At Least My Husband Reads

Well, Lex is right. If I didn’t watch reruns of reruns, I’d read more. (And maybe post more, too, but I don’t know.) I might have gotten more done if my middle daughter hadn’t decided to get engaged. My husband, on the other hand, has read his Christmas gifts already, so I asked him to do my year’s end book duty.

The Arnoldian says:
My favorite Christmas gifts this year were two books from my wife. One was a recently published work, The Cube and the Cathedral, by George Weigel, a Catholic theologian. The other one was published a few years ago–Modern Culture, by Roger Scruton, who is often described as a “conservative” critic and popular philosopher. Both books are in fact about that elusive topic “culture,” something I have a special interest in because of my research on the nineteenth-century British critic Matthew Arnold, whose Culture and Anarchy was very influential in promoting the sense we have of culture as “the pursuit of excellence” through imaginative literature and the arts. In the tradition of Arnold, Scruton is a secular writer who has a profound respect for the Christian heritage.

Please don’t get the idea that our family spends the Christmas holiday just sitting around reading books. We have various ways of celebrating this “merry” time, but in this case I did find time to finish the two books within a few days after receiving them. It seemed so appropriate because they obviously complemented each other (coming from institutionally religious and secular points of view) and both of them, as I’m sure my wife intended, very much in the “true spirit of Christmas.”

Weigal, like his mentor, John Paul II, of course believes that Christianity still plays a vital role in modern Europe but he is distressed by the anti-Christian sentiment that is so prevalent there today. For example, there are references to the classical heritage but none to Christianity in the new EU constitution (all Hellenism and no Hebraisim, as Arnold might put it), and many Europeans seem to be ashamed of their religious background–an understanding of which is in fact fundamental to understanding European history. It is maybe fanciful but not absurd to imagine a future Europe in which Islam, nurtured by Islamic immigrants and their descendants, continues to grow while Christianity nearly fades away, or ironically, is revived by missionaries from Africa and Asia.

It is not a coincidence that the native European population is declining rapidly in this “post-Christian” era. Secular atheists of various ideologies in the past couple of centuries have striven to “liberate” human beings from repressive religious mythology. But in a real sense, it is the commitment to a moral purpose associated with a religious vision that liberates us from a slavery to our selfish whims and animal appetites. Religion connects us with the dead and the unborn. Without it, it is easy to feel that we are living in the present, “free” to live out our short, meaningless lives. Scruton mericlessly analyzes the absurdities of both pop culture and academic postmodernism. Not much chance of finding a substitute for traditional relgion there. With all this in mind, we can begin to think about serious implications underlying the sometimes silly-sounding arguments we heard in our own country this year about “the war against Christmas.”

Beyond our concerns as individuals and as members of families, tribes, and nations, Christianity opens up the vision of universal humanity. No doubt images of Jesus can be used to reinforce local cultural affiliations but the grand idea behind him is that all people all over the earth (even Europeans?) have one Father and are all part of the same family.

The (New) Color of Money

The Spectacular New U.S. Grant Fifty Dollar Note

Take an Interactive Tour of the new $10, $20 and $50 bills courtesy of the U.S Bureau of Engraving and Printing (requires Macromedia Flashplayer).

Tour Hints:
Select the “Eyeball” icon for an automatic virtual tour.
Select the “Lightbulb” icon to see the bill backlight and view the watermarks.
Select the “Magnifier” icon to examine the bill up close.
Select the “Arrow” icon to flip the bill over.

I think this new U.S Grant / U.S Flag fifty is a phenomenal piece of currency art and strongly suspect this bill will become a classic, much collected in years to come. And since these bills are changing in design every few years now in an effort (in vain) to keep ahead of counterfeiters, now is the time to grab a few of these bills in mint, uncirculated condition and pass them along to your heirs. Or to me. Whichever.

Great Books

While I can never hope to compete with the likes of Lex – who reads even while cooking – or Ginny, who can glean the subtlest moral from any tale and nimbly connect it to her own life’s experience; I did, for me, a lot of reading last year. Of all that I read two books stand out like flares amongst candles and I recommend them to you heartily.

No. 1: The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

I cannot, literally, praise this book highly enough. Published in 1986, it has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and if you read it, you’ll understand why.

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Blowhard Sees The Passenger

Michael Blowhard’s tribute to Antonioni’s The Passenger is interesting both because of his perceptions and the era he (and it) brings back. The first films we ordered from Netflix were Antonioni’s–I’d remembered loving them much as I loved the spaces in Pinter. We see them with a sort of ache: the music draws us in as does the minimalist plot through pauses. Little action, much space, much time – the very slowness mesmerizes. The world we enter through his eyes seems severed from the realistic, the humanist, the live. And so, across the screen, a heroine seldom strides but always seems to wander, moving around rather than toward. The hero ends up, somehow, in bed without pursuing. These solipsistic lives are punctuated by intense but, well, uncommunicative sex which only accentuates isolation. No wonder we so often felt, well, alienated. Watching them again this summer, we found they still embodied a remarkable aesthetic, a coherence I hadn’t recognized all those years ago.

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Wooly Thinking

Butterflies & Wheels helps us advance our arguments with its “The Woolly-Thinker’s Guide to Rhetoric.” One useful ploy is Pave With Good Intentions: “Make it clear that you mean very well, that all the benevolence and right feeling and compassion and tolerance are on your side, and all [suspect motivations] on your opponent’s.” Bad Moves also is useful; for instance, Julian Baggin sums up Percipi est esse:

Some important truths are so simple that rock songs can not only express them, but do so with greater [clarity] than more sophisticated prose. Radiohead’s song ‘There There’, contains the line, ‘Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.’ Since I can’t improve on this summary of the fallacy I want to describe, I’ve fallen back on an old trick: if you want to make your idea look cleverer than it is, use Latin. But, of course, just because if looks cleverer, it doesn’t mean it is.

(B&W can be interesting but the blog’s writing skills could be stronger.)