A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:
Louisiana State University Press is in trouble. Bertram Wyatt-Brown weighs in.
Washington Post review of Edmund Morgan, American Heroes.
The Star-Spangled Banner was a drinking song.
I am not sure I would call its readers "idiots," but the Patriot's Bible is certainly interesting. (NOTE: Since I wrote this, the "idiot" monicker has been removed from the title of this post).
Ronald Thiemann on Obama as a public theologian.
Historiann tries to make sense of a bunch of Ivy League graduate students and professional school graduates wondering if they are elite or not. (Read the comments).
Bill Donohue is rooting for Sotomayor.
Jeremy Beer on Christopher Lasch.
Verlyn Klinkenborg on the joy of re-reading.
Conan is ready. (And Andy Richter will return as his sidekick).
Ali, one of my former students, is on the road.
Happy Birthday American Creation!
Obama's choice for ambassador to the Vatican.
Sotomayor's Catholicism. Also here.
Christian Century review of Andrew Murphy's Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9-11.
I hope to read this novel soon.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 30, 2009
New Review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home
The recent issue of Fides et Historia has a nice review of The Way of Improvement Leads Home by Will Katerberg of Calvin College (who also happens to be the editor of the journal). Check out Will's new book: Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (Kansas, 2008).The review is not yet on-line, but I offer a couple of snippets here:
John Fea's monograph is good scholarship, the kind of empirical, fine-grained analysis that the history profession teaches and values. But it is more than that...Fea does not just use Fithian's diaries to learn about the man and his time, especially tensions between his provincial loyalties to his home in rural New Jersey and his ambition to discover, enjoy, and make his way in a wider cosmopolitan world. Fea also is drawn to Fithian's example and wants us to learn from Fithian's experiences...
(Fea) has shown the rootedness of Fithian's Enlightenment (any enlightenment, I think, not just Fithian's). These roots are local, personal, and emotional, and enlightenment is all the richer for them, especially when cosmopolitans are aware of their own provincialism and finitude.
Song of the Day
Springsteen: The Girls in their Summer Clothes (Sorry, Springsteen won't let us embed it).
Friday, May 29, 2009
Research at the Teaching College
Should faculty at institutions devoted primarily to teaching be encouraged to do research? College and university administrators approach this question differently. I know colleagues who teach at schools where research is encouraged, but not supported. Teaching and service are the primary considerations in tenure cases at these places and scholarship requirements are minimal. (For example, at some places the scholarship requirements are met by attending conferences or paying for membership in a professional organization). At these schools, writing and publication and other forms of scholarship outside of delivering the curriculum are viewed as little more than a hobby.
Other teaching institutions, like the one in which I work, encourage scholarship through teaching reductions and research funds. The emphasis is still primarily on teaching, but the relationship between faculty growth and research is understood.
Some well-endowed teaching institutions have permanently reduced teaching loads that come close to the loads offered at research universities. Dickinson College, for example, recently dropped their teaching load from a 3-3 to a 2-3.
In today's economy, even those college and universities that support faculty research may be tempted to cut costs by reducing funds devoted to scholarship. I personally think that this is a bad idea and I am supported, to an extent, by a recent article on the subject in Inside Higher Ed. The article mentions a study by Dahlia Remier and Elda Pema, economists who studied the benefits of faculty research.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Remier and Pema have drawn the following tentative conclusions:
1). Students gravitate toward research orientations.
2). Research make professors better teachers.
3). Research oriented professors help sort students by being poor teachers. (Are all research oriented professors bad teachers? This one seems a bit odd).
4). Research quality has been a proxy for teaching quality.
5). Altruism (Scholarship produces socially valuable knowledge).
6). Faculty members like to do research.
7). Envy and prestige. (Departments doing research may inspire other departments to do the same).
Read the article. For what it's worth, there is a lot here for administrators to think about before cutting their faculty's research funds and opportunities.
Other teaching institutions, like the one in which I work, encourage scholarship through teaching reductions and research funds. The emphasis is still primarily on teaching, but the relationship between faculty growth and research is understood.
Some well-endowed teaching institutions have permanently reduced teaching loads that come close to the loads offered at research universities. Dickinson College, for example, recently dropped their teaching load from a 3-3 to a 2-3.
In today's economy, even those college and universities that support faculty research may be tempted to cut costs by reducing funds devoted to scholarship. I personally think that this is a bad idea and I am supported, to an extent, by a recent article on the subject in Inside Higher Ed. The article mentions a study by Dahlia Remier and Elda Pema, economists who studied the benefits of faculty research.
According to Inside Higher Ed, Remier and Pema have drawn the following tentative conclusions:
1). Students gravitate toward research orientations.
2). Research make professors better teachers.
3). Research oriented professors help sort students by being poor teachers. (Are all research oriented professors bad teachers? This one seems a bit odd).
4). Research quality has been a proxy for teaching quality.
5). Altruism (Scholarship produces socially valuable knowledge).
6). Faculty members like to do research.
7). Envy and prestige. (Departments doing research may inspire other departments to do the same).
Read the article. For what it's worth, there is a lot here for administrators to think about before cutting their faculty's research funds and opportunities.
It's A Clean Sweep for Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed has just won the $50,000 George Washington Prize for her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. She now has the Washington Prize to go with her Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for this powerfully written account of Thomas Jefferson and the slave family with whom he became intimately involved.The Washington Prize is one of the largest literary awards in America. It is presented as a joint effort by the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Mt. Vernon Ladies' Association.
Congratulations!
Thursday, May 28, 2009
How to Read for a College History Course
ATTENTION HISTORY MAJORS: Over at the new blog of the Historical Society, UMASS professor Heather Cox Richardson has posted a piece that all history majors should read. Richardson offers some very helpful suggestions for how to read for a history class and offers some tips for working one's way through both primary sources and academic monographs.
New McNeil Center Fellows
Dan Richter reports on the new group of young scholars (and at least one old one) who will be joining the community at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. As I read about their projects, I realize just how far early American studies have come (I will let you decide if this is good or bad) in the ten years since I graced the hallowed halls of the Center. Here is the letter:
Dear Colleagues:
I am delighted to announce the McNeil Center’s fellowship appointments for the 2009-2010 academic year. Thanks to the generosity of the Barra Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the institutional members of the McNeil Center Consortium, the Friends of the MCEAS, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the Quinn Foundation—along with new grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Park Service and the Friends of Valley Forge Park, and an anonymous donor, sixteen scholars will receive funding for writing and for research at Philadelphia-area libraries and archives during all or part of the summer and academic year.
Our newest category of fellows comes to us through a major grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of the Early American Literature and Material Text Initiative. Offered in collaboration with the Library Company of Philadelphia, EALMT Fellowships are awarded to dissertators whose work combines in innovative ways the study of texts with the material circumstances of their production and dissemination. Marcia Nichols, who studies Early American Literature at the University of South Carolina, captures the spirit of both sides of the Initiative in the title of her dissertation, "‘And Let Them See How Curiously They’re Made’: Constructing Female Sexuality in Anglo-Atlantic Midwifery Texts, 1690-1800," which combines the close study of both books as material objects and the words they contain to explore how female bodies were made for 18th-century readers. In "American Paratexts," Marcia’s fellow EALMT fellow, Joshua Ratner of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, also looks at the relationship between authors, readers, and physical books, as expressed in prefaces, frontispieces, notes, and other apparatuses that, in his hands, become anything but auxiliaries to the main work.
The EALMT fellows share many common interests with Joseph Rezek, who will be joining us for the first of two years as a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow. Joe’s recently completed UCLA dissertation, "Tales from Elsewhere: Fiction at a Proximate Distance in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1800-1850," studies the strategies of writers on the cultural peripheries of Ireland, Scotland, and North America as they sought success in the London metropole—strategies that often turned on keen understanding of the ways in which books were manufactured, distributed, and reviewed. Sure to prevent these three specialists in material texts from excessive intellectual inbreeding is our continuing Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, Brian Connolly, whose monograph in progress is based on his Rutgers University dissertation, "Domestic Intercourse: Incest in the United States, 1780-1871."
Only slightly less disturbing—but no less historically enlightening—forms of familial interaction are the subject of Dawn E. Peterson’s New York University dissertation, "Unusual Sympathies: Race, Family, and Servitude in Jacksonian Politics." As a Consortium Dissertation Fellow, Dawn will continue her research into the surprising phenomenon of elite antebellum men (not least among them Andrew Jackson) who supported both Indian Removal and the expansion of racial slavery while at the same time adopting American Indian boys into their households.
The issues of racial identity, cultural coercion, and familial self-fashioning raised by Dawn’s work run through many of our fellows’ projects. Paul Conrad of the University of Texas Austin, looks at Native people whose experience of cultural displacement was even more wrenching in "Captive Fates: Displaced Apache Indians and the Boundaries of Slavery in the Southwest Borderlands and Atlantic World." Paul will trace his own complicated Center genealogy as both the inaugural Richard S. Dunn Fellow and a Friends of the MCEAS Fellow. Race and identity in the Atlantic basin are similarly the subject of the work of our distinguished 2009 Consortium Summer Faculty Fellow, Roderick McDonald of Rider University, who is completing work for a book entitled "The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery: Dr. Jonathan Troup’s Journal of Dominica, 1789-91.
Literary constructions of enslaved people are also a central concern—along with expatriates, traitors, and other Others—of Consortium Dissertation Fellow Carrie L. Hyde of the English Department at Rutgers, in her study of "Alienable Rights: Negative Styles of U.S. Citizenship, 1790-1868." In a very different temporal and cultural context, Barra Dissertation Fellow Elena Schneider of Princeton explores similar themes in "The Limits of Loyalty: Slavery, Commerce, and British Occupation in 18th-Century Havana."
