Meanderings, 11 November 2023

Have an autumn weekend!

Photo by Alisa Anton on Unsplash

If you feed them, they (the javelinas) will come:

Growling, clacking teeth, the rumble of hooves – as night falls at one of the United States’ most scenic golf clubs, sinister noises reverberate off the red-rock canyon walls.

And when the Arizona sunshine breaks over Seven Canyons in the morning, the destruction is revealed. Sprawling mounds of ravaged turf blot the 7,000-yard course like open wounds, soil and grass strewn in all directions across otherwise pristine fairways.

The perpetrators? Javelina, a pig-like creature with raking canine teeth whose capacity for chaos in the town of Sedona has seen them become a viral sensation.

“When you come upon them and see them, it’s like The Tasmanian devil,” Seven Canyons general manager Dave Bisbee told CNN.

“There’s turf flying all over the place, there’s grunting, there’s fighting. For rather small creatures, they do a lot of damage.

“They can rototill some turf with those teeth … it is really disturbing when you see it.”

From Miami to Medellin, with money to spare:

She’d been living in Miami for around three decades and had built a life that she loved.

But Julie Balzano, originally from Long Island, found herself struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living in the “Magic City,” recently ranked as the 10th most expensive city in the world on Swiss private bank Julius Baer’s annual Lifestyle Index.

After selling her home in 2021 with the intention of downsizing, Balzano couldn’t find anything within her price range and decided to rent a townhouse for a year in order to “let the market stabilize” and eventually “buy back in.”

However, as time went on, the 60-year-old, who is divorced with two grown-up children, realized that this was unlikely to happen anytime soon, and she’d need to come up with a different plan for her future.

“Property prices were rising exponentially,” Balzano tells CNN Travel. “My income was not keeping up, and I was slowly but surely falling behind.”

With her rent “creeping up and up,” Balzano was determined to reduce living costs so that she’d be able to retire, or at least think about retiring, in the not too distant future.

“So how do I get from where I am currently, to there?” she thought to herself.

Balzano had been visiting Colombia regularly for around eight years while working for a trade association, and one of her good friends had recently relocated to the South American country.

As she weighed up her options, she began considering the prospect of doing so herself.

And when the same friend offered to put her up in her home in the city of Medellin to give her some time to get on her feet, she decided to go for it.

David Gushee’s diagnosis is not quite Christian nationalism. An interview by Kristin Kobes DuMez of David Gushee about his new book on Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies:

KDM: As a Professor of Christian Ethics, why this book? 

DG: I write this book because I believe some current forms of traditionalist Christian political engagement need to be critiqued precisely in Christian ethical terms. What I call “authoritarian reactionary Christianity” does not qualify as an adequate expression of Christian discipleship, besides being destructive of democracy. 

KDM: You coin a term here, “authoritarian reactionary Christianity.” Can you describe how you came to it, and why you prefer it over “Christian nationalism”?

DG: In Christian ethics, we have a long history of the use of the term "Nationalism." It has meant a dangerously exaggerated version of patriotism, or love of country. Nationalism goes beyond a morally justifiable love of one's own country toward a dangerous hostility and contempt for other peoples and countries. Religious nationalism blends a version of religion with nationalism to supercharge it with the fuel of religious zeal. It is often associated with violence. The term has been used to describe dynamics in multiple religious and national contexts. 

The recent use of the term Christian nationalism, as initiated by the fine book by sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead (Taking America Back for God), really means Christian nation-ism -- which they actually say at one point. What they mean is a political agenda on the part of a certain part of the US population to (re)create a certain kind of white-dominated, patriarchal, conservative, Christian nation, and to vote and act accordingly. This has become shorthanded as Christian nationalism, or white Christian nationalism, and I think it is describing something quite real but different from the older uses of the term nationalism, religious nationalism, etc. 

I argue that it is more descriptive to say that many Christians, in a number of countries that (once) had a culturally dominant Christian population or (once) had an established, official Christian government, have fallen into a reactionary posture toward politics that is motivated by their group's loss of cultural, political, and legal dominance. In the US, we can see hostile Christian reaction to pretty much every major social change since the 1960s, and traditionalist Christians have been fighting back since that time. For a long time, traditionalist reactionary Christians in the US used evangelistic, missionary, and eventually democratic political strategies to attempt to advance their agenda. But especially since the emergence of Trump, his obvious authoritarianism and lack of commitment to playing within the democratic rules of the game have helped some of these traditionalist Christians to feel justified in moving toward anti-democratic strategies, including for example denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election, participating in militias like the Proud Boys or joining the January 6 insurrection, or supporting others who did so. This is definitely no longer anything as quaint as “values voting” - this is challenging democracy itself.

