Meanderings, 19 August 2023

Good morning!

Photo by Carmen Meurer on Unsplash

Yes she is! the Fourth Cappadocian:

Icons, pictures, and mosaics of the “Three Holy Hierarchs”, also called “the Cappadocians”, are common in churches throughout the east—three theologians immortalized as wise figures with books in hand. Indeed, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa deserve admiration for many of their contributions to the church: they aided in the theological formulations that led to the Creed at Constantinople (known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed), created one of the first welfare hospitals (the Basiliad), and combated the unorthodox theology of Eunomius and Apollinarius. But, one of the unfortunate effects of this portrayal is who it leaves out: the fourth Cappadocian, Macrina the Younger, the sister and teacher of these Hierarchs.

Macrina the Younger was the oldest of 10 children, born to Basil Sr. and Emmelia in 327. Basil of Caesarea was born second (b. 329) and Gregory of Nyssa was the fifth born (b. 335). Apparently, strong female Christian influences were already a part of her family’s culture—her grandmother, Macrina the Elder taught them theology and spiritual formation (see Basil of Caesarea, Letter 204.6). It became clear very early that Macrina was a devout follower of Christ. When she was 12, her father began making plans for her to be married, but her betrothed suddenly died. Rather than find another suitor, she dedicated herself to a life of virginity, claiming that she was legally a ‘widow’, despite her parent’s pleas for marriage. From this point on, Macrina started to make a profound spiritual impact on this home. She became a spiritual and physical aide to her mother, especially after her father died in 345. “Under the guidance of her mother, she kept her own life spotless… and at the same time by the example of her own life she provided great guidance to her mother towards the same goal, namely that of philosophy, drawing her on little by little to the immaterial, more perfect life (Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of St. Macrina, 26). During this time, her younger brother Basil was sent off to school in Caesarea of Cappadocia, Constantinople, and Athens, where he met his close friend Gregory of Nazianzus. After Basil came home though, he was, to say the least, a bit snobbish.

Spam helps!

The makers of Spam, saying that their “special relationship with the Hawaiian community spans decades,” have donated over 264,000 cans to aid the disaster-relief efforts on Maui, the company said in a press release.

“Three truckloads of Spam products are on their way to the impacted areas with two more trucks following,” Hormel Foods, the company that owns Spam, said. “In all, the Spam brand has donated cash and product with a retail value of more than $1,000,000 to directly help those impacted by the wildfires.”

The company said it has partnered with nonprofit group Convoy of Hope to get the cans to where they are needed most.

“The fact that Spam doesn’t need refrigeration makes it a perfect item for Convoy to deliver to survivors,” Stacy Lamb, vice president, disaster services at Convoy of Hope, is quoted as saying in the press release.

More Spam is consumed per person in Hawaii than in any other state. It’s stacked on a block of rice and wrapped in seaweed to make Spam musubi, and sold at fast-food chains like McDonald’s in Hawaii. There’s even an annual Waikiki Spam Jam festival.

Hormel Foods said it has also developed a “Spam Brand loves Maui” t-shirt, and 100% of the proceeds will be donated to Aloha United Way’s Maui Fire Relief Fund.

Spam was first introduced to Asia-Pacific during World War II, a welcome substitute to meat that was increasingly becoming unaffordable or simply unavailable in the conflict-wracked region.

Interesting news about Monarchs:

If you’ve ever wondered how the monarch butterfly got its spots, University of Georgia researchers may have just found the answer.

The new study suggests that the butterflies with more white spots are more successful at reaching their long-distance wintering destination. Although it’s not yet clear how the spots aid the species’ migration, it’s possible that the spots change airflow patterns around their wings.

“We undertook this project to learn how such a small animal can make such a successful long-distance flight,” said lead author Andy Davis, an assistant researcher in UGA’s Odum School of Ecology. “We actually went into this thinking that monarchs with more dark wings would be more successful at migrating because dark surfaces can improve flight efficiency. But we found the opposite.”

