SKJ Today

Someone passed this quote along to me the other day from a book review J. Greshem Machen wrote in the 1920’s. Still has something to say to us today perhaps.

The entire book is really based upon the pragmatist assumption that religion can be separated from theology and that a man can obtain the values of the religious life apart from the particular intellectual conception which he forms of his God. This assumption leads in the first place to an artificial treatment of history, which altogether fails to do justice to the real complexity of human life; and it leads, in the second place, and in particular, to the reconstruction, contrary to all evidence, of a primitive Gentile Christianity which shall exhibit just the type of nontheological religion which the modern pragmatist desires.

J.Gresham Machen, “Review of Arthur Cushman McGiffert’s The God of the Early Chrisitans” (1924) in Selected Shorter Writings, edited by D.G. Hart, 499-50.

Cornel West on Real Time With Bill Maher

skj — Sat, 29 May 2010 20:41:58 +0000

Theories of Change

skj — Sat, 29 May 2010 03:46:47 +0000

David Brooks wrote a nice piece on the legacy of the British Enlightenment in today’s NY Times. Unlike their French counterparts, British Enlightenment thinkers didn’t just extol reason’s capacities, they underscored its limits. There is no greater example of the this tradition than Edmund Burke, who rejected the radical approach to social change advocated by the French.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Brooks sees this tension between radical and more traditional Enlightenment perspectives as playing out in our politics today:

We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

No surprise where Brooks comes down.

Bill Maher’s Panel Discusses Atheism & The Role of Religion in Public Life

skj — Sun, 16 May 2010 23:24:42 +0000

Bill Maher’s Panel on Atheism & Religion in Public Life
Uploaded by scottkentjones. – Up-to-the minute news videos.