Take a break with autumn words.

Alan Jacobs lets the cat of ignorance out of the bag of incompetent editors and publishers:

The author, James Walvin — a pretty eminent historian (primarily of The Atlantic slave trade) from the University of York — simply can’t have said those things. But lo and behold, here he is describing the D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey revival meetings in England: 

Their down-to-earth style filled the largest of city venues wherever they appeared. They held 285 such meetings in London alone. Theirs was a style which, inevitably, was heartily disliked by the more solemn corners of British worship. When Ira Sankey performed in the parish church in the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-le-Frith, one parishioner was so outraged that he thought the local bishop “will have something to say” to the curate who had invited him.

Throughout, Moody portrayed Christ himself as a sinner, a person with whom armies of ordinary people could identify. If Christ could be saved, so too could the humble and ordinary people in the audience. Salvation was there for all. This simple, seductive point, a potent message for the poor in the late nineteenth century, was exactly what John Newton himself had pressed home, in his letters and hymns a century before. Salvation was available to all who repented. …

A few comments, typed with quivering hands: 

1. The reviewer, Priscilla M. Jensen, calls these “theological observations,” but they are no such thing: they are historical statements that are catastrophically, outrageously wrong — the equivalent of saying that Benjamin Franklin was a Buddhist and that Frederick Douglass was a native speaker of French. They are so wrong, and wrong about facts so elementary, that I couldn’t possibly trust one word of Walvin’s book. Nor should any of you. 

2. If Walvin thinks that “Christ could be saved,” by whom might that be accomplished? If Jesus Christ is one of the saved, who is the Savior? Perhaps Walvin could reflect on that name “Christ” — does he think that it’s Jesus’s surname, and that especially respectful people would refer to him as Mr. Christ? 

3. If “throughout” his evangelistic sermons D. L. Moody called Mr. Christ a sinner, I would love to see just one example of it. But there isn’t one. It is not, as Jensen said, “vanishingly unlikely,” it is impossible. Moody’s entire theology — like that of every other orthodox Christian — was completely governed by his belief that, as the letter to the Hebrews says, “We have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” 

   As Tim Larsen noted in the essay that got me onto this subject, “It takes a village” to disseminate ignorance this gross: James Walvin wrote the sentences I have quoted, but no peer reviewer noticed anything wrong, no editor, no copy editor — not one person in the whole complex process at the University of California Press knew enough even to question the claim that an evangelical preacher regularly proclaimed that Jesus Christ is a sinner, or that the average Church of England parish in the eighteenth century featured priests mumbling prayers in Latin. Never at any point was it thought necessary to have a manuscript on an English Christian hymn looked at by someone with an elementary knowledge of English Christianity. 

   Finally: Why — why, oh why, oh why — do people (scholars especially!) insist on writing books on subjects that they cannot be bothered to learn the basic facts about? Write on something you’re sufficiently interested in to learn about, for heaven’s sake! 

What about annotated editions of classics? Like them or not? Like IVP Academic’s edition of Dorothy Sayers’ Man Born to be King.

Why should this post go into such detail over what some might consider to be a relatively minor piece of scholarship? In part, because any book’s format (particularly one targeted to the academic sector) should meet the requirements of a real world use case. This annotated edition was created, not to impress the reader, but to support the anticipated educational work of reading and analysis. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that scholarly output doesn’t have to be flashy to serve its function.   

I love the coffee-table approach to annotated editions found in the trade publishing sector. (I own many from both Harvard University Press as well as W.W. Norton.) Those have the space to allow a single detailed annotation to run across three printed pages. The artwork causes one to linger. That said, a physical book’s format needs to be fit for purpose if hard copy publications are to be sustainable. Small or mid-sized publishers serving the academic marketplace (such as IVP Academic) are thoughtfully strategic in their production planning. The final product is worth the effort.