Elena and Paul help weave another common thread among several fellows’ dissertation projects: the experience of warfare in the eighteenth-century. In "‘Melancholy Landscapes’: Warfare and Written Expression in Revolutionary America," Philip C. Mead of Harvard University studies hundreds of diaries and memoirs to trace "how exposure to wartime landscapes hardened regional, ethnic, and racial prejudices that soldiers brought to the war experience." Phil will share his understanding of that experience with staff—and through them visitors—to Valley Forge National Park, as the inaugural Bruce Baky Valley Forge Dissertation Fellow, funded entirely through the generosity of the National Park Service and the Friends of Valley Forge Park in honor of the former chairman of the latter group.
While the subjects of Phil’s work experienced the landscape of North American warfare intimately, those studied by Benjamin Bankhurst of King’s College, London, imagined it at a distance, as Ulster Presbyterians read about, corresponded with, and, most significantly raised funds for, the many thousands of their coreligionists caught up in brutal fighting on the frontiers of Pennsylvania. As an E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fellow in Early American Religious Studies, Ben will continue work on his dissertation, "‘Habitations of Cruelty’: America, Irish Presbyterians, and the Seven years War, 1754-1764."
Habitations of another order entirely fascinate Irene Cheng, a student of Architecture History and Theory at Columbia University, who, as a Monticello-McNeil and Friends of the MCEAS Fellow, will spend six weeks at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville and the remainder of the year in Philadelphia. In "Forms of Function: Self-Culture, Geometry, and Octagon Architecture in Antebellum America," Irene surveys the surprisingly widespread phenomenon of polygonal domestic and public architecture in the antebellum United States and even more surprisingly widespread belief that distinctively shaped domiciles could produce distinctively shaped human selves.
One form of human self that historians have long considered distinctive is the supposedly autonomous Dutch woman of New Netherland, who then became a social and legal dilemma for the post-conquest English regime. Virginie Adane, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, turns a critical eye to such easy generalizations in "Women in A Multicultural Colonial Society: New Netherland, New York, 1630-1730." Virginie, whose home institution is in Paris, will spend the fall semester at the New York State Archives in Albany as a Quinn Foundation Fellow and the spring in Philadelphia as a Friends of the MCEAS Fellow. A similarly peripatetic mix of things French, Dutch, and North American structures the work of Society of the Cincinnati Fellow Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, whose Columbia University dissertation is entitled "Corresponding Republics: Private Letters and Movement Organizing in the America, Dutch Patriot, and French Resolutions, ca. 1765-91."
Last but certainly not least are two fellows whose projects make phenomena usually considered mundane central to fresh analyses of early American culture. In "Do You Hear What I Hear? Revival Poetry and the Formation of the Evangelical Ear in 18th-Century Poetry," Carpenter Fellow Wendy Raphael Roberts of Northwestern University recovers a world of rhyme, meter, and orality that previous scholars have almost entirely overlooked. And, in "Cloth as Metaphor in the Early American Atlantic World, 1550-1750," Barra Art and Material Culture Fellow Laura E. Johnson of the University of Delaware does amazing things with surviving scraps of the trade textiles whose importance to Native-European exchange she reveals to be far more than economic.
Please join me in congratulating these wonderful scholars and in welcoming those who are newcomers to the McNeil Center community.
Daniel K. Richter
The Richard S. Dunn Director
Dear Colleagues:
I am delighted to announce the McNeil Center’s fellowship appointments for the 2009-2010 academic year. Thanks to the generosity of the Barra Foundation, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the institutional members of the McNeil Center Consortium, the Friends of the MCEAS, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the Quinn Foundation—along with new grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Park Service and the Friends of Valley Forge Park, and an anonymous donor, sixteen scholars will receive funding for writing and for research at Philadelphia-area libraries and archives during all or part of the summer and academic year.
Our newest category of fellows comes to us through a major grant from the Mellon Foundation in support of the Early American Literature and Material Text Initiative. Offered in collaboration with the Library Company of Philadelphia, EALMT Fellowships are awarded to dissertators whose work combines in innovative ways the study of texts with the material circumstances of their production and dissemination. Marcia Nichols, who studies Early American Literature at the University of South Carolina, captures the spirit of both sides of the Initiative in the title of her dissertation, "‘And Let Them See How Curiously They’re Made’: Constructing Female Sexuality in Anglo-Atlantic Midwifery Texts, 1690-1800," which combines the close study of both books as material objects and the words they contain to explore how female bodies were made for 18th-century readers. In "American Paratexts," Marcia’s fellow EALMT fellow, Joshua Ratner of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, also looks at the relationship between authors, readers, and physical books, as expressed in prefaces, frontispieces, notes, and other apparatuses that, in his hands, become anything but auxiliaries to the main work.
The EALMT fellows share many common interests with Joseph Rezek, who will be joining us for the first of two years as a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow. Joe’s recently completed UCLA dissertation, "Tales from Elsewhere: Fiction at a Proximate Distance in the Anglophone Atlantic, 1800-1850," studies the strategies of writers on the cultural peripheries of Ireland, Scotland, and North America as they sought success in the London metropole—strategies that often turned on keen understanding of the ways in which books were manufactured, distributed, and reviewed. Sure to prevent these three specialists in material texts from excessive intellectual inbreeding is our continuing Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, Brian Connolly, whose monograph in progress is based on his Rutgers University dissertation, "Domestic Intercourse: Incest in the United States, 1780-1871."
Only slightly less disturbing—but no less historically enlightening—forms of familial interaction are the subject of Dawn E. Peterson’s New York University dissertation, "Unusual Sympathies: Race, Family, and Servitude in Jacksonian Politics." As a Consortium Dissertation Fellow, Dawn will continue her research into the surprising phenomenon of elite antebellum men (not least among them Andrew Jackson) who supported both Indian Removal and the expansion of racial slavery while at the same time adopting American Indian boys into their households.
The issues of racial identity, cultural coercion, and familial self-fashioning raised by Dawn’s work run through many of our fellows’ projects. Paul Conrad of the University of Texas Austin, looks at Native people whose experience of cultural displacement was even more wrenching in "Captive Fates: Displaced Apache Indians and the Boundaries of Slavery in the Southwest Borderlands and Atlantic World." Paul will trace his own complicated Center genealogy as both the inaugural Richard S. Dunn Fellow and a Friends of the MCEAS Fellow. Race and identity in the Atlantic basin are similarly the subject of the work of our distinguished 2009 Consortium Summer Faculty Fellow, Roderick McDonald of Rider University, who is completing work for a book entitled "The Ethnography and Pornography of Slavery: Dr. Jonathan Troup’s Journal of Dominica, 1789-91.
Literary constructions of enslaved people are also a central concern—along with expatriates, traitors, and other Others—of Consortium Dissertation Fellow Carrie L. Hyde of the English Department at Rutgers, in her study of "Alienable Rights: Negative Styles of U.S. Citizenship, 1790-1868." In a very different temporal and cultural context, Barra Dissertation Fellow Elena Schneider of Princeton explores similar themes in "The Limits of Loyalty: Slavery, Commerce, and British Occupation in 18th-Century Havana."
Elena and Paul help weave another common thread among several fellows’ dissertation projects: the experience of warfare in the eighteenth-century. In "‘Melancholy Landscapes’: Warfare and Written Expression in Revolutionary America," Philip C. Mead of Harvard University studies hundreds of diaries and memoirs to trace "how exposure to wartime landscapes hardened regional, ethnic, and racial prejudices that soldiers brought to the war experience." Phil will share his understanding of that experience with staff—and through them visitors—to Valley Forge National Park, as the inaugural Bruce Baky Valley Forge Dissertation Fellow, funded entirely through the generosity of the National Park Service and the Friends of Valley Forge Park in honor of the former chairman of the latter group.
While the subjects of Phil’s work experienced the landscape of North American warfare intimately, those studied by Benjamin Bankhurst of King’s College, London, imagined it at a distance, as Ulster Presbyterians read about, corresponded with, and, most significantly raised funds for, the many thousands of their coreligionists caught up in brutal fighting on the frontiers of Pennsylvania. As an E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Fellow in Early American Religious Studies, Ben will continue work on his dissertation, "‘Habitations of Cruelty’: America, Irish Presbyterians, and the Seven years War, 1754-1764."
Habitations of another order entirely fascinate Irene Cheng, a student of Architecture History and Theory at Columbia University, who, as a Monticello-McNeil and Friends of the MCEAS Fellow, will spend six weeks at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville and the remainder of the year in Philadelphia. In "Forms of Function: Self-Culture, Geometry, and Octagon Architecture in Antebellum America," Irene surveys the surprisingly widespread phenomenon of polygonal domestic and public architecture in the antebellum United States and even more surprisingly widespread belief that distinctively shaped domiciles could produce distinctively shaped human selves.
One form of human self that historians have long considered distinctive is the supposedly autonomous Dutch woman of New Netherland, who then became a social and legal dilemma for the post-conquest English regime. Virginie Adane, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, turns a critical eye to such easy generalizations in "Women in A Multicultural Colonial Society: New Netherland, New York, 1630-1730." Virginie, whose home institution is in Paris, will spend the fall semester at the New York State Archives in Albany as a Quinn Foundation Fellow and the spring in Philadelphia as a Friends of the MCEAS Fellow. A similarly peripatetic mix of things French, Dutch, and North American structures the work of Society of the Cincinnati Fellow Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, whose Columbia University dissertation is entitled "Corresponding Republics: Private Letters and Movement Organizing in the America, Dutch Patriot, and French Resolutions, ca. 1765-91."
