Entries from December 2007 ↓

[Another great Luther quote on Christmas, posted in 2005]

The God in the Manger
A major hat-tip to What You Do Do Quickly for this heart-touching Christmas meditation from Martin Luther:

if you will have joy, bend yourself down to this place. There you will find that boy given for you who is your Creator lying in a manger. I will stay with that boy as he sucks, is washed, and dies…. There is no joy but in this boy. Take him away and you face the Majesty which terrifies…

I know of no God but this one in the manger…That person lying in the manger is both man and God essentially, not seperated one from the other but as born of a virgin. If you separate them, the joy is gone. O Thou boy, lying in the manger, thou art truly God who hast created me, and thou wilt not be wrathful with me because thou comest to me in this loving way- more loving cannot be imagined.”

HT to Paul McCain for quotes about how Luther relates vocation to Christmas:

Here is another excellent and helpful lesson, namely, that after the shepherds have been enlightened and have come to a true knowledge of Christ, they do not run out into the desert-which is what the crazy monks and nuns in the cloisters did! No the shepherds continue in their vocation, and in the process they also serve their fellow men. For true faith does not create people who abandon their secular vocation and begin a totally different kind of living, a way of life which the totally irrational monks considered essential to being saved, even though it was only an externally different way of existence. [Klug, Luther’s House Postils, Vol. 1:48]

“We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in Himself, but in Christ and in the neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor.” “On the Freedom of a Christian,” (LW 31:371)

“These are the two things in which a Christian is to exercise himself, the one that he draws Christ into himself, and that by faith he makes him his own, appropriates to himself the treasures of Christ and confidently builds upon them; the other that he condescends to his neighbor and lets him share in that which he has received, even as he shares in the treasures of Christ.” 1521 Christmas sermon.

When veterans of the Clinton administration went into academia, a number of them were shocked to find that despite their impeccable liberal politics, their new university colleagues considered them unacceptably right wing! On many campuses the faculty has more Marxists than Republicans. This has long been known, but some recent studies are documenting the extent to which our nation’s campuses have a hard-left bias and discriminate against conservatives. Read this from Robert Maranto, who is publishing a book on the subject. Excerpts from his findings:

Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University looked at all the reliable published studies of professors’ political and ideological attachments. They found that conservatives and libertarians are outnumbered by liberals and Marxists by roughly two to one in economics, more than five to one in political science, and by 20 to one or more in anthropology and sociology.

In a quantitative analysis of a large-scale student survey, Matthew Woessner of Penn State-Harrisburg and April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College found strong statistical evidence that talented conservative undergraduates in the humanities, social sciences and sciences are less likely to pursue a PhD than their liberal peers, in part for personal reasons, but also in part because they are offered fewer opportunities to do research with their professors. (Interestingly, this does not hold for highly applied areas such as nursing or computer science.)

Further, academic job markets seem to discriminate against socially conservative PhDs. Stanley Rothman of Smith College and S. Robert Lichter of George Mason University find strong statistical evidence that these academics must publish more books and articles to get the same jobs as their liberal peers. Among professors who have published a book, 73 percent of Democrats are in high-prestige colleges and universities, compared with only 56 percent of Republicans.
. . . . . . . . .
Unfortunately, subtle biases in how conservative students and professors are treated in the classroom and in the job market have very unsubtle effects on the ideological makeup of the professoriate. The resulting lack of intellectual diversity harms academia by limiting the questions academics ask, the phenomena we study, and ultimately the conclusions we reach.

I am provost at Patrick Henry Collegewhere we are countering that anti-intellectual silliness and keeping our civilization’s educational heritage alive. We are giving the best and the brightest of conservative, Christian young people an Ivy-League caliber of education (referring back when the Ivy League was at its height). Our students have some of the highest SAT scores anywhere and we are equipping them with a rigorous classical Christian liberal arts education, full of the great books and the great ideas, coupled with specialties in culture-shaping fields, featuring an apprenticeship methodology with some of the best internships in the nation.

And though we might be accused of bias in the other direction, I would put the quality of our class discussions, including the consideration of alternative viewpoints, to be far above what goes on in the typical leftwing classroom.

We are a young school, having been founded in 2000, and we are small, with just over 300 hand-selected students. We should be at least ten times bigger than we are. But we are pretty much at capacity in our existing facilities. Since we don’t take government funds and refuse to go into debt, we have to raise the money before we can build the classrooms and dormitories that we need.

We have some amazingly generous donors, but we should have 100 times the number of financial supporters than we do now. Many people of means are pouring money into institutions whose faculty members would, if they had their dream, line them up against the wall as bourgeois capitalists and consign them to a revolutionary firing squad. They would do far better to pour money into Patrick Henry College!

If any of you are thinking of making an end-of-the-year charitable contribution or would like to support us in an on-going way, go here and here.

OK, end of fund-raising appeal. I’ll try not to do that very often. But reading about the state of higher education in this country made me convinced all the more of the importance of what we are doing at Patrick Henry College.

