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“It is not that, as an intellectual, one can or should seek to subordinate everybody else’s knowledge to one’s own grand purposes. Even G. W. F. Hegel arrived too late to do that, and no one has tried since. What is called for, paradoxically, is less a store of knowledge than a “store” of ignorance. By forcing oneself to go where one is oneself the blinking beginner rather than the seasoned expert, one learns to turn one’s own narrow intellectual sophistication into a broadened version of itself. A generalist is someone with a keener-than-average awareness of how much there is to be ignorant about. In this way, generalization as a style of writing is decidedly different from mere simplification or popularization. If a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, a generalist is unapologetically someone who knows less and less about more and more. Both forms of knowledge are genuine and legitimate. Someone who acquires a great deal of knowledge about one field grows in knowledge, but so does someone who acquires a little knowledge about many fields. Knowing more and more about less and less tends to breed confidence. Knowing less and less about more and more tends to breed humility. Popularization, which certainly has its place, conveys the specialist’s confidence but also his or her isolation. Generalization conveys the generalist’s diffidence but also his or her connectedness and openness to further connections. Something like this, to repeat, is the core difference between the academic and the intellectual in action on the page.” —Jack Miles (HT: Alan)
I was just thinking about a related idea today. Not exactly the same, to be sure, but related.
Our culture, full of sound-bites and twitter feeds, has little room for extended conversation, and the polarization of opinions coupled with uneducated ad hominem attacks have turned the public square into a WWE ring: make a confident statement, fight with flair, and hope that somebody backs you up. I’m not comfortable with that, and I don’t think many other reflective people are either. I’m not an expert. I can’t make a conclusive statement about too many things and have the confidence that it will stand. I’m not a heavyweight. I’m a layman, a guy who wants to explore ideas, present his thoughts, and have some conversation. Am I allowed to grow and change in my thinking over the years or will that be viewed as flip-flopping? Do I have to draw a line in the sand now, become an expert on something, and never turn back? I hope not. I have convictions, to be sure, but I also know how much I don’t know, and I’d like the public square to be a place where dialogue enhances and enriches the participants, and encourages us all toward a more robust sense of truth, goodness, and beauty.
(via rhizomejournal)
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“ When Christ says “Go and sin no more,” He is not saying “Quid pro quo.” He’s offering her a further gift: the gift of chastity. God’s generosity is pretty boundless, and He doesn’t expect repayment. He’s a Father. When you have kids and you impose rules on them, it’s not because you think that by following the rules the children will somehow make themselves worthy of your love and of the life that you have bestowed on them. Any parent can see that that’s just a crazy way of thinking about it – even though most of us have kids who think of it that way from time to time. The rules exist in order to keep the children happy and safe, not in order to make the kids pleasing to the parents. The kids are pleasing by default, even when they’re cranky, or get toothache, or snivel, or throw things at their siblings. There’s nothing that they can do in order to earn our love, or in order to make that love go away. In so far as we’re good parents, the things that we “demand” of our kids are actually gifts that we try to give them which happen to be arduous to receive. The gift of peace between siblings, the gift of self-control, the gift of a healthy body, the gift of a well-formed intellect, these are all gifts which we can bestow only if the child is willing to co-operate and is willing to work, trusting in the benevolent will of their mother or father. None the less, they are gifts which are intended for the good of the child.
It’s the same with God. Avoiding sin is not a bargaining chip that we offer to Jesus in order to make us worthy of His Body and Blood poured out on the cross. We are not called to avoid sin to pay our way out of Hell (which we can’t do anyways) or to prove to God that we really love Him. We are called to avoid sin because in doing so we are empowered to trust in God enough to recieve the gifts that He desperately wants to give to us.
This is why it is disastrous when the gift of chastity is presented to people as a demand, an exchange of happiness in this life for happiness in the next life. It’s not that at all. Chastity is good, not merely as a means of becoming a Saint in some future existence, but as a means of preserving dignity, integrity and happiness right now, in the present. The problem with Catholic outreach to sexual sinners is not that we don’t tell them the truth about the sinfulness of sin, but rather that we do not show them, by our actions and our words, that God’s love is bountiful, without limit, unmerited and unmeritable, available to all, capable of healing the most profound kinds of pain, utterly trustworthy, and directed towards the authentic goods of human life.
”— Melinda Selmys (via wesleyhill) -
“ It’s telling that Dostoyevsky, himself a Christian, offered no direct theological rebuttal to his character’s speech. The counterpoint to Ivan in “The Brothers Karamazov” is supplied by other characters’ examples of Christian love transcending suffering, not by a rhetorical justification of God’s goodness.
In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence.
In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.
That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.
The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.
In the leafless hills of western Connecticut, this is the only Christmas spirit that could possibly matter now.
”— Ross Douthat, “The Loss of the Innocents” (via wesleyhill)