The monarchs with less black on their wings and more white spots were the ones that made it to their ultimate destination, nearly 3,000 miles away in south and central Mexico.

“It’s the white spots that seem to be the difference maker,” Davis said.

I love to read Dorothy Sayers:

In the wake of WWI, a brilliant woman in search of an income found herself in a quandary. Here she was, a woman in a man’s world, and therefore unable to become a professor—a path she would have likely pursued, had she been born half a century later. She was, nevertheless, someone prone to live inside her head, dwelling less comfortably with people than with her intense and deep ideas about so many topics, from the Greco-Roman Classics to Dante’s poetry to French literature and, most of all, theology and God’s claims on her life.

Sure, the myth persists today that degrees in English or other literatures are worthless; apt to leave one broke, unemployed, and unemployable. This is a lie as much in our own age as it was in Sayers’. You see, every advertising agency or company selling any kind of goods needs a copywriter.

The copywriter’s job is far from glamorous, but just think of all these words with which we are besieged on every side today—on roadside billboards, on websites for every product imaginable, on ads that troll us on social media. Someone has to write all these words, painstakingly making sure that they read smoothly, are free of error, and hopefully portray the product enticingly enough to get readers to buy it. This someone is a career writer, most often a proud owner of a degree in English or literature with dreams and aspirations of becoming the next J. K. Rowling or Dante or Keats. Instead, here they are, writing eloquent ads for meatless breakfast sausages, absolutely leak-proof diapers, and toilet paper so soft even the bears love it.

It is mind-blowing to imagine in retrospect, as we think of Dorothy Sayers as who she became by the end of her life—a best-selling crime writer, translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and a public intellectual par excellence—that for a decade (from 1922 to 1931), she was primarily a copywriter for an advertising agency.

Sayers was never content to be peddling mustard and beer—as characteristically elaborate and witty as her jingles for such products were. But this time in her life was not wasted. Rather, she used this period to solve her own crisis of the evangelical mind and in the process, perhaps not even quite realizing it at the time, she determined the track that the rest of her life took.

The key question that she faced during this rather low time in her life was: what should an intellectual woman do to make ends meet if she feels called to a life of the mind, yet the traditional careers that most readily offer such a life are closed to her? Her dilemma is a remarkable example of plus-ça-change. As I wrote recently in another essay, the new and future crisis of the evangelical mind involves not academics, but independent scholars. Unable to get the jobs for which their Ph.D. prepared them, many still want a life of the mind. And, of course, others (like myself or, to name a more prominent example, Karen Swallow Prior) resign from academic positions that were not designed for human flourishing. For all who struggle with these questions, seeking a life that would allow them to use their mind for the glory of God, Sayers’ trajectory offers food for thought, even as her path is not one that is perfectly replicable at will.

Bad news about WVU, and we Bible professors care deeply about foreign languages.

Last week, West Virginia University (WVU) announced a plan to raze some of its core programs. The public land-grant university intends to eliminate 9 percent of its majors (32 programs total), all of its foreign language programs, and 16 percent of its full-time faculty members (169 in total). The departments targeted for these massive cuts count Truman, Marshall, Fulbright, and Rhodes scholars among their alumni. These cuts were recommended by the consulting firm rpk GROUP, and there’s every reason to believe they’re a trial balloon for doing this elsewhere. Anyone who cares about higher education should be alarmed about what this portends for public universities.

These changes are the functional equivalent of an atomic bomb at WVU, and stand to make it increasingly difficult for the institution to meet its stated mission to create “a diverse and inclusive culture that advances education, healthcare and prosperity for all by providing access and opportunity.” So why is it doing this?

An apple a day has been my habit for decades:

You probably know the saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” But are apples really that good for you? Snow White, who ate a poisoned apple and fell into a coma, might claim otherwise. But assuming you’re not living in a fairy tale, apples are one of the most delicious and healthy fruits you can eat.

