Doing a little last-minute wrapping of presents I grabbed yesterday for the nieces and such. I got to do a surprising bit of shopping yesterday, first with Dan after we picked up Anna at school, and then with Amy on a Sam's Club run while Dan was putting the kids down. Being a little more "landlocked" downtown and living without a car, I've not been so exposed to the wonders of bulk warehouse shopping of the sort one can do at Sam's and such places. But I saved a lot of money on a couple of my regular supply purchases by buying the jumbo sets. Now I just need another closet.

Out the window, I'm overlooking the Marquette campus slowly being buried in snow, with the pink glow of streetlights being partially smothered by the thick snowfall. I'm a bit – well, not really nervous as much as the more neutral "watchful" – about the storm outside, and whether this might interfere with things tomorrow. Last year I missed Christmas for coming down with the flu at the stroke of midnight as the 23rd passed into Christmas Eve. And given that there was a major ice storm that made the interstate highways very dangerous, the Chicagoland contingent of the family didn't make it to the Sweeney clan gathering in Madison, either. I'm hoping that the weather outside, though frightful, doesn't give us a repeat of that.

Present wrapping has been going much better for me this year, as that's usually an exercise in humiliation for me. So I am all sorts of disproportionately proud of myself for having produced something other than my usual oddly lumpy, asymmetrical packages. Grace and Haley are getting the game "Sorry Sliders" that they've been wanting for some time, and Sophie is getting a Yo Gabba Gabba sing-along microphone that looks like the character Foofa, who she loves, and who she dressed as this last Halloween. I, on the other hand, know nothing about Yo Gabba Gabba or Foofa or any of that sort of child television programing, so I'm entirely indebted to Leslie for the inside scoop on what the girls are asking for. Good thing they don't have the run of the internet yet so I can jot these things down.

Also like last year, I'm realy enjoying listening to the rough album we recorded of Christmas music in high school, especially some of those songs you don't hear all that much. I still seem to especially love – just as I did when singing it as a teenage – the version we did of "the Gloucester Wassail," which seems to have slightly slippery lyrics, given all the slight variations I've seen on the internet.

The Gloucester Wassail

Wassail! Wassail! all over the town,
Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown
Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree
With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee!

So here is to Cherry and to his right cheek
Pray God send our master a good piece of beef
And a good piece of beef that may we all see
With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee!

And here is to Dobbin, and to his right eye,
Pray God send our master a good Christmas pie
And a good Christmas pie that may we all see
With our wassailing bowl we'll drink to thee!

And here is to Broad May and to her broad horn
Pray God send our master a good crop of corn
And a good crop of corn that may we all see
With our wassailing bowl we'll drink unto thee!

Come butler, come fill us a bowl of the best
And we hope that your soul in heaven may rest
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small
Then down shall go butler, bowl and all!

Then here's to the maid in the lily white smock
Who tripped to the door and slipped back the lock
Who tripped to the door and pulled back the pin
For to let these jolly wassailers in!

Bllleeeecccchhh. The long grading binge is officially over: 5:06am. As I say to myself every semester: that's what I deserve for doing essay and short answer test questions. I'm completely wiped out, but had to crow in victory, even if only to myself.

I have, however, been blissfully aided through the night by the day's traditional album of choice, as I save Over The Rhine's The Darkest Night of the Year for a winter solstice playing. (In this case, with iTunes set to loop.)

Okay. Time to swoon. It's been a long semester. Mischief managed.

Drat. Drat. Drat.

I discovered yesterday that the Starbucks downstairs is closed over the entire break for renovations. This entirely wrecks my imagined next four weeks, since the Raynor and Memorial Libraries on campus won't be open past 6pm or on weekends, and so I figured to spend my evenings writing in Starbucks. Say what you will about it being a soulless corporate shell of a coffeehouse when compared to the authentic independent coffeehouses of our land, but it was my soulless corporate shell of a coffeehouse – conveniently located around the corner on my block and one of the few entities (usually) remaining open when the students are away, and the only one I can get to, park, and write without having to travel or to fight off frequent addict panhandlers.

So drat.