The British press is reporting that the head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, said in an interview that the nativity story is just a a legend.

What he really said is that the Wise Men weren’t kings, that they didn’t show up with the shepherds, and that there probably wasn’t snow, since we don’t know that Jesus was really born on December 25. He was casting doubt on the conventional Christmas card scene, which is nothing new or faith-threatening to well-instructed Christians. Unfortunately, today’s Brits are not, on the whole, so well-instructed. (The Archbishop did say that there is “no evidence” the Magi existed, taking the usual Higher Critical approach to Scripture. Normally, if a written document attested to something, that WOULD be considered evidence, but the Bible, for some reason, is not allowed to count.)

But here is my real problem with the Archbishop:

Later on in the show, the Archbishop was challenged by fellow guest Ricky Gervais, the comedian, about the credibility of the Christmas story.

Gervais told Dr Williams he was concerned about “brainwashing” of children who are sent to faith schools at an early age, comparing teaching that God exists to belief in Father Christmas.

Dr Williams said faith schools expose children to the full range of human experience and values and he did not believe they indoctrinated people.

This doctor of theology, this head of the state church addressing his national flock, went along even with a comedian who equated belief in God with a belief in Santa Claus. The Archbishop had an opportunity and a forum to witness to the Christian faith, a chance to explain the doctrine of the Incarnation–which I suspect many Brits have never heard of–but he totally wimped out.

Anglicans of the world: Your problem is not that you have homosexual bishops. It is that you have bishops who deny the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and even sometimes the existence of God. You have bishops who are Druids and syncretists. You have bishops who want to conform to the world rather than teaching God’s Word. (I’m not saying the Archbishop of Canterbury is completely this way, though he is a Druid and is way too concerned about being accepted by Ricky Gervais.) It isn’t so much that Anglicans need heterosexual bishops; first of all, they need Christian bishops.

Confounding the anti-natalists we talked about recently, the fertility rate in the USA has reached 2.1 children per woman, which means that Americans are, at long last, replacing themselves.

This is good news, as other advanced industrial nations are struggling with low fertility rates that will have major bad economic consequences. Most of those countries are giving money to women who have babies and other benefits. The USA is doing nothing like that, but the higher fertility rate is taking place in all age groups and across all demographics. This is the first time the fertility rate has reached replacement level since the 1970s and the advent of birth control and legalized abortion. Read this article from USA Today. Excerpts:

The fertility rate among Americans has climbed to its highest level since 1971, setting the country apart from most industrialized nations that are struggling with low birthrates and aging populations.

The fertility rate hit 2.1 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates released by the National Center for Health Statistics. It’s a milestone: the first time since shortly after the baby boom ended that the nation has reached the rate of births needed for a generation to replace itself, an average 2.1 per woman.

“What matters is that the U.S. is probably one of very few industrialized countries that have a fertility rate close to or at replacement level,” says José Antonio Ortega, head of the fertility section at the United Nations’ Population Division.

A high fertility rate is important to industrialized nations. When birthrates are low, there are fewer people to fill jobs and support the elderly.

Fertility in the USA went up in every age group from 2005 to 2006, the biggest jump coming among those 20 to 24 years old. The U.S. population topped 300 million last year, and the Census Bureau projects growth to 400 million by around 2040.

Developed countries in Europe and Asia have launched several government initiatives to encourage more births, from financial bonuses and extended family leaves to subsidized child care.

The wide availability of birth control options and more career opportunities for women have caused fertility rates to hit low levels in Japan, South Korea, Italy, Germany and Russia. France, renowned for its family friendly policies, remains the exception with a fertility rate of 2.

“What is paradoxical is that the U.S. doesn’t have those (family friendly) policies and it has higher fertility,” Ortega says.

Fertility experts say that economic prosperity, immigration and better job security for working mothers contribute to more births.

“We do know that birthrates ticked up quite a bit among the most affluent,” says Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. “Kids are luxury goods, and some of this uptick may be stay-at-home moms.”

It also has become easier for women to negotiate leaves from work to stay home with their children. “Women now feel much more entitled and much more confident, especially as they’re getting more education,” Coontz says.

U.S. fertility hit its low of 1.7 in 1976 after the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. Another factor: the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion.

“It’s not so much that abortion lowered the birthrate but abortion, coming on top of the birth control pill, really made it much more clear to women — and to men — that childbearing was a choice,” Coontz says.

You will notice that some people think of a big population as a liability (how will we feed so many? how will we get them jobs? what will they do to the environment?). Others see a nation’s population as its most important economic resource. Explain.

G. K. Chesterton said that there is no such thing as an uninteresting subject. There can only be an uninterested person. His point was that EVERYTHING in this created order is, when seen properly, amazing. A corollary that I have long noted is that ANY subject can be made interesting if it is presented with the requisite skill.

