across Europe over the subject of religion, a treaty was struck and Christian doctrine was sidelined as a unifying factor for the political identities of the emerging European states, at the Peace of Westphalia. Leaders concluded that it would be best to sideline religion for the sake of social stability. Following a few generations after this legacy, the philosopher Immanuel Kant developed a new way of moral thinking that could respect the need for social order but leave faith conviction on the sidelines. The system he imagined has become one of the more enduring philosophical legacies for the succeeding centuries!

Fast-forward to the present day, and it has become clear that, though Kant offered a new sort of “objectivity,” there were losses as well. In order to grant coherence to the concept of duty in this newly secular modern world, objectivity became the new focal point of moral deliberation. And this objectivity comes at a cost, as Plato suggests: “If we are to have clear knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body” (Phaedo). Old theological notions such as justice, were replaced with new secular ones like “fairness” and “equality.” But this brave new world can be bleak at times, as the secular vision for the good life, which was to be achieved through science and engineering, has been frustrated in a wide variety of circumstances, including new wars, Nazi projects in human engineering, and fascist experiments in social engineering. To be fair, this new Scientific society has also brought us refrigeration and disposable toilet cleaners, but one is often left wondering… where is the idea of the “good life”?

In Kant’s vision, created particularities had to be left on the sidelines along with the creator. In privileging our rational faculties for the sake of objectively discerning our duties, Kant also left behind the role of our emotional lives and the unique contours and needs of the social life of neighbourhoods.

I would argue much is to be gained with a re-affirmation that at the true center of freedom lies the notion that we are created, contingent creatures. In the wake of the creeping failure of the modern orientations for the moral life – progress, science, engineering – in some cases people have finally given up on orienting our societies to any sort of purpose at all. And, without an orientation, we are prone to wander. As Augustine observed in another age of violent conflict, “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you [God]” (inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te). I think it is no accident that Augustine puts this in the plural as well. Not only are our personal lives prone to disorientation when we have nothing by which to order them, so too is our common life prone to wander restlessly searching for an orientation which can guide our life together.

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Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

Fear can be scarier when it is shared. I can remember several moments in the past few years where I’ve felt a palpable shared sense of fear, first in the build-up to the Iraq war, then more recently with the “financial crisis.” In each case, I can remember feeling that moral dilemmas, which would ordinarily involve some fairly straight-forward thinking, have become muddled and unclear.

So I became unsure, for instance, over whether a pre-emptive military policy in Iraq really had some merit. I had been opposed to this idea for years, but such conviction was harder to maintain after the evening news was saturated for weeks with stories about the possibility of long range nuclear missiles and chemical weapons in the hands of Saddam Hussein. Similarly, I remember that same sense of uncertainty – what might be called a cloud of fear – following me around when the financial crisis supposedly threatened the stability of our social institutions, including the viability of entire governments. Again, social fear was palpable as we assessed the limited options for economic recovery being proposed, which have now resulted in many countries propping up the very institutions and their leadership which bear responsibility for the economic crisis. Strange decisions result from strange times.

I’ve just spent the past weekend at an academic conference discussing another, perhaps even stronger, fear cloud – the threat of climate change. Speakers helpfully pointed out that climate change is but one of several issues which are accelerated by our consumptive lifestyles and disdain for the limits that God seems to have placed in the creation, as we face water shortages, peak oil, soil destruction, pollution, dead zones in the ocean, and the list could go on. I imagine we all have a personal, concrete experience with the some troubling ecological issue, whether that be a recent water shortage, the ugly smell of a nearby landfill, or extreme weather patterns.

One of the most useful interactions I had at this conference was a theological discussion on a proper Christian response to fear. What resources and guidance does our faith provide in seeking to respond to ecological or financial crisis? A frequent exhortation that appears in the Bible is to “fear the Lord.” Indeed Psalm 111:10 suggests that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.” The hebrew word used in the Psalm for fear, yārēʾ, actually encompasses a wider range of meaning, including fear, reverence, to honor, worship, or be afraid of. There is some wisdom embedded in the language itself here, I think; it suggests that what we fear, we may also grant overriding control over our moral lives. Thus, if I fear the financial crisis, i.e. my own financial ruin, at the root of this fear is my own love of money and the economy which secures my wealth. Similarly, fears of environmental destruction may reflect an underlying worship of the patterns I am familiar with, such as a ready supply of tropical fruits or an abundance of consumer products without any indication of their source or true cost. In short, my fear may reflect an underlying reluctance to see change, whatever the source.

A Christian response to such fear, I think, is the act of repentance. In this, we identify the underlying idolatries (or distorted loves) that generate our fears and express regret for the destructiveness these misguided attachments have caused. Next, we detach our loyalties from them, and place our trust instead in the only thing which can correspond to our highest aspirations: the personal God who created us. This redirection offers an entirely new orientation by which we can respond to bad news and conceive of our life within changed circumstances. This orientation holds, even if the pennies are few and the winter comes too early.