RJ Snell’s Acedia is about acedia. But before he gets to his extended analysis of that vice, he offers a superb, brilliantly brief, ontology and anthropology, drawing on the resources of Trinitarian theology and the book of Genesis. Among other things, Snell emphasizes the gift that is human work, a gift first given to an unfallen Adam in what is known in Reformed circles as the “dominion mandate.” (In a footnote [38, fn 9], and rightly criticizes the Reformed treatment of this... Read more
Howard Zehr makes clear in his Little Book of Restorative Justice that “restorative justice” isn’t a panacea. It doesn’t pretend to replace the the legal system, nor is it necessarily opposed to retribution (12-13). Primarily, restorative justice is an effort to put the principle actors back at the center of the process of criminal justice – the victims, the offenders, and the communities that are damaged by crime. Victims, Zehr writes, “often feel ignored, neglected, or even abused by the justice... Read more
Robinson Crusoe suffers enormous hardship before he ever gets to his island, and the hardship seems disproportionate to the wrong he commits. Is running off to sea against his father’s wishes such an enormity? In his classic study of Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, GA Starr explains that Robinson “defies the joint authority of family, society, and Providence.” While running away “may be somewhat more complex than, say, eating an apple, yet each deed is significant primarily as an outward token of... Read more
Mark Greengrass (Christendom Destroyed) observes that nearly everyone in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was in debt at one time or another during their lifetimes: “In Rome, for example, about 6 percent of the population found themselves imprisoned for debt in 1582 alone.” Court records provide further evidence: “Debt litigation dominated law cases in London in the century after 1550” (112). And it wasn’t just commoners, merchants, or lower nobility who incurred debt. On the contrary, “the higher up you were... Read more
The peerage seems a near-eternal fixture of European society, but Mark Greengrass (Christendom Destroyed) argues that it was a creation of the early modern period. Dukedoms and peerages “hardly existed before 1500,” but a century or so later “titled aristocrats had mainly taken over as the means by which states admitted new families to the ranks of the highest nobility” (137). It was an advantageous system for princes and kings: “Letters patent for a peerage involved no investment; rather the... Read more
Once, writes Mark Greengrass (Christendom Destroyed), “Nobility existed to defend Christendom by force of arms. Knighthood was the institution founded by the Church for the purpose” (123). Changes in the technology of warfare, along with the breakdown of unified Christendom, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, undermined that aim. Chivalric rituals continued, but chivalry “became a way of life by which lay aristocratic elites retired from the increasing brutality of warfare into a make-believe world, peopled by perfect, gentle knights.”... Read more
David Goldman (It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You) claims that the Global South is marked by two trends: “the fastest rate of cultural extinction in history as well as the fastest rate of Christian evangelization in history.” The two, he argues, are related: “It is only because of the terrible depth of [the tragedy of cultural extinction] that hundreds of millions of souls turn in fear and trembling to a religion that represents... Read more
David Goldman (It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You) argues that “modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, namely the critics, who made the reputation of the abstract impressionists, the most famous example being Clement Greenberg’s sponsorship of Pollock.” He thinks that the audience for modern art is somewhat like the Western intellectuals’ inclination to communism: “They were happy to admire communism from a distance,... Read more
“Scholars today (though in practice it is more the custom of the popularizers and media exponents) can afford to be snide or patronizing about the missionary movement,” writes Andrew Walls in The Cross-Cultural Process of Christian History. “But many branches of Western learning now exist because of it.” He points to the correspondence of Max Müller, or J G Frazer, or A C Haddon, with missionaries; not because these luminaries could identify with missionary aims, but because they were aware of... Read more
Andrew Walls (The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History) argues that Europe’s encounter with non-Western peoples was one of the key factors in the secularization of Western politics. At a moment when Europe’s hegemony over the world seemed secure, it came “by means of the expansion of the Iberian powers, into massive contact with the nonWestern world. With Christianity essentially territorial in concept, all recent experience pointed to crusade as the natural mode of relationship.” And so conquistadors embarked on their... Read more
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