I can set up my laptop in my office, of course, but I do like the buzz of some slight human activity in the background, and the vague illusion of human interaction involved in ordering an occasional drink or piece of yummy lemon loaf. When the students all vanish from the university for the holidays, there's always a sudden crash of a feeling of isolation or a sort of "background" loneliness, even though the people absent aren't Close, Personal Friends of Mine. Writing in Starbucks was always a nice balance against that sudden transformation of the university into a ghost town solely inhabited by East and South Asian graduate students in Computer Science shuffling to and from the computer lab at odd hours.

It's been one of those weeks that was somehow both long and short at the same time: just something that kept my head spinning. Last Friday was a fun early Christmas gathering at Dan and Amy's, where the kids exchanged some presents and the adults tucked into some creative finger foods and everyone chattered away at their own speed. It was a good respite from the build-up to Finals Weeks, after finishing grading homework assignments and writing the final exam. Even though all my energy was going into finishing the semester's teaching responsibilities, it was like I could feel the back of my brain warming up and getting excited about a month of uninterrupted dissertation-writing. My subconscious mind seemed to be already chewing the material and it was the strangest sensation: every once in a while it was as though my subconscious mind would just finish working on a point and hand my conscious the mind the answers while I was working on something for the students: "Connect Part A to Part C with Section B." I described this to the guys and they immediately pounced and asked if I was making sure to write this stuff down, and, happy to take advantage of strange brain activity, I was not trusting my memory and making sure to do so. So I would pause, jot down the new insight, and get back to the other work. So I'm apparently getting quite jazzed about the final dissertation sprint.

That evening passed in a bit of a whirl, honestly, and all I seem to remember off the top of my head is a conversation about the legal questions involved in the U.K. court question equating Jewish self-identity with racism, and a side conversation I had with Professor Barnes comparing Augustine on knowing God and knowing the self with the argument for how we know things given in the Transcendental Thomism of Rahner, and whether these amount to the same account of grace. Far less technical and more fun for everyone was watching the kids exchange their presents by the tree in the living room, and to see just how taken they were with the most simple gift. The only downside was that Anthony and Kelly weren't able to make it up from Chicagoland because their baby, Kate, was coming down with the croup. That ended up getting worse over the next few days, leading Kate to being hospitalized for a few days while she slowly responded to treatment. I proctored one of Anthony's Intro To Theology finals on Monday so that he could stay there (and caught an idiot cheating during the exam, which is almost such a pain in the ass for the instructors with the paperwork involved as to not make it worth it).

It has also been a week characterized more by interruption than anything else. My entire schedule seems to just lurch from one thing to another, without enough regularity to give it a rhythm. Review sessions with students, individual appointments with students. 8am final for one class on Tuesday, and a 1pm one this afternoon for the other class. Grocery shopping on the East Side. A run out to the hospital on the West for a shot. Grading exams. The one bit of a constant through it all that's been more fun for me has been the couple of moments here and there that I have had to read an engaging book I had read a review of just a few weeks ago and then borrowed from the library. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the standout philosophers of our age, and is a professor at Notre Dame: one who has had a major effect on a number of friends of mine who have worked with him. A recently-published book of his, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, grew out of an advanced undergraduate course he taught at Notre Dame. I think that I'm so used to teaching freshman over the last few years that it's almost a surprise to imagine undergraduates advanced enough to work through the material in the text. Plugging into my interest in both philosophy and in the Catholic university, there have been a number of chapters that have had lots of new information for me, too: looking through the material on what aspects of the medieval Islamic heritage were employed by Thomas Aquinas has certainly expanded what I knew of that exchange. Yesterday, bouncing on the bus over to the Metro Market, reading some of the conflict between Aquinas's work and that of John Duns Scotus (who I have never seriously worked on) has also been eye-opening. So I'm trying to imagine what sort of course I might be able to teach where I could employ the text. It has been painful to not mark up the text. Perhaps most useful in all of it is to see more of the development of the Catholic philosophical tradition that is setting itself up for the intellectual expansion coming out of this medieval matrix, where what we today call "Science" would become a methodologically distinct activity from Philosophy, but also to be more aware of what sorts of assumptions and questions science would take for granted and leave within the field of philosophy.