I don’t have that much interest in automobiles, but I do have interest in a TV show about them,
Top Gear. It’s a British show, to be found here on BBC America, and it is stone cold hilarious. The rumpled Jeremy Clarkson leads a team of English motorheads who test automobiles. . . Well, that doesn’t capture it. A typical show brings on a celebrity to see how fast he can drive a “reasonably priced car,” and humorous things always happen. (For example, on a recent episode, they supposedly sent out an invitation to everyone in the year’s Who’s Who. A celebrity showed up, but the hosts didn’t know who he was.) Then the team test drives some 100,000 pound sports car (that’s money, not weight, over $200,000 American money) in an entertaining way. Then the team takes on some project that fails miserably (building an amphibious vehicle, designing the interior of a car so that it accords with what you would like to see in your house, turning a van into a convertible that, unfortunately, catches fire in a carwash).

Well, I can hardly convey the full magnitude of this show. If you like British humor, never mind if you don’t like cars. You need to see TOP GEAR for yourself.

Time Magazine has named Russian strongman Vladimir Putin“Person of the Year.” The choice is attracting some criticism, though at least the magazine has named a, you know, person. As opposed to a computer, which they did not long ago, and what they did last time, giving EVERYBODY that honor by putting a mirror on the cover. Who would you pick?

Peter Jackson, who directed “The Lord of the Rings” movies, has finally untangled some legal complexities and will start filming The Hobbit next year. He is splitting Tolkien’s novel into two separate films, with the first to be released in 2010 and the second in 2011.

Thanks again to Cheryl Banks for helping with the design and features of this blog. You can now buy books from EITHER Concordia Publishing House OR Amazon.

We also have a box featuring the writings of my other colleague at the Cranach Institute, Angus Menuge, who has written widely on the philosophy of science, intelligent design, apologetics, C. S. Lewis, and evangelism.

We also have a box for books on our major theme here, the doctrine of vocation. It includes the essential book on the subject by the Swedish theologian Gustav Wingren, “Luther on Vocation.” The other classic book from a Swedish theologian, Einar Billing’s “Our Calling,” was available just a few weeks ago, having come back into print at least briefly, but I see it’s not available now. You can still find it on some used book sites. But the icon is still there, in hopes it will reappear on Amazon. I also list, in addition to my own “God at Work,” a relatively new anthology of writings on the subject going back to the days of the early church. There are other books about vocation, of course, but some of them don’t quite “get it,” in my opinion. In the future, I hope to review some of these, and, if they pass muster, list them in this box with my recommendation.

Also, notice the Amazon.com portal now on this site. If you do your Amazon searching and subsequent buying from the Cranach blog, we will get a commission! We also get a cut every time you click one of the Google ads, which I hope are not too annoying. So that’s a way you can help us pay the rent for this online real estate.

The Tower of Babel must have been build in the style of one of those Babylonian ziggurats with the spiraled ramps. I get that picture when I read about what scientists today are doing with the spirals of DNA.

From the “Washington Post” article Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms:

Scientists in Maryland have already built the world’s first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce.

In the coming year, they hope to transplant it into a cell, where it is expected to “boot itself up,” like software downloaded from the Internet, and cajole the waiting cell to do its bidding. And while the first synthetic chromosome is a plagiarized version of a natural one, others that code for life forms that have never existed before are already under construction.

The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial — and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive.
. . . . . . . . .

Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA. Experiments with “natural” DNA indicate that when a faux chromosome gets plopped into a cell, it will be able to direct the destruction of the cell’s old DNA and become its new “brain” — telling the cell to start making a valuable chemical, for example, or a medicine or a toxin, or a bio-based gasoline substitute.

I got to attend vespers at my wife’s school yesterday, a service held at the end of every school day. There is something powerfully moving about hearing little kid voices singing serious hymns (which they learn by heart) and chanting the liturgy. And the children did so with such gusto and loudness!

My theory is that the cutesy-wootsey approach to children’s songs and worship appeals mainly to parents and grandparents (OK! I admit it! I am both of those things and a sucker for cutesy-wootsey!). But that children appreciate being able, through good teaching, to take part in what adults do. I also worry that in our attempts to make their experience with worship and Bible study completely “kid friendly” and in our trying usually in vain to attract adolescents with what I have elsewhere termed stupid youth group tricks, that we are reinforcing the deadly tendency of young adults rejecting their church background as “childish” once they leave home. Better, in my opinion–and less condescending–to introduce them to a spiritual life bigger than themselves that they can grow into.

Mark Steyn writes about a new convergence of “pro-choicers” and environmentalists, a movement he calls anti-natalism:

Here’s something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that “the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings,” and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have.

Last week, in the Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell with this wimp-o pantywaist “voluntary” child-reduction. Professor Walters wants a “carbon tax” on babies, with, conversely, “carbon credits” for those who undergo sterilization procedures. So that’d be great news for the female eco-activists recently profiled in London’s Daily Mail who boast about how they’d had their tubes tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet.

“Every person who is born,” says Toni Vernelli, “produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of overpopulation.” We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. The best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.

What’s the “pro-choice” line? “Every child should be wanted”? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

By the way, if you’re looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” The author “argues for the ‘anti-natal’ view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct.”