Last but certainly not least are two fellows whose projects make phenomena usually considered mundane central to fresh analyses of early American culture. In "Do You Hear What I Hear? Revival Poetry and the Formation of the Evangelical Ear in 18th-Century Poetry," Carpenter Fellow Wendy Raphael Roberts of Northwestern University recovers a world of rhyme, meter, and orality that previous scholars have almost entirely overlooked. And, in "Cloth as Metaphor in the Early American Atlantic World, 1550-1750," Barra Art and Material Culture Fellow Laura E. Johnson of the University of Delaware does amazing things with surviving scraps of the trade textiles whose importance to Native-European exchange she reveals to be far more than economic.
Please join me in congratulating these wonderful scholars and in welcoming those who are newcomers to the McNeil Center community.
Daniel K. Richter
The Richard S. Dunn Director
The Burden of Encyclopedia Articles
Many of my senior colleagues will not write articles for academic encyclopedias. I understand why. Writing these articles require a certain style that is as far from imaginative prose as one can possibly get. They require a lot of searching for bibliographic references and biographical information such as dates of birth, etc... It is not always easy to write 1000 words on a subject that you know a great deal about. And, finally, they do not pay well. (Although as a graduate student $50 to $100 per entry looked pretty good).
Nevertheless, I continue to say "yes" when asked to write such articles. For whatever reason, I view them as part of my responsibility to my profession and discipline. Today I have been working on three entries for the forthcoming Dictionary of Early American Philosophy, edited by my friend and former colleague Steve Wilson. The work is tedious, and I am late in delivering in these articles, but it is good to refresh my thinking about early American Presbyterians such as Samuel Davies, Francis Alison, and Jonathan Dickinson. Steve, if you are reading this, the entries are almost on their way!
Nevertheless, I continue to say "yes" when asked to write such articles. For whatever reason, I view them as part of my responsibility to my profession and discipline. Today I have been working on three entries for the forthcoming Dictionary of Early American Philosophy, edited by my friend and former colleague Steve Wilson. The work is tedious, and I am late in delivering in these articles, but it is good to refresh my thinking about early American Presbyterians such as Samuel Davies, Francis Alison, and Jonathan Dickinson. Steve, if you are reading this, the entries are almost on their way!
Save Your Local Economy Through the 3/50 Project
Jeremy Beer at Front Porch Republic has alerted us to the 3/50 Project. Check it out. This seems to be a practical way of sustaining local community in your towns and neighborhoods.
Do You Refuse to Touch the Faucet in a Public Restroom?
Then you must be a conservative, according to Nicholas Kristof.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Conservative Values for Progressive Ends
John Schmalzbauer is the Blanch Gorman Strong Chair in Protestant Studies at Missouri State University. (I don't know if John remembers, but I shared a great Italian dinner with him and a few others at a Lilly Fellows conference in Los Angeles back in 2000 or 2001). Anyhow, he has a great piece over at Immanent Frame entitled "Barack Obama's Book of Virtues." Schmalzbauer wonders whether Obama has read William Bennett's The Book of Virtues. He points out that six of the ten "virtues" listed in The Book of Virtues were mentioned in Obama's inaugural address. They are responsibility, hard work, courage, honesty, loyalty, and faith.
Perhaps E.J. Dionne was correct when he described Obama as employing conservative values in service of progressive ends.
Perhaps E.J. Dionne was correct when he described Obama as employing conservative values in service of progressive ends.
Christians in the American Empire
I just finished Vincent D. Rougeau's excellent Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship in the New World Order (Oxford, 2008). Rougeau is upset with the way in which Christianity has been distorted by the Religious Right. His main targets are Catholic neo-conservatives such as the late Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, Michael Novack, and the rest of the gang surrounding First Things. He writes as a faithful Catholic and offers a way of thinking about religion and politics from the perspective of Catholic social teaching. Rougeau, a law professor at Notre Dame, is not happy with the way in which members of the Republican Party claim the name of Christ but are driven by other gods: free-market capitalism, libertarianism, nativism, militarism, and moral absolutism. Christian neoconservatives, he argues, have been too selective in their embrace of Catholic social teaching. How else, he asks (for example), could they claim that the Iraq war was a "just" war despite the fact that the Vatican and the American Bishops opposed it?A few of Rougeau's more intriguing (at least to me) points:
1). Our free market system is obsessed with materialism and consumerism. The free market has "enhanced living standards for millions of people around the world," but it has also bred greed and self-indulgence. Human freedom in a democracy is only sustainable when people learn how to care for their neighbors. Such relationships are difficult when the value of the human person is dictated by the free market.
2). American libertarianism glorifies the individual and results in "radical dissociation of human beings from one another." Republicans tend to embrace this kind of libertarian individualism more than the Democrats, but Democrats have offered no "meaningful alternative" to it. Democrats have promoted individual autonomy as the "favored mode of liberating persons from discrimination and other negative forms of social control that are entrenched in 'traditional society.'" The "left" in America is much less communal and Catholic than the "left" in other nations. "Left libertarianism" allows people to basically do whatever they please, as long as they are not harming anyone.
3). The Vatican is worried about America's "exaggerated individualism, its hyperconsumer spirit, its relegation of religion to the private sphere, its Calvinist ethos." The Vatican thinks that the "American Creed" is "heresy," but most "churchgoing Americans" disagree. American flags, which have long been a staple in Protestant churches, are now beginning to appear in Catholic churches as well.
4). Catholic social teaching is compatible with secular liberalism, especially when it is employed in defense of human rights and dignity. Rougeau lists its core tenets as human dignity (he engages Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre here), the common good, solidarity (human social connections that reflect humanity's "intimate connections to God"), and subsidiarity (the idea that particular communities must be considered alongside the universal human community).
5). Rougeau asks: Are Christians to be one-issue voters, pulling the Republican lever on the basis of the party's facial commitment to a pro-life position on abortion, yet ignoring the party's inconsistent support of life issues more broadly defined? What about the party's promotion of an economic program for the nation and the world that is clearly rooted in a North American libertarianism that Catholic social teaching excludes? On the other hand, can Christians support a Democratic agenda that is marked by the exaltation of the atomized individual in the social order and seems hostile to the role that families, traditions, and communities of memory and meaning might play in the shaping of an individual conscience?
6). The fact that Americans refuse to take "collective ownership" of anything "beyond the scope of their individual responsibility" has meant that the nation "has failed to embrace a shared narrative about the past that privileges African-Americans unique role in the nation's story." This is ultimately a failure of "collective memory." Solidarity "demands that all Americans recognize the unique burdens that have been placed on African-Americans throughout U.S. history." Rougeau thus calls for an Affirmative Action rooted in this kind of Catholic solidarity.
7). Selfishness and the "materialistic vision" of society makes it difficult "for law and public policy to confront poverty in the United States." Again, the key is "solidarity"--"those who are more influential, because they have a greater share of goods and common services, should feel responsible for the weaker and be ready to share with them all they possess."
8). Catholic social teaching defends the right to emigrate "when one' s ability to sustain the basic conditions necessary for a life of dignity is threatened."
9). Christian belief in the solidarity of all human beings means that "national favoritism" is "difficult to justify on moral terms." The nation-state is not divinely ordained. Loyalty to the state should be based on whether or not the state is promoting human dignity and the common good.
For my readers familiar with Catholic social teaching, many of Rougeau's ideas will be familiar. It strikes me that Catholic social teaching, when applied consistently, leaves one with no real political home. Nevertheless, it seems to be a much deeper and theologically reflective view of Christianity and public life than either the Republican or Democratic parties, or many Protestant evangelicals in power, seem to be offering.
I highly recommend this book.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
The Conservative Lay of the Land
Over at the New Republic website, Damon Linker has a nice piece surveying the intellectual "right" in the age of Obama.
He divides today's conservative thinkers into four camps:
1). The National Review:
Today NRO's group blog The Corner is angry, sarcastic, cranky, irritable, grossly populist -- miles away from the serene high-mindedness cultivated by founder William F. Buckley, Jr. Contributors compete with one another over who can offer the most obsequious encomium for Rush Limbaugh and turn instantly against anyone who dares utter a criticism of him.
2). Commentary and The Weekly Standard
Whereas National Review promotes Reagan worship, the Weekly Standard and Commentary have chosen to rally around Dick Cheney, proud champion of "enhanced interrogation" and thoroughly unrepentant advocate of the invasion of Iraq. There's something admirable in this position, I suppose, since it can't possibly flow from a belief that an embrace of the wildly unpopular and increasingly grouchy Cheney will improve the political fortunes of the Republican Party, at least in the short term. No, William Kristol and John Podhoretz appear to be standing tall with Cheney out of principle.
3). The conservative columnists of The New York Times. (Who have been appearing on the same day lately).
On David Brooks: Brooks believes the federal government has an important role to play in fostering the institutions (families, neighborhoods, churches) on which a liberal society depends for its health and vitality. If this reminds you of the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign, it's because that's exactly what it sounds like.
On Ross Douthat: Douthat takes a similar approach and faces a similar challenge -- namely, how to differentiate his ideas from the ones that got the GOP into its current mess in the first place -- but he has the added burden of being a pro-lifer firmly committed to the agenda of the religious right.
4). Radical conservatives:
They are downright anti-modern in outlook. Delighted by Christopher Lasch's indictment of the free market, enamored of Wendell Berry's poetic agrarianism, romantically drawn toward "localism," titillated by Alasdair MacIntyre's praise of monasticism as an option for those seeking refuge from the moral impurities of modernity, open to radical environmentalism, hostile toward an idealistic foreign policy, disgusted at the overall tone of life in America since sexual revolution--these writers are interesting in the way all reactionaries are interesting: as a provocation to deep thinking, and as a warning about the (political and intellectual) dangers of indeterminate negation.