“Apples are popular for a reason,” says registered dietitian Amber Sommer, RD, LD. “They’re easy to eat on the go, and they taste terrific. But what most people don’t know is that eating them regularly over time can provide a big health boost.” Sommer shares the benefits of apples and why you should grab a bushel at the market.

Apples are only about 60 calories each, giving you a lot of nutritional bang for the calorie count. You get the most health benefits of apples when you eat them whole, raw and unpeeled. Juice, cider and applesauce aren’t as healthy because cooking and processing apples remove valuable nutrients.

Apples’ nutrients vary a bit, depending on the type you eat. Red Delicious apples may be the healthiest variety of apple. Its dark, red skin contains more antioxidants (substances that protect cells from damage). But all apples are loaded with nutrients, including:

• Antioxidants: Apple peels are rich in antioxidants, most notably quercetin. This nutrient is found in highly pigmented (colorful) foods, including citrus fruits, berries, green tea and red wine.

• Fiber: Apples are a good source of fiber, which aids digestion.

• Water: Apples are about 85% water, making them a hydrating snack.

At the end of a long piece by Philip Jenkins on how self-expression/secularization (generally used) is now being accompanied by a revival of older traditional categories:

Finally, might the move to that individualist/secular Utopia be a self-limiting cycle? Look at Sweden, which I have cited earlier as the textbook model for secularization, for individualism and for values based on self-expression. As an unavoidable part of that package, Sweden’s fertility rate fell to unsustainably low levels, which in turn meant bringing in lots of immigrants to keep the society functioning. Most of those migrants came from societies that were distinctly non-secular. Twenty percent of Sweden’s population is now foreign born, and the Muslim share of overall population is at least eight percent. (By way of comparison, the current US proportion of foreign-born is below fourteen percent, but the non-Christian share is much smaller). A secular liberal society thus creates the inevitable conditions for the increasing role of non-secular and (often) non-liberal populations.

Conversely, the old stock society reacts to that change by reverting to non-liberal and quite Traditional/Survival policies. The most significant development in that country in recent years has been the dramatic rise of the Sweden Democrats, a party with fascist antecedents, although it has since cleaned up its act quite considerably, purging most of the blatant Nazis and skinheads. Even so, SD has parlayed its anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural credentials into an impressive 21 percent of the national vote, making it the country’s second largest party. SD provides essential outside support to the Swedish ruling coalition created last year, an alliance of three other firmly Rightist parties.

The Sweden Democrats used to be more explicit about their roots, using pictures of burly Viking warriors with shields inscribed “Keep Sweden Swedish!” (You can trace their evolving symbols and iconography here). Or to return to the phrase I quoted earlier, “a sense of threat drives people to seek refuge in family, racial or national groups.” Hold on, wasn’t that meant to be something we found in those old style poor Traditional/Survival societies, and not the modernized secular individualistic ones? Not in places like, well, Sweden? Now, the SD are absolutely not a religious party in any sense, and they represent no kind of Christian revival. But they certainly do manifest an unabashed revival of ethnocentric Traditional/Survival values of a kind that are surprising for prosperous Europe.

In passing, I am always amused to hear Americans hymn the praises of “Scandinavian social democracy,” which indicate that they (the hymners) have managed to miss the last couple of decades of that region’s history.

To take a related example, Germany is another very prosperous and developed country that stands high in the Secular/Self-Expression quadrant. Exactly like Sweden, it is also a land of historically low fertility and high immigration, which has opened the door to a far Right populist party very much like the Sweden Democrats, in the form of the AfD, Alternative für Deutschland. AfD is in the news currently as it is running at an alarming 21 percent in the polls, which is coincidentally the share of the vote that SD picked up last year in their country. A panicked German government is seriously considering banning AfD. Yes, obviously, Germans don’t want any kind of Nazi revival, but more immediately, they don’t want their party system to end up like Sweden’s.

In such instances, modernization and development demand massive social changes, which undermine people’s sense of trust and security, which in turn makes them rethink the values that led to that modernization and development in the first place. Threats and insecurity take many forms.

So maybe the processes are not as linear as we might initially think, still less inevitable.