Ginny – Page 22 – Chicago Boyz

Barry Puts Williams in Context: Coke, the Law, & a very young man

June 28, 2012June 20, 2012 by Ginny

Roger Williams tells Winthrop “I desire not to sleep in securitie and dreame of a Nest wch no hand can reach.” Puritans could hope but Williams found certainty “monstrous” when it violated “soul liberty.” He sought no conversions: while he could convince the Indians with whom he traded to go through the motions of belief, it would be deeply wrong. Indeed, he argued “any bloody act of violence to the consciences of others” would be as if “the parliament of England hath committed a greater rape than if they had forced or ravished the bodies of all the women in the world.” (The Bludy Tenent). He valued restraints civil & spiritual.

John M. Barry’s Roger Williams emphasizes Sir Edward Coke’s (1552-1634) incrementalism and careful construction of precedents that ordered chaos and defined restraints; the purpose was “to take down common law, to precipitate it out of the cloud of centuries of argument and judgment into the hard crystal of precedent, to then crack that crystal open by analyzing it, and finally to lock the piece into place by defining precedent and law more firmly than could any legislative act” (24). After 1600, Coke’s annual commentaries applied those precedents. The English tradition, Barry argues, led to a “common law more arcane and labyrinthine than civil law, but its very arcana, along with custom, created a web which restrained power, making England more resistant to absolutism than states on the continent” (21). The English valued stability, grounded in property rights: the resonance of his speech still delights as in “Every Englishman’s home is as his castle” (63). (The quotes demonstrate how heady word choices must have been: Coke’s life covered King James’ translation and Shakespeare; Williams lived during Donne’s time and taught Milton Dutch. Their words retain a life familiarity has buried.)

Theoretically, We Separate Church and State â€“ But perhaps we need to know what each is first

June 28, 2012June 16, 2012 by Ginny

We signal academic style seems dowdy but members read its gestures; soccer fans treasure that moment of recognition. We note kinship, we signal we understand. We treasure that moment when we raise our eyes and see a surprised look, an – “I agree.” The academic style seems to troll obsessively for these moments – perhaps to still the cognitive dissonance.

John Barry’s Roger Williams inspired me I had known little and he has led me to study farther. But if I’m grateful, I’m also a bit irritated. Why a concluding criticism of John Yoo and equation of George Bush with James I (whom he has treated with considerable contempt)? And it alienates – no understanding look would pass between us in conversation, at a dinner table. The relation between the Patriot Act and James’ highhandedness seems tenuous at best and certainly irrelevant. Barry’s LA Times’ piece argues Williams would be today’s “warrior against religion.” Well, maybe. He cites the suit brought by a Rhode Island girl, requesting the school remove a prayer mounted on the wall. He concludes – “Presidential candidates and evangelicals ignore American history and insist on injecting religion in to politics. They proclaim their belief in freedom even while they violate it.” This simplifies; certainly, using Williams exiled from each New England community – as touchstone might mean your “American history” is more limited than you imply.

Empathy – A Belated Response to Foster

December 23, 2015June 13, 2012 by Ginny

David Foster’s thoughtful “Fiction and Empathy” notes Keith Oatley’s research on reading fiction and empathy. Surely a writer’s empathy is important – Dreiser didn’t seem to like his characters, why would we? Literature often celebrates the sacred or unifies a people. Some is marginalizes the other. Surely, whether fiction leads to empathy or not is complex.

This belated riff is prompted by Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal. In a cutesy (his shtick) and dismissive review, Adam Gopnik simplifies Gottschall’s argument, using the ever popular straw man of academia. Well, no, these professional consumers of story are seldom moral exemplars. Indeed, some display an unusual inability to empathize.

Roger Williams & the Ship of State

June 15, 2012June 11, 2012 by Ginny

Roger Williams, who represents America on the oversized Reformation Wall in Geneva, was not an easy man. Graduating from Cambridge in 1627, he was chaplain to Sir William Masham; by 1630 Archbishop Laud’s demand for oaths of loyalty reached even such clerics, and so Williams and his bride set off for New England. Fortuitously, John Wilson was just then returning to England to gather his family; that is, fortuitously for anyone but Williams. He declined the First Church of Boston post, for he “durst not officiate to an unseparated people.” In the cold winter of 1634-35, he was exiled from Salem, having already been sent from Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. “Soul liberty” became the governing core of his Providence government – one he defended against Indian attack and the ambitions of other colonies, one he buttressed with authority from England, under both Cromwell and Charles II. He understood liberty because of his “separateness.”

At times he seems an early libertarian: he took Calvinism farther than even these steely New Englanders, having sacrificed much for their faith, were willing to go. If “moderation,” as Cotton Mather noted, characterized every page of Winthrop’s biography, “extremism” would of Williams’.

Inky Characters & Their Home in Deep Structure

June 15, 2012June 10, 2012 by Ginny

We are drawn into narrative because of plot our mind wonders what will happen and because of character our heart feels empathy, sympathy. In The Mind and its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion Patrick Colm Hogan uses the Sanskrit “rasa” as feeling evoked by “ink” people (Jonathan Gottschall’s term). Sanskrit “bhava” approximates emotions ones evoked in our world. But, Hogan contrasts the love he feels for a character in a play with the love for his wife. “Rasa”, here, is a form of love not sadness or pride. But that “inky” world lives: “the characters experience the bhavas, such as love and sorrow, while the readers/spectators experience the rasas, such as the erotic and the pathetic.” Of course, the definition works for us because we had the concept – our tenses hint at this universal experience: Shakespeare wrote Hamlet but Hamlet feels angst, we feel him feeling angst.