I don't like labels and it has been a while since I thought of myself as person of the "Right," but there is a lot I like about this fourth category of conservatives. Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry have profoundly influenced my thinking. I like MacIntyre, although I must confess that his prose is so dense that I have yet to make it all the way through After Virtue. As readers of this blog know, I am "drawn toward" localism, place, and environmentalism. I am not sure if this makes me a conservative--perhaps it does. But I do have much in common with these so-called radical conservatives and I think I would prefer them as conversation partners over the other forms of the "right" that Linker describes.
Whatever the case, I found this to be a very helpful introduction to conservative thinking in American political life.
He divides today's conservative thinkers into four camps:
1). The National Review:
Today NRO's group blog The Corner is angry, sarcastic, cranky, irritable, grossly populist -- miles away from the serene high-mindedness cultivated by founder William F. Buckley, Jr. Contributors compete with one another over who can offer the most obsequious encomium for Rush Limbaugh and turn instantly against anyone who dares utter a criticism of him.
2). Commentary and The Weekly Standard
Whereas National Review promotes Reagan worship, the Weekly Standard and Commentary have chosen to rally around Dick Cheney, proud champion of "enhanced interrogation" and thoroughly unrepentant advocate of the invasion of Iraq. There's something admirable in this position, I suppose, since it can't possibly flow from a belief that an embrace of the wildly unpopular and increasingly grouchy Cheney will improve the political fortunes of the Republican Party, at least in the short term. No, William Kristol and John Podhoretz appear to be standing tall with Cheney out of principle.
3). The conservative columnists of The New York Times. (Who have been appearing on the same day lately).
On David Brooks: Brooks believes the federal government has an important role to play in fostering the institutions (families, neighborhoods, churches) on which a liberal society depends for its health and vitality. If this reminds you of the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign, it's because that's exactly what it sounds like.
On Ross Douthat: Douthat takes a similar approach and faces a similar challenge -- namely, how to differentiate his ideas from the ones that got the GOP into its current mess in the first place -- but he has the added burden of being a pro-lifer firmly committed to the agenda of the religious right.
4). Radical conservatives:
They are downright anti-modern in outlook. Delighted by Christopher Lasch's indictment of the free market, enamored of Wendell Berry's poetic agrarianism, romantically drawn toward "localism," titillated by Alasdair MacIntyre's praise of monasticism as an option for those seeking refuge from the moral impurities of modernity, open to radical environmentalism, hostile toward an idealistic foreign policy, disgusted at the overall tone of life in America since sexual revolution--these writers are interesting in the way all reactionaries are interesting: as a provocation to deep thinking, and as a warning about the (political and intellectual) dangers of indeterminate negation.
I don't like labels and it has been a while since I thought of myself as person of the "Right," but there is a lot I like about this fourth category of conservatives. Christopher Lasch and Wendell Berry have profoundly influenced my thinking. I like MacIntyre, although I must confess that his prose is so dense that I have yet to make it all the way through After Virtue. As readers of this blog know, I am "drawn toward" localism, place, and environmentalism. I am not sure if this makes me a conservative--perhaps it does. But I do have much in common with these so-called radical conservatives and I think I would prefer them as conversation partners over the other forms of the "right" that Linker describes.
Whatever the case, I found this to be a very helpful introduction to conservative thinking in American political life.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Sunday Night Odds and Ends
A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:
How senior historians became historians
Lane Wallace defends the liberal arts.
David Brooks reviews Simon Schama's The American Future.
Jeremy Lott reviews Allen Guelzo's Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction
Mark Bauerlein remembers Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
Should Obama place a wreath on the Arlington Confederate Monument?
Leon Wieseltier on perfectionism.
Is the bad economy making us more conservative? John Judis thinks so.
An argument against celebrity commencement addresses.
Baseball slang.
Garry Wills reviews Henry Louis Gates's Lincoln on Race and Slavery.
How senior historians became historians
Lane Wallace defends the liberal arts.
David Brooks reviews Simon Schama's The American Future.
Jeremy Lott reviews Allen Guelzo's Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction
Mark Bauerlein remembers Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
Should Obama place a wreath on the Arlington Confederate Monument?
Leon Wieseltier on perfectionism.
Is the bad economy making us more conservative? John Judis thinks so.
An argument against celebrity commencement addresses.
Baseball slang.
Garry Wills reviews Henry Louis Gates's Lincoln on Race and Slavery.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
A Step Backward at Liberty University
As readers of this blog know, I spent a few days last month speaking at a conference on Christianity and American history at Liberty University. At that time I wrote:
For all of the heat that Liberty and its founder Jerry Falwell have taken in the mainstream press, I was actually quite impressed with both the campus, the students I encountered, and the members of the history department.
I stand by this statement. I remain impressed with Liberty's campus and the members of the history department who I met that weekend. It is easy to criticize Liberty and I do not want to "pile on."
I am NOT, however, impressed by the news that Liberty has banned its College Democrats Club. You can get the details of this decision either in the link above or in this news story about Governor Timothy Kaine's statement urging Liberty to restore the club to official status. I also noticed that the LU College Democrats website is "no longer available."
What does this mean for Liberty University? The late Jerry Falwell always wanted Liberty to be able to compete nationally--in academics and sports--as a sort of Protestant fundamentalist version of Notre Dame. But it seems to me that by banning any form of political diversity on campus Liberty ceases being a a university--a place of intellectual inquiry where ideological freedom is celebrated.
Granted, Liberty has the right to define itself as a "Christian university." I teach at a Christian college that defines itself by a general commitment to an ecumenical Christian faith defined by the Apostles Creed. (This, I should add, makes Messiah College a much more tolerant, diverse, and hospitable place than Liberty). So I understand, and am sympathetic to, Liberty's decision to self-consciously define itself as a Christian school.
Liberty, of course, even has the right to define itself as a politically conservative Christian university. But this becomes a bit more problematic from the perspective of its identity as an institution of higher learning. Good Christians can disagree on politics and the means by which Christianity is applied to political and social life. The decision to ban Democrats from campus leads me to believe that Liberty is little more than a place of political indoctrination--a place that is unwilling to entertain any dissent or conversation with people who differ from the political views of the administration. What does the administration of Liberty University fear? Why can't a Christian college or university be a place where students can engage in the marketplace of ideas? This, after all, is what education is all about. A Christian college or university should be a place where students can explore various viewpoints--on society, government, politics--in a safe environment that affirms their Christian convictions.
When I was at Liberty last month I also learned that the university does not have a system of tenure in place. Faculty, in other words, have no security. This leads me to wonder--are there any "in the closet" Democrats on the faculty? If so, what will happen to them if they are exposed?
For all of the heat that Liberty and its founder Jerry Falwell have taken in the mainstream press, I was actually quite impressed with both the campus, the students I encountered, and the members of the history department.
I stand by this statement. I remain impressed with Liberty's campus and the members of the history department who I met that weekend. It is easy to criticize Liberty and I do not want to "pile on."
I am NOT, however, impressed by the news that Liberty has banned its College Democrats Club. You can get the details of this decision either in the link above or in this news story about Governor Timothy Kaine's statement urging Liberty to restore the club to official status. I also noticed that the LU College Democrats website is "no longer available."
What does this mean for Liberty University? The late Jerry Falwell always wanted Liberty to be able to compete nationally--in academics and sports--as a sort of Protestant fundamentalist version of Notre Dame. But it seems to me that by banning any form of political diversity on campus Liberty ceases being a a university--a place of intellectual inquiry where ideological freedom is celebrated.
Granted, Liberty has the right to define itself as a "Christian university." I teach at a Christian college that defines itself by a general commitment to an ecumenical Christian faith defined by the Apostles Creed. (This, I should add, makes Messiah College a much more tolerant, diverse, and hospitable place than Liberty). So I understand, and am sympathetic to, Liberty's decision to self-consciously define itself as a Christian school.
Liberty, of course, even has the right to define itself as a politically conservative Christian university. But this becomes a bit more problematic from the perspective of its identity as an institution of higher learning. Good Christians can disagree on politics and the means by which Christianity is applied to political and social life. The decision to ban Democrats from campus leads me to believe that Liberty is little more than a place of political indoctrination--a place that is unwilling to entertain any dissent or conversation with people who differ from the political views of the administration. What does the administration of Liberty University fear? Why can't a Christian college or university be a place where students can engage in the marketplace of ideas? This, after all, is what education is all about. A Christian college or university should be a place where students can explore various viewpoints--on society, government, politics--in a safe environment that affirms their Christian convictions.
When I was at Liberty last month I also learned that the university does not have a system of tenure in place. Faculty, in other words, have no security. This leads me to wonder--are there any "in the closet" Democrats on the faculty? If so, what will happen to them if they are exposed?
The Rural Enlightenment Today
It was about ten years ago when I first talked publicly about what I have called the "rural Enlightenment." I was presenting a paper on the subject at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn when a graduate student remarked how there were a large number of early American history job openings that year located in rural or remote colleges and universities. With the potential of so many intellectuals moving to locations in "fly over country," this Ivy League Ph.D candidate seemed to find the concept of "rural Enlightenment" a helpful way to think about his future employment.
I was also on the market that year and, fortunately, had several job offers to choose from. Some of the offers were quite good--at least by the standards of the academic guild. In the end, I chose Messiah College. I have yet to regret the choice and I still cannot imagine leading an academic life anywhere else.
I think Thomas Hart Benton, a.k.a. William Pannapacker, understands what I mean by the "rural Enlightenment." I think he also may understand why I teach at Messiah. I have been reading Benton's Chronicle of Higher Education columns for several years now and, though we have never met, I find him a kindred spirit. The other day a fellow blogger called my attention to Benton's recent piece, "Growing Where You Are." As I read this essay, I really thought that Benton was describing my life and my approach to the academic vocation.
For example, Benton writes:
Of course, academics are not alone in that experience; the push-pull of social and economic change is a longstanding condition of modern life. Like almost everyone, we are torn between our desire for opportunity and the arguably natural human impulse to be connected deeply to places and people.