I also got a treat of a real, pen-and-ink letter from Angie with the Christmas card of the girls that she and Chad sent out. Giving sort of a laughing justification for why she likes to write actual letters sometimes, instead of typing an email, I got to enjoy just the visual and tactile experience of reading an honest-to-goodness paper letter again. This is extra fun for me when the letter is from Angie because, back in ancient times, before email and before long distance was cheap, she was my primary correspondent during my undergraduate years. There, along with the occasional expensive long-distance phone call, we might exchange as many as three letters a weeks, with multiple lines of conversation running at once as questions and answers, points and counterpoints crossed one another during the delay of waiting for a letter that answered one specific point or another. So there was a time when seeing her loopy handwriting in my mailbox was the greatest thing for making my day, and reading her letter therefore gave me that extra nostalgic glow of something familiar in that way. All of that had very little to do with the actual conversation of the letter, describing a systematic theology course she was taking, and the fun she was having in exploring a bit in my corner of the academic world, but no matter: a letter from an old friend with whom you once practiced the ancient craft of letter-writing was just "gravy," above and beyond the specific news of the letter itself.

I am always interested to see something of this sort appear in The New York Times. I think it very important for the political health of the United States to encourage the re-emergence of what in the last generation was called the "Religious Left." One of the real problems in American politics has been the loss from the late 1960s from what had been the American interpretation of the Enlightenment, which allowed for the free expression of religion as a key component in American politics. (See Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy In America for the classical insight into that dynamic.) With the emergence of the New Left in the late 1960s, a shift was made to a more French Revolution interpretation of the Enlightenment, with its secularizing, dogmatic opposition to the public expression of religion and spirituality. While the Left in America today makes an icon of Martin Luther King, Jr., I doubt there is any way that the current Left would allow King to remain primarily faith-based in his political expression and motivation: he would either be pressured to change his expression and approach, or he would be rejected as having "become" a conservative, even though it was really the American Left that shifted on this matter.

I think that this is a matter of concern in American politics for the simple reason that it is this hostile and repressive Left that more than anything else causes the rise of fundamentalist politics in the United States. Were "religion" allowed to express itself across the whole of the American political spectrum as it used to, in wide varieties, there wouldn't be this forced concentration of "religion in politics" on the American Right. But as the Left has grown more militant about such things, they caused the migration of most people of belief toward the only political party that allowed them to express their political views as coming from whatever their worldview happened to be, religious or no. (The deepest irony of all of this is that this ideological hostility to other worldviews in politics understands and proclaims itself to be in the interest of "diversity.")

So I was interested the other year to hear Howard Dean, when he was Chair of the Democratic National Committee, say on Meet The Press that during his time in office he really wanted to try to open up the Democratic Party to people of faith once again, acknowledging that the marginalizing of such voices had done little good in building broad consensuses for Democratic initiatives in American politics. (People don't seem to remember today that until that secularlizing shift in the 1970s, American Evangelicals were a Democratic voting block, for example.) To see President Obama being analyzed in these classic 20th century American categories in The New York Times is therefore interesting as a step toward re-creating some of that wider, more diverse, and (dare I say?) more liberal conversation in the contemporary American Left. The liberalism of Kennedy's day expressed itself as the consensus-making alliances among people of diverse worldviews, in the formula "Protestant, Catholic, Jew." That early 1960s liberalism is now more likely to be labeled "Neo-Conservatism," despite Democratic iconography still appealing to Kennedy and King. Myself, I think that America can do nothing but profit from that most dangerous of diversities: diversities of thought and worldview.

Op-Ed Columnist
Obama’s Christian Realism
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 14, 2009

If you were graduating from Princeton in the first part of the 20th century, you probably heard the university president, John Hibben, deliver one of his commencement addresses. Hibben’s running theme, which was common at that time, was that each person is part angel, part devil. Life is a struggle to push back against the evils of the world without succumbing to the passions of the beast lurking inside.

You might not have been paying attention during the speech, but as you got older a similar moral framework was floating around the culture, and it probably got lodged in your mind.

You, and others of your era, would have been aware that there is evil in the world, and if you weren’t aware, the presence of Hitler and Stalin would have confirmed it. You would have known it is necessary to fight that evil.

