There are a number of ways of thinking about social justice issues. For
example:

• Value: No one should go hungry.
• Observation: Here are some people who will go hungry if
  something isn’t done.
• Action: Let’s feed them.

This is the sort of logic that builds soup kitchens and food banks.
Here’s another way:

• Value: No one should go hungry.
• Observation: There are people in our society who do go hungry.
• Action: Let’s build a society in which no one goes hungry.

Now, this is an admirable idea, on the face of it. But how do we go
about building such a society? Practically speaking, we hold rallies and
protests and put up posters so that everyone knows that there are people
in our society that go hungry. And we lobby congressman and we circulate
petitions and we try to get out the vote in an attempt to get the
government to make sure that no one goes hungry. Mostly we talk a lot,
and the government collects a lot of money that goes to support a massive
bureaucracy that provides foodstamps to people who would otherwise go
hungry.

Now, I’m not against such a safety net. We’re a wealthy country, and we
can afford it. But I’ll point out that the logic is somewhat impersonal.
We’re no longer thinking of specific hungry individuals, but of hungry
individuals as a class. And the action we take to serve them doesn’t
feed anyone directly; it’s all aimed at getting someone else to do
the actual work.

The real problem with this logic is that it leads to magical thinking.
“We protested and lobbied and canvassed, and the hungry got fed! Wow!”

There’s a third way of thinking about social justice, one of I’ve been
noticing more and more lately, which follows from the second way:

• Value: No one should go hungry.
• Observation: There are people in our society who do go hungry.
• Further Observation: We’ve been protesting and lobbying and canvassing,
  and they are still hungry.
• Action: This must be somebody’s fault; I blame the greedy
  multinational corporations!

I often detect this way of thinking in screeds about greedy
multi-national corporations; it betrays a basic misunderstanding about
the world. There’s an implicit assumption in the above that everything
would be perfect in the world if only they (You know,
them. You’ve talked about them yourself, I’m sure.)
would stop wrecking things for the rest of us. And this, of course, is
nonsense.

Meanwhile, other people go on building and funding soup kitchens, food
pantries, half-way houses and the like. People like the folks at
Modest Needs:

Modest Needs is a tax exempt, grass-roots charitable organization
dedicated to a simple proposition: an ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure.

Since May 2002, the active members of the Modest Needs community have
been pooling their pocket change and investing it in the future of
working families.

These families have asked for our help because the burden of a small,
unexpected expense has proven too great for them to bear on their own.

To date, Modest Needs has kept 1264 working families from entering the
public welfare system by remitting payment for $236,215.71 worth of
unexpected expenses on behalf of the families we’ve had the funding to
assist.

Those expenses have ranged from the fee for a GED test to the bill for an
auto repair to the cost of burying a stillborn child.

Modest Needs’ average grant is just over $180.00 per family. But because our grants keep working families working, they’ve now returned more than $7.7 million in earned income to the pockets of families who have remained self-sufficient because of them.

At Modest Needs, we think our dollars make more sense when they keep families working.

I must admit that I have not researched Modest Needs extensively; they
could be snake oil salesmen. But I doubt it; when I went to their
web site and looked at their Giving FAQ, I discovered
that they don’t simply hand out money; they verify the need and they make
sure the money goes where it’s supposed to. More than that, all of their
financial data is publicly available on their web site. That’s the kind
of transparency I like to see in a charitable organization.

Why don’t you go take a look?

Charlotte Macleod, author of quite a few delightfully quirky mystery novels, has been unable to write due to sickness for some few years now. A friend, Robert Guttke, has now posted a tribute to Charlotte Macleod; it’s well worth your time. († Byzantium’s Shores)

So there this guy, see, named Ian Hamet. He boldly ventures forth to Shanghai–it’s the coming place, the leading edge of the Pacific Rim–where he hopes to get work in the movie business. Instead, he ends up teaching English for six months. And at the end of the six months, he still hasn’t found a job in the movie industry. So they offer to hire him to teach full-time for a year, only when he begins work he discovers that he’s not only the English teacher, he’s the only English speaker in the entire school. Which is brand new. Which will stand or fall with him.

Good grief, he’s not working in the movies, he’s living one. All he needs is some troubled teenagers to turn around, and maybe a beguiling love interest, and he’s all set.

Update: Apparently movie pitches should be 30 words or less. Well, that explains a few things. (For the record, Ian, it was the English division I was referring to.) Also, I’d ruled out Qili and Deliver–given how polite everyone is, I just couldn’t see the need for a baseball bat.

A friend called me up last night and asked if I’d like to go
shooting. Guns are a serious hobby of his–he used to do target-shooting
competitively. We’d talked on a number of occasions about going out to
the shooting range one weekend so that I could see what it was like, and
this afternoon we did.