This, of course, is the thesis of The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
Benton again:
Many of us in academe live without the basic anchors of existence that have reassured the vast majority of human beings for millennia. How could we not find ourselves, at least for a time, living in a state of emotional and spiritual brokenness, in the aftermath of repeated dislocations?
Benton offers a powerful, but very countercultural, way of thinking about an academic life. Since I have been at Messiah College I have had a few chances to leave for "bigger" or "better" opportunities. But I have always tried to weigh such opportunities against the things that would be lost by leaving the place that is slowly becoming my new "home," and the only "home" that my children know. I have come to conclude, as a friend of mine once told me, that the burden of proof should be on "leaving" rather than "staying." My two daughters do not and will not wear New Jersey working class roots as badges of honor. They are the children of a middle-class college professor. Their home is south-central Pennsylvania.
Thanks again, Thomas Hart Benton!
I was also on the market that year and, fortunately, had several job offers to choose from. Some of the offers were quite good--at least by the standards of the academic guild. In the end, I chose Messiah College. I have yet to regret the choice and I still cannot imagine leading an academic life anywhere else.
I think Thomas Hart Benton, a.k.a. William Pannapacker, understands what I mean by the "rural Enlightenment." I think he also may understand why I teach at Messiah. I have been reading Benton's Chronicle of Higher Education columns for several years now and, though we have never met, I find him a kindred spirit. The other day a fellow blogger called my attention to Benton's recent piece, "Growing Where You Are." As I read this essay, I really thought that Benton was describing my life and my approach to the academic vocation.
For example, Benton writes:
Of course, academics are not alone in that experience; the push-pull of social and economic change is a longstanding condition of modern life. Like almost everyone, we are torn between our desire for opportunity and the arguably natural human impulse to be connected deeply to places and people.
This, of course, is the thesis of The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
Benton again:
Many of us in academe live without the basic anchors of existence that have reassured the vast majority of human beings for millennia. How could we not find ourselves, at least for a time, living in a state of emotional and spiritual brokenness, in the aftermath of repeated dislocations?
Benton offers a powerful, but very countercultural, way of thinking about an academic life. Since I have been at Messiah College I have had a few chances to leave for "bigger" or "better" opportunities. But I have always tried to weigh such opportunities against the things that would be lost by leaving the place that is slowly becoming my new "home," and the only "home" that my children know. I have come to conclude, as a friend of mine once told me, that the burden of proof should be on "leaving" rather than "staying." My two daughters do not and will not wear New Jersey working class roots as badges of honor. They are the children of a middle-class college professor. Their home is south-central Pennsylvania.
Thanks again, Thomas Hart Benton!
Friday, May 22, 2009
Colonial Williamsburg
Tonight I did a book signing and public lecture at the DeWitt-Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg. (Visitors enter the Museum through the 1773 Public Hospital pictured to the left). The Virginia diary of Philip Vickers Fithian is a staple in the historical interpretation efforts at Williamsburg. In fact, I learned tonight that it is required reading for the training of re-enactors and other Williamsburg staff who work as historical interpreters. Many of those attending the lecture had already read The Way of Improvement Leads Home and were ready to discuss it with me in the Q&A session. I entertained questions about Fithian's "net worth" in plantation society, his reading of the eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy, and the published edition of his works. These folks knew their stuff.Before the lecture I met Jeffry Morrison, a political philosopher who has written excellent studies on JohnWitherspoon and George Washington. We had a nice dinner together in downtown Williamsburg and also hit the Williamsburg Booksellers where we both admired our books on the shelf. (Bob Hill, the bookstore manager, asked me to sign the copies that he had in stock).
Thanks to Trish Balderson for inviting me to Williamsburg for this lecture.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Westmoreland County Museum and Library
I was in Montross, VA tonight at the Westmoreland County Museum and Library. It was a beautiful day on Virginia's Northern Neck. I was in Montross as a speaker in the museum's "Virginia Authors" lecture series. (Even though I am not a "Virginia author," Philip Vickers Fithian certainly was!). The crowd was small, lively, and very knowledgeable about Fithian's Virginia diary. Thanks to Alice French for inviting me and hosting me during my visit.I am off to Williamsburg tomorrow!
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Wednesday, May 20, 2009
A Prayer Before Study
Ineffable Creator . . .
You are proclaimed
the true font of light and wisdom,
and the primal origin
raised high beyond all things.
Pour forth a ray of Your brightness
Pour forth a ray of Your brightness
into the darkened places of my mind;
disperse from my soulthe two fold darkness
into which I was born: sin and ignorance.
You make eloquent the tongues of infants.
You make eloquent the tongues of infants.
Refine my speech
and pour forth upon my lips
the goodness of Your blessing.
Grant to me keenness of mind,
Grant to me keenness of mind,
capacity to remember,
skill in learning,
subtlety to interpret,
and eloquence in speech.
May You guide the beginning of my work,
direct its progress,
and bring it to completion.
You Who are true God and true Man,
Who live and reign, world without end.
Amen.
Amen.
St. Thomas Aquinas
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
David Herbert Donald: R.I.P.
We lost a giant in Civil War studies this past weekend. David Herbert Donald, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote some of the most accessible scholarship on Abraham Lincoln I have ever read.
Monday, May 18, 2009
End of the Year Festivities
Here are a few pics from the end of the year history department festivities at Messiah College:
The Phi Alpha Theta class of 2009
Jennifer Adams: Winner of the Clio Award for most outstanding history student.
Senior Brunch
Graduation 2009
The Phi Alpha Theta class of 2009
Jennifer Adams: Winner of the Clio Award for most outstanding history student.
Senior Brunch
Graduation 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Sunday Night Odds and Ends
A few things on the web that caught my eye this week:
What makes us happy?
The case for amnesty.
Obama: The "Great Deflector."
Kathryn Lofton reviews Richard Callahan's Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields
London Times review of God is Back.
Bruce Kuklick reviews David O. Stewart's Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy
Obama increases funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
May 2009 Perspectives on history and the new media.
Interview with Ronald White on the faith of Abraham Lincoln.
Stephen Miller on the "end" of evangelicalism.
Funniest baby laugh I have ever seen.
Peter Laarman: Gordon Gekko Gets God
David Gibson asks: Who is a real Catholic?
What makes us happy?
The case for amnesty.
Obama: The "Great Deflector."
Kathryn Lofton reviews Richard Callahan's Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields
London Times review of God is Back.
Bruce Kuklick reviews David O. Stewart's Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy
Obama increases funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.
May 2009 Perspectives on history and the new media.
Interview with Ronald White on the faith of Abraham Lincoln.
Stephen Miller on the "end" of evangelicalism.
Funniest baby laugh I have ever seen.
Peter Laarman: Gordon Gekko Gets God
David Gibson asks: Who is a real Catholic?
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Choosing Home
Readers of this blog know that I have a certain agrarian streak in me. Perhaps it is because I have read too much Wendell Berry. Maybe it has something to do with the working class Catholic culture in which I was raised. It may have to do with the fact that I was raised on a small mountainside in northern New Jersey--a place filled with fields, woods, and trails that has now been largely overrun by a housing development of McMansions.
Many professional academics are worried about the term "agrarianism." And their concerns are often well-founded. The term, and the philosophy that informs it, is too often associated with the antebellum South, racism, and some of the worst forms of tribalism. I support localism, but I reject some of its darker tendencies. As Martin Luther King Jr. argued in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," local traditions must always be challenged when they promote injustice.
Yet, with these very important caveats in mind, I still believe human beings flourish best when they are grounded, rooted, connected to a "place," and have a sense of "home. I actually believe some of the things I wrote about in The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I believe that cosmopolitan dreams and attempts at self-improvement can be cultivated--like Philip Vickers Fithian's "rural Enligthenment-- in the context of a particular place or locale.
Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger have recently argued that American culture today prepares us for homelessness. College students do not envision their undergraduate experience as a means of gaining wisdom and skills that they can bring home to improve their local communities. They are instead trained for mobility and leaving home. Actually, few have lived in one place long enough to even have a "home."
For the last decade or so I have been challenging students--largely outside of the classroom--to think about the ways that they can use their education to improve their local communities. It is not surprising that such exhortations rarely find traction in an age of globalization, relentless ambition, and world citizenship. But every now and then they do.
Today I attended a wedding of a former student. Jordan (not his real name) graduated from Messiah College a few years ago. After graduation Jordan went to a top tier law school and is now one of that school's highly ranked students. Jordan grew up on a farm in a small central Pennsylvania community. His childhood and teenage years were shaped by the Anabaptist and agricultural world of his parents and grandparents. What I admire most about Jordan is his "cosmopolitan rootedness." He has a bright future ahead of him as a lawyer, but he has committed himself to moving back home and using his expertise to contribute to the local community that helped to raise him. He has even talked about being close to his family so that he can help his father with farm duties.
A country lawyer--now there is a vocation!
Jordan, if you are reading this, thanks for inviting me to your wedding today and giving me a glimpse of the wonderful community that you call home. It was a privilege.
Many professional academics are worried about the term "agrarianism." And their concerns are often well-founded. The term, and the philosophy that informs it, is too often associated with the antebellum South, racism, and some of the worst forms of tribalism. I support localism, but I reject some of its darker tendencies. As Martin Luther King Jr. argued in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," local traditions must always be challenged when they promote injustice.
Yet, with these very important caveats in mind, I still believe human beings flourish best when they are grounded, rooted, connected to a "place," and have a sense of "home. I actually believe some of the things I wrote about in The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I believe that cosmopolitan dreams and attempts at self-improvement can be cultivated--like Philip Vickers Fithian's "rural Enligthenment-- in the context of a particular place or locale.
Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger have recently argued that American culture today prepares us for homelessness. College students do not envision their undergraduate experience as a means of gaining wisdom and skills that they can bring home to improve their local communities. They are instead trained for mobility and leaving home. Actually, few have lived in one place long enough to even have a "home."
For the last decade or so I have been challenging students--largely outside of the classroom--to think about the ways that they can use their education to improve their local communities. It is not surprising that such exhortations rarely find traction in an age of globalization, relentless ambition, and world citizenship. But every now and then they do.
Today I attended a wedding of a former student. Jordan (not his real name) graduated from Messiah College a few years ago. After graduation Jordan went to a top tier law school and is now one of that school's highly ranked students. Jordan grew up on a farm in a small central Pennsylvania community. His childhood and teenage years were shaped by the Anabaptist and agricultural world of his parents and grandparents. What I admire most about Jordan is his "cosmopolitan rootedness." He has a bright future ahead of him as a lawyer, but he has committed himself to moving back home and using his expertise to contribute to the local community that helped to raise him. He has even talked about being close to his family so that he can help his father with farm duties.
A country lawyer--now there is a vocation!
Jordan, if you are reading this, thanks for inviting me to your wedding today and giving me a glimpse of the wonderful community that you call home. It was a privilege.
Catholic Culture
I am no longer Catholic, but I was raised in what Patrick Deneen calls "Catholic culture." Though my family converted to Protestantism when I was in high school, I was deeply shaped by Catholic culture. At his blog, "What I Saw in America," Deneen offers a powerful description of this culture. Using the Obama- Notre Dame controversy as a springboard, he writes:
One of the most ardent and conservative Catholics that I know lives in an ocean-side house in Malibu, California. His opposition to abortion is fierce; however, in no way could it be suggested that he lives in a Catholic culture. He is a Catholic living in a culture of materialism, individualism, hyper-mobility and hedonism. While perhaps more extreme than the case for most of us, nevertheless his situation is closer to most American Catholics today than not. American Catholics have largely assimilated into mainstream American society, and come to seek success and approval from that culture on its terms.
And...
Catholicism is a religion of memory and tradition: at every mass we recall the saints and martyrs, the founders of the Church and its greatest heroes - inculcating as if by second nature a familiarity with past generations and our expectation for ones that follow. As Chesterton wrote, we must inhabit a democracy of "the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born." A Catholic culture is replete with stories passed down from the past and conveyed to the future - after all, we have all the best storytellers, from Dante and Shakespeare (yes, he was) to Percy and O'Connor - and, of course, Chesterton. All this is to say, the dead and the not-yet-born live among us - they are not forgotten or ignored, but among us as sure as the people who share our lives in neighborhoods and communities. This was precisely the point of Jody's fine essay on why we need to live near cemeteries. Most of us, however, are in living arrangements where the dead are kept distant and apart from us - just as we separate all of the various aspects of life, disaggregating shopping from work from recreation from home. And even in the home, we are likely to be texting or emailing Facebook "friends" or hanging on the edge of our seats to see who gets kicked off American Idol. Much of the time, we are not even home when we are home.
It has now been several years since I read Richard Rodriguez's wonderful Hunger of Memory. Rodriguez also describes this Catholic culture, but he does so to show how he moved beyond it, into a world of American Protestant individualism. (The torment he felt as he lived between these two worlds is not unlike what I have described for the eighteenth-century experience of Philip Vickers Fithian in The Way of Improvement Leads Home).
As Deneen's essay makes clear, "Catholic culture" no longer exists in America. It has been trumped by the powerful forces of modernity with all its accompanying individualism, rootlessness, and economic materialism. There is much of me that thinks this is a shame.
One of the most ardent and conservative Catholics that I know lives in an ocean-side house in Malibu, California. His opposition to abortion is fierce; however, in no way could it be suggested that he lives in a Catholic culture. He is a Catholic living in a culture of materialism, individualism, hyper-mobility and hedonism. While perhaps more extreme than the case for most of us, nevertheless his situation is closer to most American Catholics today than not. American Catholics have largely assimilated into mainstream American society, and come to seek success and approval from that culture on its terms.
And...
Catholicism is a religion of memory and tradition: at every mass we recall the saints and martyrs, the founders of the Church and its greatest heroes - inculcating as if by second nature a familiarity with past generations and our expectation for ones that follow. As Chesterton wrote, we must inhabit a democracy of "the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born." A Catholic culture is replete with stories passed down from the past and conveyed to the future - after all, we have all the best storytellers, from Dante and Shakespeare (yes, he was) to Percy and O'Connor - and, of course, Chesterton. All this is to say, the dead and the not-yet-born live among us - they are not forgotten or ignored, but among us as sure as the people who share our lives in neighborhoods and communities. This was precisely the point of Jody's fine essay on why we need to live near cemeteries. Most of us, however, are in living arrangements where the dead are kept distant and apart from us - just as we separate all of the various aspects of life, disaggregating shopping from work from recreation from home. And even in the home, we are likely to be texting or emailing Facebook "friends" or hanging on the edge of our seats to see who gets kicked off American Idol. Much of the time, we are not even home when we are home.
It has now been several years since I read Richard Rodriguez's wonderful Hunger of Memory. Rodriguez also describes this Catholic culture, but he does so to show how he moved beyond it, into a world of American Protestant individualism. (The torment he felt as he lived between these two worlds is not unlike what I have described for the eighteenth-century experience of Philip Vickers Fithian in The Way of Improvement Leads Home).
As Deneen's essay makes clear, "Catholic culture" no longer exists in America. It has been trumped by the powerful forces of modernity with all its accompanying individualism, rootlessness, and economic materialism. There is much of me that thinks this is a shame.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Graduation Weekend
I am occasionally asked why I teach at a small liberal arts college like Messiah College. While I remain loyal to Messiah and its mission, when May rolls around I am usually exhausted by the endless meetings I attended, classes I taught, and department responsibilities I had to fulfill. I have often wondered if the grass might be a little bit greener somewhere else.But whatever doubts I have about fulfilling my vocation at a place like Messiah disappear during graduation weekend. Tonight I spent the evening with our graduating history majors and their families at the Messiah College baccalaureate reception. It was a time of goodbyes, reflections on four years of academic life together, and thoughts on what the future might hold.
In a small department like the one in which I work, it is not unusual for a student, over the course of his or her college career, to take three or four courses with a given professor. We build relationships with these students--as instructors, advisors, and friends. (In fact, after graduation tomorrow morning I am headed to the wedding of a former student). At Messiah we have managed to balance the academic rigor of a history department with a caring and supportive community for our students.
So when I spend time with our graduates and their families every May it reminds me of one of the reasons I do what I do.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The Hermitage
I spent the evening tonight with a great group of history buffs at The Hermitage in HoHoKus, New Jersey. I talked a bit about Philip Vickers Fithian and answered some very insightful questions. Thanks to Rich Sigritta for the invitation.My road trip is just about over. I am heading home tomorrow for Messiah College's graduation festivities.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
A Long Day
My day began at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott. After a bowl of oatmeal I met up with my friend Anthony Napoli of the Gilder-Lehrman Institute and we walked a few blocks to our meeting at the Brooklyn Historical Society . I then led a seminar on the U.S. Constitution for twenty teachers from the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.
After a few technical difficulties with the LCD projector and laptop, I gave two 90 minute lectures on the Constitution. The first lecture focused on the 1780s and the political, economic, and moral crises that led to the gathering of the Constitutional Convention. I still find Gordon Wood's analysis in The Creation of the American Republic to be the most convincing. As a result, the lecture focused a lot on republicanism, political virtue, and the framers's fear of democracy. The second lecture explored Federalist 10, the "political psychology" (to borrow a term from Daniel Walker Howe) of the Federalists, and the ways in which such psychology was manifested in the Constitution. I ended this lecture with a discussion of whether or not we can call the Constitution a counter-revolutionary document, especially as it relates to the more democratic spirit of the Declaration of Independence. All of the teachers read Woody Holton's excellent Unruly Americans and we had some fruitful discussion related to Holton's interpretation of the Constitution.
I left Brooklyn around noon and after a brief stint at my parents' house in New Jersey I headed to Rutgers-New Brunswick to give a lecture to a gathering of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA). I have been following the activities of the NJSAA for several years, but it was finally nice to put some names with faces. It was a star-studded crowd of New Jersey history scholars, including Marc Mappen of the New Jersey Historical Commission, Maxine Lurie from Seton Hall, and Peter Wacker from Rutgers. I was also thrilled that Alan Lucibello, my high school Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher, introduced me and my talk. I spoke for about forty-five minutes on Philip Vickers Fithian's attempts to reconcile his Enlightenment ambition for self-improvement with his deep and abiding love for his Cohansey River home. Thanks to Bonita Craft Grant of Rutgers Special Collections for hosting me.
I got to Mechanicsburg around 9:40, just in time to unpack and see Danny Gokey get voted off of American Idol!
After a few technical difficulties with the LCD projector and laptop, I gave two 90 minute lectures on the Constitution. The first lecture focused on the 1780s and the political, economic, and moral crises that led to the gathering of the Constitutional Convention. I still find Gordon Wood's analysis in The Creation of the American Republic to be the most convincing. As a result, the lecture focused a lot on republicanism, political virtue, and the framers's fear of democracy. The second lecture explored Federalist 10, the "political psychology" (to borrow a term from Daniel Walker Howe) of the Federalists, and the ways in which such psychology was manifested in the Constitution. I ended this lecture with a discussion of whether or not we can call the Constitution a counter-revolutionary document, especially as it relates to the more democratic spirit of the Declaration of Independence. All of the teachers read Woody Holton's excellent Unruly Americans and we had some fruitful discussion related to Holton's interpretation of the Constitution.