At the same time, you would have had a lingering awareness of the sinfulness within yourself. As the cold war strategist George F. Kennan would put it: “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us.”

So as you act to combat evil, you wouldn’t want to get carried away by your own righteousness or be seduced by the belief that you are innocent. Even fighting evil can be corrupting.

As a matter of policy, you would have thought it wise to constrain your own power within institutions. America should fight the Soviet Union, but it should girdle its might within NATO. As Harry Truman said: “We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.”

And you would have championed the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the only system that fits humanity’s noble yet sinful nature. As the midcentury theologian Reinhold Niebuhr declared: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

You would, in short, have been a cold war liberal.

Cold war liberalism had a fine run in the middle third of the 20th century, and it has lingered here and there since. Scoop Jackson kept the flame alive in the 1970s. Peter Beinart wrote a book called “The Good Fight,” giving the tendency modern content.

But after Vietnam, most liberals moved on. It became unfashionable to talk about evil. Some liberals came to believe in the inherent goodness of man and the limitless possibilities of negotiation. Some blamed conflicts on weapons systems and pursued arms control. Some based their foreign-policy thinking on being against whatever George W. Bush was for. If Bush was an idealistic nation-builder, they became Nixonian realists.

Barack Obama never bought into these shifts. In the past few weeks, he has revived the Christian realism that undergirded cold war liberal thinking and tried to apply it to a different world.

( Read more... )

As usual, being a teacher of undergraduate Theology, I was curious to read an article that dealt with the conversations of an introductory sort to questions of the rationality of faith. A sort of conference or public event held in Rome on the topic brought together thinkers from a number of different fields, who presented some classic thoughts on the subjects. More importantly, for our times, they looked to dispel a number of the sorts of intellectual assumptions or bigotries against such thoughts, which are often repeated and clung to in such a way as to prevent such conversations from even beginning. I don't know if I would have followed Sandro Magister in entitling this article as "All the Evidence for God," because I certainly can think of a variety of other approaches to the question that I will toss out to students, but it is interesting to see here some of the variety of approaches that were being gathered and discussed in one event.

All the Evidence for God. An Inquiry

A selected guide to the international event on "God today. With him or without him, that changes everything." Cardinal Ruini the philosopher resurfaced. And joining him in the discussion were Spaemann, Scruton, Van Inwagen. And natural scientists Nowak and Coyne. And experts in music, art, cinema...

by Sandro Magister

ROME, December 13, 2009 – The objective was to "dispel the shadow that makes access to God precarious and frightening for the man of our time."

Benedict XVI said so in the message on December 10 that inaugurated the international event in Rome on "God today. With him or without him, that changes everything," conceived and organized by the committee for the cultural project of the Italian Church, headed by Cardinal Camillo Ruini.

Two days later, at the end of the event, Ruini was beaming. The topic was tough, and listening a challenge, with philosophers and scientists using arduous language. And yet the hall was always full, in an extremely attentive silence. 2500 people went to the grand auditorium on the Via della Conciliazione, a short walk from Saint Peter's Square, to hear about God. Much of the audience was new, and young. Visibly proud of the richness and seriousness of the things said, in a disoriented world that is thirsty for precisely this.

( Read more... )

I opened my mailbox to find this today. My sister did particularly well with this year's Christmas card. They're outrageously cute. Even Haley's "I haven't figured out yet how to smile on command" smile came out fairly cute. And while I love Grace's enthusiasm, I have to give the Squee Award to little Sophie grinning in her outfit with matching cap.

Up at 5am this morning, and now the sky over Lake Michigan is starting to lighten, with bands of deepest maroon, dusky rose, and even hints of dark green, foreshadowing the rising of the Sun.

I have to say, there's something I really dig about sunrises that is entirely different from what I dig about sunsets. Sunsets (the best ones ever were the ones over Saint Mary's Lake at Notre Dame, looking westward over the lake, with the effects probably heightened by the air pollution from Gary, Indiana) are like watching a fireworks display: all dazzling sky art. Sunrises, with the slow build-up that I'm watching now, especially with how much of the horizon I can glimpse from being up on this 6th floor apartment I call "The Ledge," are more like a symphony beginning to tune and warm up, with a sudden explosion into music. Both great, but different.