Meanderings, 24 February 2024

If it weren’t for the nonsense so much of life has to offer, days and evenings would be a breeze. And, speaking of evenings, how about the Indiana women’s team beating the Iowa women?! That was a fun game to watch. On to some Meanderings for you folks, and I so appreciate your coming back every week for this selection of stuff from the internet. Kris and others send me links. I don’t find these myself.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Williams-t.html

OK, I’m a fan of Flannery O’Connor so I’m interested in this interview with Jessica Hooten Wilson and the book she has written:

Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine, having published two novels and dozens of short stories that would cement her reputation as one of the American South’s most revered literary voices. After her final story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was released posthumously in 1965, an unfinished novel, titled “Why Do the Heathen Rage?,” remained tantalizingly archived in folders at Emory University in Georgia. Only a short excerpt of the novel had appeared during her lifetime, in a 1964 Esquire feature labeled “Works in Progress.”

Had O’Connor lived, there’s little telling how this work might have turned out. Scholars who attempted to sort through the unpublished material found, in the words of one, “only an untidy jumble of ideas and abortive starts, full scenes written and rewritten many times, several extraneous images, and one fully developed character.”

In her recently published book, Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress (Brazos Press, 2024), author and scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson attempts to unravel this textual mystery, giving shape and context to the fascinating fragments O’Connor labored over in the last years of her life. Centered on Walter Tilman, a listless young man beset by illness and living at home on his family’s farm, the “Heathen” typescripts hint at revelatory new directions O’Connor may have taken in her fiction, from issues of racism and social justice to her own faith and physical deterioration.

Below, Hooten Wilson speaks with LOA about her deep dives into O’Connor esoterica, the bold artistic innovations contained in the uncompleted novel, and how to think about the author’s evolving viewpoints on the central moral and political questions of her time—and, indeed, of ours.

[Read the interview at the link above]

For some fun:

Look out, there’s another chess prodigy on the scene.

At eight years, six months and 11 days, Ashwath Kaushik made history on Sunday by becoming the youngest player ever to beat a chess grandmaster in a classical tournament game.

The youngster, who lives in Singapore, achieved the feat after beating Poland’s Jacek Stopa, 37, in round four of the Burgdorfer Stadthaus Open in Switzerland.

The previous record was only just set last month by then eight-year-old Leonid Ivanovic – who became the first player under the age of nine to beat a grandmaster in a classical game – but Ashwath was five months younger than the Serbian when he beat Stopa, according to Chess.com.

“It felt really exciting and amazing, and I felt proud of my game and how I played, especially since I was worse at one point but managed to come back from that,” Kaushik told Chess.com after beating Stopa.

Born in India in 2015, Ashwath has already made a name for himself after winning a number of youth tournaments around the world – notably becoming the World Under-8 Rapid champion in 2022, per Chess.com.

I’m just going to say it: A top notch piece by Bob Smietana about Trump’s speech in Nashville about his support for American Christianity, and I’ll leave it at that as I’d like to say more. Read about it here.

NASHVILLE (RNS) — In an evening filled with apocalyptic rhetoric, patriotic songs, and campaign promises, former President Donald Trump promised Thursday (Feb. 22) that he would make a triumphant return to the White House next year, and that he would restore Christian preachers to power in American culture.

“If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before,” Trump told the annual gathering of National Religious Broadcasters at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center.

Speaking to a packed-out ballroom of radio and television preachers and other Christian communicators, Trump described himself as a friend and fellow believer, and someone ready to restore God to his rightful place in America culture.

Reformers, the Church Tradition, and the Anabaptists by Jacob Randolph, and here’s his gist:

But is it an accurate picture? Is it right to say that radicals had no desire to align themselves with the ancients, no patience for the things that had come before, no awareness of the need for catholicity? On the other hand, is it true that Luther, Calvin, and others saw themselves as standard bearers for the Great Tradition, that they meticulously and self-consciously aligned their ideas to fit the mold of the great Fathers and doctors of a glorious scholastic Christendom? The answer is—as with all history worth its salt—it’s complicated.

For the purposes of this piece, I’ll touch briefly on the second question by focusing my efforts on the first question, were Anabaptists anti-tradition? And I’ll give you my answer up front: It depends on what the tradition was, who was writing, and why. But here’s the rub: this is true not only of Anabaptists, but of all the Protestant reformers.