I left Brooklyn around noon and after a brief stint at my parents' house in New Jersey I headed to Rutgers-New Brunswick to give a lecture to a gathering of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA). I have been following the activities of the NJSAA for several years, but it was finally nice to put some names with faces. It was a star-studded crowd of New Jersey history scholars, including Marc Mappen of the New Jersey Historical Commission, Maxine Lurie from Seton Hall, and Peter Wacker from Rutgers. I was also thrilled that Alan Lucibello, my high school Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher, introduced me and my talk. I spoke for about forty-five minutes on Philip Vickers Fithian's attempts to reconcile his Enlightenment ambition for self-improvement with his deep and abiding love for his Cohansey River home. Thanks to Bonita Craft Grant of Rutgers Special Collections for hosting me.
I got to Mechanicsburg around 9:40, just in time to unpack and see Danny Gokey get voted off of American Idol!
Applying to Graduate School?
If so, you should read this essay in today's Inside Higher Education. Several major research universities are reducing the size of their Ph.D programs by limiting the number of students they admit. The Humanities will be the hardest hit.
It looks as if it will be more difficult for recent college graduates to avoid the harsh realities of the economy by hiding out for several years in graduate school.
It looks as if it will be more difficult for recent college graduates to avoid the harsh realities of the economy by hiding out for several years in graduate school.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Downsizing the Library
Don Yerxa's great piece on downsizing his library is up today at the Books and Culture website. He writes:
As I contemplated retirement—at least from teaching — I began to downsize my library. How many of us, I wonder, have books at home we'd be embarrassed to place on our office shelves? Would academic colleagues think less of me if they knew I read Vince Flynn and David Baldacci novels on the subway? Or if they knew I have a good number of "What If?"-type alternative historical explorations at home? How lowbrow! But I digress.
Over the years I have culled a fair number of superfluous and unwanted books from my shelves. These haven't been terribly painful exercises. The minor losses were more than compensated for by the prospect of new, more exciting replacement volumes. This time, however, it felt very different. I wasn't just pruning and thinning here and there. This was "biblio clear-cutting." I committed to keep only those books that I truly cherish, really want to read, or have some prospect of using in my post-teaching career.This hurt. I said good-bye to hundreds of books. But I also found that radical downsizing of a personal library can be instructive...
I am not nearing retirement, but the thought of downsizing my library crossed my mind this weekend when my parents came to visit from New Jersey. They told us that they were coming to watch my older daughter's piano recital and my younger daughter's soccer game, but they also brought bags and bags of my old books with them. These are books that I have had sitting on the bookshelves at their home--my childhood home--for at least two decades. Many of them are college textbooks, theological and church history texts from my divinity school days, and other random books about sports, history, and religious studies.
Some of these books include:
Terry Pluto: Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association
Philp Schaff, History of the ChristianChurch (5 vols.)
Paul S. Karleen, The Handbook to Bible Study
Barry Williams, Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg
William Cook, The Medieval World View
Earle Cairns, God and Man in Time: A Christian Approach to Historiography
Mary Stewart, Thunder on the Right
John Feinstien, A Season on the Brink
Good News for Modern Man
Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth
Dave Anderson, Great Quarterbacks of the NFL
Carl Zuckmayer, A Late Friendship, The Letters of Karl Barth and Carl Zuckmayer
Warren Wiersbe, Be Dynamic
William Shedd, Dogmatic Theology
Os Guiness, The Dust of Death
Owen Chadwick, The Reformation
Walter Laquer, Europe Since Hitler
Gary Carter, A Dream Season ('86 Mets)
I know what your thinking: This is an unusual mix of books. But what do I do with them? Do I sell them on-line? Do I integrate them into my existing library? Do I build more bookshelves? Do I keep them as a means of reflecting on the intellectual journey of my life?
Any advice would be appreciated!
As I contemplated retirement—at least from teaching — I began to downsize my library. How many of us, I wonder, have books at home we'd be embarrassed to place on our office shelves? Would academic colleagues think less of me if they knew I read Vince Flynn and David Baldacci novels on the subway? Or if they knew I have a good number of "What If?"-type alternative historical explorations at home? How lowbrow! But I digress.
Over the years I have culled a fair number of superfluous and unwanted books from my shelves. These haven't been terribly painful exercises. The minor losses were more than compensated for by the prospect of new, more exciting replacement volumes. This time, however, it felt very different. I wasn't just pruning and thinning here and there. This was "biblio clear-cutting." I committed to keep only those books that I truly cherish, really want to read, or have some prospect of using in my post-teaching career.This hurt. I said good-bye to hundreds of books. But I also found that radical downsizing of a personal library can be instructive...
I am not nearing retirement, but the thought of downsizing my library crossed my mind this weekend when my parents came to visit from New Jersey. They told us that they were coming to watch my older daughter's piano recital and my younger daughter's soccer game, but they also brought bags and bags of my old books with them. These are books that I have had sitting on the bookshelves at their home--my childhood home--for at least two decades. Many of them are college textbooks, theological and church history texts from my divinity school days, and other random books about sports, history, and religious studies.
Some of these books include:
Terry Pluto: Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association
Philp Schaff, History of the ChristianChurch (5 vols.)
Paul S. Karleen, The Handbook to Bible Study
Barry Williams, Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg
William Cook, The Medieval World View
Earle Cairns, God and Man in Time: A Christian Approach to Historiography
Mary Stewart, Thunder on the Right
John Feinstien, A Season on the Brink
Good News for Modern Man
Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth
Dave Anderson, Great Quarterbacks of the NFL
Carl Zuckmayer, A Late Friendship, The Letters of Karl Barth and Carl Zuckmayer
Warren Wiersbe, Be Dynamic
William Shedd, Dogmatic Theology
Os Guiness, The Dust of Death
Owen Chadwick, The Reformation
Walter Laquer, Europe Since Hitler
Gary Carter, A Dream Season ('86 Mets)
I know what your thinking: This is an unusual mix of books. But what do I do with them? Do I sell them on-line? Do I integrate them into my existing library? Do I build more bookshelves? Do I keep them as a means of reflecting on the intellectual journey of my life?
Any advice would be appreciated!
Monday, May 11, 2009
On The Road
After proctoring an exam on Tuesday morning and attending a few meetings in the early afternoon, I am off on a small road trip. On Wednesday morning I will be at the Brooklyn Historical Society conducting a Gilder-Lehrman Institute seminar on the Constitution for teachers from the Diocese of Brooklyn and the Archdiocese of New York. Later in the day I head to Rutgers University to do a lecture on The Way of Improvement Leads Home for the members of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance.On Thursday I am back in Grantham, PA for the Messiah College History Department's brunch for graduating seniors. Then it is back to New Jersey, where I will be doing a public lecture at The Hermitage in Ho Ho Kus on Thursday night.
Finally, it is back to Grantham for Messiah's baccalaureate and graduation ceremonies this weekend.
And my grading it still not done...
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Sunday Night Odds and Ends
A few things on-line that caught my attention this week:
Is baseball boring?
A religious labor movement?
E.J. Dionne on a new development in the Obama-Notre Dame controversy.
New Republic slideshow of athletes in politics.
Robert Putnam's forthcoming book: Religious people are nicer.
John Turner reviews Jon Shields's The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.
A short history of Mother's Day.
Mapping the "Seven Deadly Sins."
Gerardo Marti on evangelical critiquing themselves.
Peter Steinfels on Catholics and abortion.
Does a functioning society require religious faith?
Is baseball boring?
A religious labor movement?
E.J. Dionne on a new development in the Obama-Notre Dame controversy.
New Republic slideshow of athletes in politics.
Robert Putnam's forthcoming book: Religious people are nicer.
John Turner reviews Jon Shields's The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.
A short history of Mother's Day.
Mapping the "Seven Deadly Sins."
Gerardo Marti on evangelical critiquing themselves.
Peter Steinfels on Catholics and abortion.
Does a functioning society require religious faith?
Friday, May 8, 2009
Save the Wilderness from Wal-Mart!
Walmart is at it again. In addition to sending people random checks for $130, they want to build a "superstore" "on historically sensitive land directly across the road" from where the 1864 Civil War "Battle of the Wilderness" was fought. Historians and preservationists, including noted Princeton Civil War scholar James McPherson, are up in arms about this. Check out McPherson's op-ed in the May 3rd Washington Post. There is also a nice blog dealing with the issue here. Even Robert Duval is involved.It is bad enough in and of itself that another Wal-Mart must be built, but building it on or near a Civil War battle field is just not right.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Religion and the Constitution
Today was the last round of presentations in my Religion and the American Founding seminar. The presenters were Tommy DeShong and Kacie Morrell.
Tommy got things rolling with a presentation on the religious beliefs of the Anti-Federalists. He argued that many Anti-Federalists opposed the ratification of the Constitution because it did not make any explicit statement that it was creating a Christian nation. He suggested that today's defenders of Christian America may be better off making appeals to the Anti-Federalists rather than the supporters of the Constituion.
Kacie's paper was drawn from her ongoing interest in religious liberty. She traced America's longstanding tradition of liberty of conscience from Roger Williams and William Penn through James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the Constitution. She concluded her presentation by arguing convincingly that Jefferson's famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists (which includes the phrase "wall of separation between church and state") was meant to advocate the protection of religious conscience from the state and not the other way around.
I do not often get a chance to teach small seminars like this one, so it was a privilege to be able to work with these students on a topic that I have invested a lot of time thinking about. Moreover, the conversations we had this semester have helped me to formulate a lot of my thinking about the topic of my forthcoming book on Christian America. Thanks to Melinda, Tommy, Ali, Courtney, Marty, Thomas, Amanda, Kacie, Renae, Matt, and Dillon for a great semester!
Tommy got things rolling with a presentation on the religious beliefs of the Anti-Federalists. He argued that many Anti-Federalists opposed the ratification of the Constitution because it did not make any explicit statement that it was creating a Christian nation. He suggested that today's defenders of Christian America may be better off making appeals to the Anti-Federalists rather than the supporters of the Constituion.
