My friend John Barach offers a further gloss on the Richard Wilbur poem I discussed here yesterday. He suggests that the final lines about the milkweed possessing the field allude to Psalm 37:9, 11: Those who wait on the Lord, the humble, inherit the land. And of course that anticipates Jesus’ promise that the “meek will inherit the earth.” John hears a scrambled echo of that promise in the title of Wilbur’s poem: “Milkweed” unscrampled is “meek will.” Read more
Obama’s re-election leaves social conservatives feeling as if the earth trembled and shifted. Writing in the Weekly Standard , Christopher Caldwell explains why: Obama won as a values candidate. It’s just that his values are opposite those of religious conservatives. When Obama “set out to pick a fight with the Catholic church over contraception,” it looked like a political flub, but Obama “understood that ‘reproductive rights’ are similar to ‘gun rights.’ Even if the number of people who care about... Read more
I argued earlier this week that, as a matter of historical fact, Western economies have not been state-free zones. My question here is more theoretical and general: Is it even possible to have a state-free economy? Yes, at a small scale, in, say, a tribal economy. But then in a tribal economy, there is barely a “state” to intervene or refrain from intervention. Certainly, there is nothing like the modern bureaucratic state. For modern economies, the state has an indispensable... Read more
Richard Wilbur’s “A Milkweed” has been haunting me all week. It’s a useful exercise in interpretation: Short, accessible, memorable, and profound. Today’s text: Anonymous as cherubs Over the crib of God White seeds are floating Out of my burst pod. What power had I Before I learned to yield? Shatter me, great wind: I shall possess the field. What is the poem “about”? (more…) Read more
We think of leaders as large, dominant figures, whirlwinds that control every room and crowd, know what to do and tell everyone to do it. To that, Susan Cain ( Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking ) has two responses: First, that this vision of leadership has a specific, specifically American, history; second, that it ain’t necessarily so. Cain spends some number of pages tracing the “rise of the ‘mighty likeable fellow’” and assessing... Read more
Beds in Scripture are sick beds (Hezekiah) or death beds (Jacob, David). Beds are also analogous to altars. In 2 Kings 4:8ff, the woman who sets up a room for Elisha quips the room with a table and a menorah and a chair and a bed. This is an upper room for the man of God, who bears the presence of God with him, and the upper room resembles a sanctuary. It has the furnishings of a sanctuary: There is... Read more
In a brief talk this morning, my colleague Doug Wilson highlighted the drama of the book of Jeremiah: Jeremiah stands against the religious and political elites of his time. He has a very controversial message; he doesn’t sound like a prophet; his message of surrender violates every instinct of the people of Jerusalem. His life doesn’t look blessed; he’s beaten and rejected and despised of men, thrown into a cistern. As Doug pointed out, we know that Jeremiah is the... Read more
After beginning with the lament “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22 turns to thanksgiving and praise: “I will declare thy name unto my brethren” (v. 22). In his study of Hebrews 2:12 ( Proclamation and Praise: Hebrews 2:12 and the Christology of Worship ), Ron Man points out that the author of Hebrews quotes the beginning of the second half of the Psalm. Hebrews 2:12 views the Psalm of thanks as the words of Christ,... Read more
David Cheal ( The Gift Economy ) offers a deft critique of Mauss’s and C.A. Gregory’s theories of gift. The central rebuttal is to point to the fairly obvious fact that giving continues to occupy a large place in modern societies. Gift-giving is big business, as that pile of Christmas catalogs already accumulating in your mailbox demonstrates. Mauss and others miss this because they work from a stance of “anthropological elementarism,” which assumes that the only relevant forms of giving... Read more
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