Continue reading →

Life has been interesting recently, for reasons I won’t go into at the moment except to say that if you read last week’s news about the three Los Angeles parishes of the Episcopal Church who chose to secede from the Diocese of Los Angeles and place themselves under the authority of an Anglican bishop in Uganda, I don’t go to any of those three parishes. Quite. But my parish has close ties with them, and I’m acquainted with all three of their rectors. So I use the word “interesting” in the sense of the Chinese proverb.

If any of my readers would care to offer up a prayer for my parish (St. Luke’s of the Mountains) or for our three sister parishes over the next few months, I’d be greatly obliged. (Those of you are don’t believe in prayer, don’t sweat it.)

Perhaps, like the good woman at Buried Treasure Books, I’ve been putting too much effort into my book reviews. Why write a lengthy detailed review, when I could write this instead?

Of course, then I’d have to read books that lend themselves to that kind of review…

And sometimes people notice.

Amazingly, I passed four decades on this Earth without ever having read
[btitle “Treasure Island”] until just this month, when I read it aloud to
my son, David. I tried to read it once when I was a kid, but didn’t get
far; when Billy Bones was given the Black Spot I got depressed and put the
book down, having become quite attached to that sullen old gentleman of
fortune. On top of that, given what little I remember of that first
attempt, I think I might have been reading an abridgement or adaptation
of some kind; either that, or I was retaining only about a third of the
words.

Anyway, it turns out to be a fine adventure tale in the old tradition;
old, in that the pirates are indisputably bad, and the good guys
indisputably good, if not always entirely wise. It was rather
refreshing, actually. The prose was rather over David’s head, I fear,
and I was continually having to explain bits to him, but once I did he
enjoyed it thoroughly.

I think the bit that amazed me most was Long John Silver. I’d formed the
impression of Silver as your typical pirate captain, with a cocked hat
and a parrot and a pegleg, and somehow I had the notion that Silver and
Jim Hawkins went off to search for the treasure together, as good
comrades-in-arms–in short, that Silver was something of a hero.

The reality is somewhat different. Silver has the pegleg, and the parrot,
oh yes, and he goes off to search for treasure with Jim Hawkins; and
for part of the book the pirates regard him as their captain. But there’s
absolutely nothing of the hero about him. Instead he’s a quite plausible
rogue, as Jack Aubrey might say, with one eye on the main chance and the
other on the door, and if he has a silver tongue he has two faces with
which to wield it. A cunning fellow, indeed, but thoroughly contemptible.

How did I ever get the idea that Long John Silver was one of the good
guys? I really have no idea.

When I first ran into The Da Vinci Code I knew it was
nonsense; as history buff, I already had enough general historical
knowledge under my belt that it smelled really bad. Nevertheless, it
prompted me to go out and see what I could find on the specifics, and
this book is the first fruits of that.

The History of the Church is the earliest history we have of the
Christian faith in its first few centuries. Eusebius was born around 260
AD, and wrote most of the book between 315 and 325 AD. It begins with
Jesus and the apostles, and traces the apostolic succession down to the
early reign of Emperor Constantine. Along the way Eusebius discusses a
variety of persecutions, martyrs, heresiarchs, and the like, along with a
number of comments on the canon of the New Testament, and in so doing he
quotes a vast number of sources at great length. Indeed, in some ways, that’s the chief
value of Eusebius; he wasn’t an original thinker, but he had a large,
well-stocked library and quoted from it liberally. Many of the passages
he cites we know only from his quotations; where we have the source
documents as well, he is shown to be fairly trustworthy.

So what did I learn from Eusebius?

First, that the canon of the New Testament, although still somewhat fluid
even up to the end of Eusebius’ life, was nevertheless pretty well
thrashed out. All of the books we currently have in the New Testament
were well-known to Eusebius and his sources, many of which date from the
first and second centuries, and were liberally quoted by them. In
Eusebius’ day there was still some controversy about Revelations, Paul’s
Letter to the Hebrews (Eusebius maintained that it had indeed been
written by Paul, but in Hebrew, and was translated into Greek by Clement
of Rome), and some of the so-called “Catholic” letters. On the other
hand, the various “gnostic” gospels so beloved of certain scholars these
days as holding hidden knowledge–the Gospel of Thomas, for example–were
also well known to Eusebius and his predecessors, and were generally
dismissed as bogus. (The discussion often involves comments on the style
of the various authors; it sounds quite contemporary to my ears.)
In short, the New Testament was too well known and
too widely quoted in earlier times to be the work of Constantine, as
Dan Brown would have it.

Second, the early Christians were dedicated to (among other things)
preserving the faith as they had received it from the apostles, and as a
result they had a short way with heresy.