Kacie's paper was drawn from her ongoing interest in religious liberty. She traced America's longstanding tradition of liberty of conscience from Roger Williams and William Penn through James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and the Constitution. She concluded her presentation by arguing convincingly that Jefferson's famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists (which includes the phrase "wall of separation between church and state") was meant to advocate the protection of religious conscience from the state and not the other way around.
I do not often get a chance to teach small seminars like this one, so it was a privilege to be able to work with these students on a topic that I have invested a lot of time thinking about. Moreover, the conversations we had this semester have helped me to formulate a lot of my thinking about the topic of my forthcoming book on Christian America. Thanks to Melinda, Tommy, Ali, Courtney, Marty, Thomas, Amanda, Kacie, Renae, Matt, and Dillon for a great semester!
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Eugene Genovese's Memoir of Marriage
Ralph Luker at Cliopatria calls our attention to a Books and Culture podcast in which John Wilson, editor of B&C, discusses Eugene Genovese's new book, Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage. Genovese's book reflects on his marriage to the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. This was a marriage between a working class Marxist scholar who is one of our leading historians of slavery and southern culture (Eugene) and a pioneer in the field of women's studies and a leading historian of the plantation south (Elizabeth). Elizabeth converted to Catholicism in 1995 and Eugene followed in 1996. (Check out Elizabeth's conversion narrative published in the April 2000 edition of First Things). In 2008 the Genoveses published their magnum opus together: Slavery in White and Black.Just the other day I was telling my Civil War course about Eugene Genovese's work, particularly his books on the southern agrarian tradition's critique of market capitalism.
I am looking forward to reading this book.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Brooks: Republicans are the Party of Untrammeled Freedom and Maximum Individual Choice
David Brooks is at it again. In today's column he takes the Republican Party to task from his perch as one of the New York Times's conservative columnists. And once again, he makes perfect sense.
The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.
The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.
Brooks's op-ed reminds me of the words of the late Christopher Lasch. (True and Only Heaven, p. 38-39):
The "traditional values" celebrated by Reagan--boosterism, rugged individualism, a willingness to resort to force (against weaker opponents) on the slightest provocation--had very little to do with tradition. They summed up the code of the cowboy, the man in flight from his ancestors, from his immediate family, and from everything that tied him down and limited his freedom of movement. Reagan played on the desire for order, continuity, responsibility, and discipline, but his program contained nothing that would satisfy that desire. On the contrary, his program aimed to promote economic growth and unregulated business enterprise, the very forces that have undermined tradition. A movement calling itself conservative might have been expected to associate itself with the demand for limits not only on economic growth but on the conquest of space, the technological conquest of the environment, and the ungodly ambition to acquire godlike powers over nature. Reaganites, however, condemned the demand for limits as another counsel of doom. "Free enterprisers," according to Burton Pines, an ideologue of the new right, "insist that the economy can indeed expand and as it does so, all society's members...can increase their wealth."
The party sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.
The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to be pursued in all circumstances.
Brooks's op-ed reminds me of the words of the late Christopher Lasch. (True and Only Heaven, p. 38-39):
The "traditional values" celebrated by Reagan--boosterism, rugged individualism, a willingness to resort to force (against weaker opponents) on the slightest provocation--had very little to do with tradition. They summed up the code of the cowboy, the man in flight from his ancestors, from his immediate family, and from everything that tied him down and limited his freedom of movement. Reagan played on the desire for order, continuity, responsibility, and discipline, but his program contained nothing that would satisfy that desire. On the contrary, his program aimed to promote economic growth and unregulated business enterprise, the very forces that have undermined tradition. A movement calling itself conservative might have been expected to associate itself with the demand for limits not only on economic growth but on the conquest of space, the technological conquest of the environment, and the ungodly ambition to acquire godlike powers over nature. Reaganites, however, condemned the demand for limits as another counsel of doom. "Free enterprisers," according to Burton Pines, an ideologue of the new right, "insist that the economy can indeed expand and as it does so, all society's members...can increase their wealth."
Monday, May 4, 2009
Religion and the American Revolution
Today was day three of student presentations in my "Religion and the American Founding" undergraduate seminar. Our presenters today were Thomas Williams, Courtney Weller, and Renae Paulson.Thomas got things rolling with a presentation on the uses of "Pope's Day in colonial New England. He did a great job of showing how the colonial version of "Guy Fawkes Day" played on the anti-Catholic fears of Puritans in Massachusetts.
Courtney gave a fascinating presentation on Peter Muhlenburg (pictured above), the patriotic son of American Lutheran pietist Henry Melchior Muhlenburg. Courtney showed how Muhlenburg, the "Fighting Parson," was one of the few Lutheran ministers to take a strong patriotic position. A Lutheran herself, Courtney was especially good at connecting Lutheran "2 Kingdoms" doctrine to Lutheran political activity (or lack thereof).
Finally, Renae explored some revolutionary war-era sermons. She showed how a belief in providence, millennialism, and virtue influenced the thought of New England ministers during the period. We had some fruitful discussion about the ways in which many New England ministers tried to cast the blame for the Revolution on the King's advisors, rather than on the George III himself.
Thursday's final round of papers will deal with religion and the Constitution. Stay tuned.
Song of the Day: The Happy Organ
Check out this 1959 classic from Dave "Baby" Cortez and Rinky Dink:
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Sunday Night Odds and Ends
A few things on-line that caught my eye this week:
Best places to eat at Messiah College's Philadelphia Campus.
Alan Wolfe on "campus inquisitions."
Alan Brinkley on Obama's First 100 Days.
Is Susan Boyle a political, moral, and theological symbol? Check out this top ten.
Kansas City's empty stadium.
The refugees of the conservation movement.
R. Howard Bloch defends the Humanities.
Andrew Bacevich on the American Century.
Twittering in church?
New Ben Franklin letters discovered in London.
W.E.B. DuBois papers going digital. Bald Blogger reports.
Top 10 Civil War blogs.
Best places to eat at Messiah College's Philadelphia Campus.
Alan Wolfe on "campus inquisitions."
Alan Brinkley on Obama's First 100 Days.
Is Susan Boyle a political, moral, and theological symbol? Check out this top ten.
Kansas City's empty stadium.
The refugees of the conservation movement.
R. Howard Bloch defends the Humanities.
Andrew Bacevich on the American Century.
Twittering in church?
New Ben Franklin letters discovered in London.
W.E.B. DuBois papers going digital. Bald Blogger reports.
Top 10 Civil War blogs.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
The Faith of the Founders
Yesterday was our second day of student presentations in my "Religion and the American Founding" seminar. The focus was the religious faith of three so-called "Founding Fathers." Our presenters were Dillon Keeks, Amanda Delessio, and Marty Zimmerman.
Dillon discussed the religious views of Thomas Jefferson. He concluded that Jefferson was a "full-blown Deist." Dillon described the way Jefferson was mesmerized, inspired, and sometimes tortured by traditional religion, but in the end he was ultimately influenced by the Enlightenment thinking of the era. He ended his presentation with a discussion of the so-called "Jefferson Bible."
Amanda focused her attention on Benjamin Franklin and specifically the 1790 exchange of letters between him and Yale president Ezra Stiles. In his response to a letter from Stiles, Franklin offered perhaps his most complete statement of his religious faith. He affirmed the existence of God, the need to love one's neighbors, and a belief in the afterlife. Amanda argued, quite convincingly I might add, that Franklin wrestled with religion his entire life, but in the end was probably a Deist with certain Christian tendencies.
Marty's paper was titled "Benjamin Rush: Evangelical in Word and Deed." He argued that Rush was an orthodox Christian in both words and actions. Marty broke down his religious thought into five categories: post-millennialism, Arminianism, a high regard for the Bible, universalism, and republicanism. Rush had a pretty traditional conversion experience and was a strong advocate of Christian republicanism through his support of voluntary societies. During the Q&A we debated over whether or not Rush's belief in universalism made him an "orthodox Christian."
Monday's panel will focus on the religious dimensions of the American Revolution.
Dillon discussed the religious views of Thomas Jefferson. He concluded that Jefferson was a "full-blown Deist." Dillon described the way Jefferson was mesmerized, inspired, and sometimes tortured by traditional religion, but in the end he was ultimately influenced by the Enlightenment thinking of the era. He ended his presentation with a discussion of the so-called "Jefferson Bible."
Amanda focused her attention on Benjamin Franklin and specifically the 1790 exchange of letters between him and Yale president Ezra Stiles. In his response to a letter from Stiles, Franklin offered perhaps his most complete statement of his religious faith. He affirmed the existence of God, the need to love one's neighbors, and a belief in the afterlife. Amanda argued, quite convincingly I might add, that Franklin wrestled with religion his entire life, but in the end was probably a Deist with certain Christian tendencies.
Marty's paper was titled "Benjamin Rush: Evangelical in Word and Deed." He argued that Rush was an orthodox Christian in both words and actions. Marty broke down his religious thought into five categories: post-millennialism, Arminianism, a high regard for the Bible, universalism, and republicanism. Rush had a pretty traditional conversion experience and was a strong advocate of Christian republicanism through his support of voluntary societies. During the Q&A we debated over whether or not Rush's belief in universalism made him an "orthodox Christian."
Monday's panel will focus on the religious dimensions of the American Revolution.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Harrisburg 4 Reading 2
To celebrate my daughter Caroline's eight birthday we all headed off to Metro Bank Park on City Island in Harrisburg see the Harrisburg Senators, our local AA baseball team, play the Reading Phillies in an Eastern League battle. The Senators broke an eleven game losing streak with a 4- 2 win and the night ended with a great fireworks show. This is local culture at its best. And I almost caught a foul ball!
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