The reformers’ use of ancient sources was often imbalanced and ad hoc. Early Protestants were walking a tightrope in their attempts to secure the stability of their various movements. On the one hand, they needed to prove that the medieval view of the church and its piety they inherited was dangerous enough to prompt self-removal. On the other hand, they also needed to prove that they were not the heretics or schismatics that the secular authorities suspected them of being. This was as true for so-called radicals as it was for Lutherans and Reformed Christians. Appeals to and against traditional authorities were polemical in most cases, sources one could accumulate to marshal a defense for one’s perspective. This is not to say that the reformers didn’t genuinely care what church fathers or medieval doctors wrote (although it’s clear they weren’t always careful in their assessment). But the fact of the matter is that the early reformers frequently used tradition to bolster their (often idiosyncratic) interpretations of scripture. The respect given to the church fathers as a collective voice masked the manifold ways individual voices could be deployed for various reasons. And when Protestants wanted to get spicy, they had no issue pointing that out (see, e.g., Luther’s “On the Councils and the Church”). But many Anabaptists and Spiritualists were, like Lutherans and Calvinists, aware they’d be more confident bringing tradition as a wingman to the doctrinal dance.

Roger Olson, folk religion, and Christian Nationalism:

One of the most influential articles I read was by sociologist of religion Robert Ellwood, who I got to know personally later. It was about Christianity’s “down-home turn.” Right now I don’t remember where it was published, but I cut out the article and kept it in my files. It spurred me to write my book Questions to All Your Answers: The Journey from Folk Religion to Examined Faith.

According to Ellwood, folk religion is basing religion on feelings without critical thinking or even cognitive content. Folk religion is ahistorical and anti-intellectual. (I went beyond the brief article by Ellwood and studied other descriptions of folk religion.) Folk religion thrives on something other than given revelation, history, reason and that “something other” can be many things including, I believe, a religious-like commitment to and passion for something finite like a nation state. The religion of Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s was the National Socialist idea of “Germania” and the Aryan Race.

Today’s American Christian Nationalism is a form of folk religion. It is clearly disconnected from history (except American history), revelation (America is nowhere found in the Bible), and critical thinking. It is a form of “group think” and smacks of cultism, especially when takes a political form such as Trumpism. And it is based on a veneration, if not worship, of America (feeling).

I have spoken with many American Christian pastors about American Nationalism and asked them why they shy away from guiding their congregants away from it. The answer is uniform: I would lose my church. But if at least some expressions of American Christian Nationalism are heretical, as I believe they are, is it worth it to try to keep a church that cannot stand to hear the truth? What to do? I sympathize with their dilemma, but worry about their silence about the subject.

Do we need more academic diversity? From the Harvard Crimson.

In 2002, writer David Horowitz proposed an Academic Bill of Rights to ensure viewpoint diversity in U.S. higher education. The proposal was criticized for not respecting the autonomy and scholarly standards of academic disciplines, and for attempting to force change from the top down.

The critics had a point, but I think his diagnosis of the problem was correct: Higher education struggles with respect for appropriate forms of viewpoint diversity.

For example, the imbalance in faculty political commitments has only grown in the intervening decades: By one measure, the liberal-to-conservative ratio of faculty in American universities increased from 2:1 in 1989 to 5:1 in 2017. According to a 2023 survey by The Crimson, among Harvard faculty, it now appears to stand at roughly 26:1.

If this lack of viewpoint diversity were simply due to the steady conquest of ignorance by knowledge, this would be worth celebrating. The reality, however, is that ideological or political homogeneity often just inhibits the pursuit of truth, sometimes causing entire areas of inquiry to be neglected. This hinders universities’ missions of generating, preserving, and transmitting knowledge and preparing students for democratic citizenship.

As John Stuart Mill argued in "On Liberty," ignoring alternative viewpoints compromises our capacity to pursue truth, to understand other perspectives, to realize when we are wrong, and even to adequately defend our positions when right. Lack of intellectual diversity among faculty (and administrators) might also render open student discourse increasingly difficult as indeed we experience at Harvard. ….

I don’t believe universities should implement new quotas targeting ideological diversity, but I do think they should self-consciously diversify the research areas they target in faculty searches. I would put forward the following principle as one consideration, among many, that departments should weigh in faculty hiring:

When a research area requires attention to viewpoints that are held by a large portion of the population and that exert significant influence on policy or society, it would be advantageous to have someone on faculty who either holds the view or conducts research on those who do. More specifically, when such viewpoints concern values, or concern matters on which there is not scholarly consensus, it would be advantageous to have a faculty member who holds the view; in contrast, when there is evidence-based scholarly consensus that the relevant view is false, it would be advantageous to have someone who studies those who hold that view.

Universities should thus try particularly hard to hire faculty who hold disfavored or controversial views when those views are held by a large portion of the population, have not been clearly refuted, and influence culture and policy.

Application of this principle to topics and viewpoints that are currently underrepresented in academic work would both preserve disciplinary autonomy and scholarly standards and also increase viewpoint diversity in ways that enhance the pursuit of knowledge.