Updates, Interlocutions, and a Hiatus

As of today, I will be taking off for a couple weeks for some long-awaited time with friends and family in London, Wales, Yorkshire, and sundry places, and blogging should be quite limited during this period—though I do hope to finally put up a review of John Perry's excellent book Pretenses of Loyalty (thanks to Davey Henreckson at Reforming Virtue for putting me onto it).

Meanwhile, though, there are a number of exciting things to which I can direct your attention.  First (and perhaps not quite so exciting), I have made long-overdue updates to the other pages here at the S&P—About Me, What is the S&P?, Projects, and Writings.  The most significant changes: I have tried to bring the "What is the S&P?" description more into line with what I actually write about here these days, and I have mercilessly purged excess projects from the Projects page, reflecting my real-life purge as I try to focus more of my attentions and energies on my thesis and related work.

Second, and rather more exciting, the Two Kingdoms debates go on.  Oh yes—and on, and on, and on, no doubt.  Matt Tuininga, not content with one rebuttal to my original post, posted five (here, here, here, here, and here), with which I interacted in a few comments, though whether any clarification was thereby achieved, I leave it to you to judge.  This impending trip has not left me leisure for a full-blown response, chock full of big bloc quotes and footnotes, but fortunately, Peter and Steven at The Calvinist International have happily stepped in to provide such a response, which will be forthcoming any day now—I recommend you check in on TCI every ten minutes or so this weekend. ;-)

As if Tuininga's responses were not enough, Darryl Hart has now kindly jumped into the fray with a post at Old Life, "Speaking of Ecclesiastical Authority."

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Suspending Judgment: Hooker the Anti-Tweeter

While reading an essay by Georges Edelen this week, "Hooker's Style," I came across a more prosaic explanation of my instinctive antipathy to Twitter and its ilk (expounded in recent posts here and here); perhaps Hooker is just rubbing off on me.  Hooker, of course, is notoriously the Anti-Tweeter, occasionally indulging in sentences than can run up to a page in length, and which might take a week to diagram.  His Puritan opponents accused him of "cunningly framed sentences, to blind and entangle the simple"; Thomas Fuller famously described it as "long and pithy, drawing on a whole flock of several clauses before he came to the close of a sentence."  Indeed, Edelen's survey of Book I reveals that half his sentences are longer than 40 words, and fully a tenth are longer than 80 words.  However, Edelen suggests that there may be a method to his madness—that in his sentence style we see the key to his thinking as a whole.

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Tetzel on Craigslist: Commodification and the Demise of the Commons

In his incisive and thought-provoking new book, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, renowned political philosopher Michael Sandel invites us to step back and take stock of the results of the rapid expansion of market logic into every area of life that the last generation has witnessed.  Economics has transformed itself from a discipline concerned with the production, exchange, and allocation of material goods and services to a master-science claiming to describe the logic of all human social relations in terms of cost-benefit analyses.  In tandem with this theoretical shift has come the increasing subjection of areas of life once governed by non-market norms to the logic of free exchange driven by supply and demand.  Many today, including (perhaps especially?) many Christians may have difficulty in seeing what is wrong with this trajectory—after all, doesn't this represent the triumph of free, voluntary social relations over against coercive, top-down ones (for a critique of this gross oversimplification, see here)? 

 Inasmuch as the logic of the market, though, is amoral and nonjudgmental—it doesn't matter what you want and why as long as you're willing to pay for it—Christians should be deeply concerned, and should heed Sandel's call to bring morality back into the picture, asking about the moral consequences of subjecting more and more of our lives to the logic of exchange (especially as Sandel himself does not provide a theological basis for this moral concern).  Accordingly, I want to reflect here on the first set of phenomena he examines, "Jumping the Queue," from a more explicitly theological standpoint.

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Calvin the Capitalist?

In his Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation, Ronald Wallace shoots the tired old hypothesis full of holes.  After first surveying Calvin's teaching on usury, and pointing out just how restrictive his "permission" of it was, he tells us: 

"Though he believed in the necessity of some distinctions remaining, he believed that the appearance of extreme differences in wealth and poverty within a community was inexcusably evil.  His comment on Paul's ideal that 'through giving there should be equality' is illuminating.  'Equality', in Paul's mind, he thinks means a 'fair proportioning of our resources that we may, so far as funds allow, help those in difficulties that there may not be some in affluence and others in want'.  The vision given in Christ's parable of Lazarus in heaven lying at the bosom of Abraham implies that riches do not shut against any man the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven but that it is open alike to all who have either made a sober use of riches, or patiently endured the want of them. 

"Calvin believed that Christ's command to us to 'sell your possessions and give alms' might under certain circumstances demand the giving away of capital as well as current income.  It enjoined that 'we must not be satisfied with bestowing on the poor what we can easily spare, but that we must not refuse to part with our estates, if their revenue does not supply the wants of the poor.

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A Snapshot of America

More than ever today, we hear handwringing among the press, politicians, and pollsters, about how America is "headed in the wrong direction," and eager finger-pointing over who is to blame.  Naturally, we assume that it is our politicians (especially the ones on the other side of the aisle, of course) who are responsible for the general national malaise.  But how much of it, I can't help but wonder, is due simply to the steady inebriation of our senses with electronic media, and abandonment of reading?  One doesn't have to be a Luddite to be sobered by the following statistics (taken from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows):

1150: minutes per week that the average American young adult spends online (on a computer)

49: minutes per week that the average American young adult spends reading any form of print publication.  

2,272: number of texts per month the average American teen sends (that's 75 per day)

153: hours per month the average American spends in front of the TV (still rising despite increased internet usage)

Unsurprisingly, Americans outstrip Europeans by a long shot, spending 50% more time surfing the Net and three times as much time in front of the TV. 

(These figures are all from 2009, I should add, and are most likely considerably worse now, as they had been getting worse at a rapid pace through 2009.)

And consider that, as of 2006, 42% of those watching over 35 hours of TV programming a week (the national average) also used the Net for over 30 hours a week, for a total of over 65 hours per week, nearly 2/3 of their waking hours.