Most of you are probably now picturing witch hunts and
auto-da-fés, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Christianity was never spread by violence until it became married to the
power of the state by Constantine, and even after that it was spread
violently much less frequently than most people would suppose. But
be that as it may, in the time period of which I’m writing Christianity spread from
person to person without any form of coercion–the early Christians had
no power, and hence no way to coerce anyone.

The way they dealt with heresy was manifold. Heretics were shunned.
Books and pamphlets were written refuting their heresies; a number of
these have come down to us. If a bishop
should fall into heresy a synod, or council, would be convened and the
matter thrashed out; if the council found that the bishop was indeed in
error, he would be stripped of his position. If heretics repented, they
were received back into the fellowship–but were never again given
positions of responsibility. And that was the extent of it. Some heresies and their purveyors persisted for decades, but the early Christians stood firm against them, and in the end they came to nothing.

It’s notable that heresy was usually
linked to a lust for power and wealth; even allowing for exageration,
Paul of Samosata sounds like a third-century Jim Bakker.

This is yet another reason why the so-called “gnostic” gospels were
abandoned–the church as a whole, which at that time was a collection of
city churches united in one faith but distributed over the whole of the
Roman empire, judged them false and didn’t preserve them, because they
didn’t accord with the faith received from the apostles.

Third, the early Christians were willing to die for their faith. It was customary for
Roman citizens to make certain sacrifices during the course of the year;
and in many cities, especially in Asia, the emperor or his predecessors
were accorded divine honors. The early Christians refused to have
anything to do with such sacrifices, which led to the initial waves of
persecution. Christians were accused of a variety of evil practices
(including incest and baby-eating), they were imprisoned, they were
flogged, they were burned at the stake, they were given to wild beasts in
the arena, they were starved, they were torn apart and thrown into the
sea to feed the fishes, they were tortured in various ways, periodically,
all through the first three centuries of the church.

What impressed me particularly was the way most of the martyrs died. They had
taken to heart Christ’s saying from the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are
you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of
evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is
your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets
who were before you.” Under the torture, some certainly renounced their
faith; of these, some few repented later. But most seem to have gone to
their deaths rejoicing that they had been thought worthy to suffer and die
as witnesses to Christ. “Witness” — that’s what the word “martyr” means.

It’s not that these early Christians were so eager to die that they went
looking for trouble. But if trouble came to them, they were determined
to die as well as they possibly could.
We’re all familiar with the image of the Christians being thrown to the
lions; it was even used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. (Yosemite Sam, the
captain of the Imperial Guard, had to find a victim for Emperor Nero.)
What I didn’t know is that sometimes the lions, for whatever reason,
balked–so that the martyrs had to encourage them to eat. And they did.

Think about that for a moment. It seems crazy–until you remember the
pearl of great price.

As a follow-on to Eusebius, I’ve found a book that has material written
by four of his sources: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin
Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons. Clement and Ignatius date from the first
century; Justin Martyr and Irenaeus of Lyons from the second. (As an
indication of the size of Roman empire and the rapid spread of
Christianity, note that Irenaeus was the head of a sizeable church in the
city of Lyons, in what’s now France.) It took me many months to work my
way through Eusebius, so don’t hold your breath.

This is the sequel to Sagan’s Idlewild, and I confess I’m not
sure what to make of it.

It begins about 18 years after the conclusion of its predecessor. The
human race has been all but destroyed by the Black Ep virus; the only
survivors are Halloween and five others, and the children they have since
brought into the world. Their chief goal (indeed, their reason for being)
is to find a permanent cure for Black Ep and then repopulate the world.
But Halloween and his age-mates didn’t have what you’d call a normal
childhood with a stable home-life, and raising children is a tricky
business indeed. Most of the kids are doing OK, having normal adolescent
angst, but one or two of them, well…

In fact, that’s probably the best way to describe this book–it’s about
parenting, and how to raise sociopaths. As such, I don’t find it
entirely convincing; the proportion of truly amoral people in this book
seems to me to be a little too high.

There’s an interesting note on the effect of a religious upbringing. Five
of the kids are raised in the Sufi tradition (Sufi is a mystical branch of
Islam). The most stable kid in the whole bunch is one of these; he’s also
the most devout. He’s balanced by his two older brothers, who had the
same upbringing; one abandons his faith for atheism and the bright
lights, while the other abandons Sufism (Sufiism? Sufi-ism?) for a more literal
reading of the Koran and becomes mightily annoying to all around him.

On the whole, I don’t think I like this book as much as its predecessor. It
takes a while to get started, and it’s less convincing. Moreover, the
point I draw from it–that kids need a moderate, firm level of
discipline, giving them neither too much nor too little freedom of choice
and experience–seems obvious to me. But then, I grew up in a functional
family.

Bottom line: I dunno. I’m curious as to what happens next, though.