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Hobgoblins or Habits

May12

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 7: Vanity of Human Reason.

Pascal: ” . . . we require the aid of good habits to overcome bad habitual tendencies in the opposite direction. Therefore, we must act as if we believed, go to church, and so forth, thus habituating the automaton to obey what reason has discovered to be true.”

At least half of parenting and educating children is the development of good habits. As I understand it, Charlotte Mason discusses this aspect of education in her books.

Of course, one can develop a “foolish consistency,” but there is much to be said for doing things out of habit after having developed a conviction that those things indeed ought to be done and don consistently. Some fairly simple habits that I would like to instill in myself and my children:

1. To flush the toilet after each and every use thereof. Does anyone else have this problem? The problem of NOT seeing this done consistently, that is. And of course, Mr. Nobody is always the culprit.

2. Go to church on Sundays. I believe regular worship with a group of Christians is an important Christian discipline.

3. Get up in the morning and get dressed. My children get tired of hearing about how great it is that as homeschoolers they can do school in their pajamas. Unfortunately, they often play into that stereotype by . . . doing school in their pajamas.

4. Brush their teeth without being reminded. We’ve been working on this one for quite a while, and they still need reminders.

5. Tell the truth. I’d like it if they did this habitually without thinking about it.

6. Obey authority. Yes, there are times when a given authority is wrong, but I would rather their first impulse be to obey. Then, they can think about the possibility that the person in authority might have been mistaken or sinful and act accordingly.

7. Look for beauty and joy. This is a habit I need desperately to develop and to model.

8. Speak kindly. Again, if only I could model this one all the time.

9. Put away things when you’re done with them. The clutter, and resultant work, in our house could be cut probably ninety percent if only we would all put things away when we’re done using them.

10. Work first, then play.

11. Read the Bible and pray daily.

Of course, there may be times when the practice of each of these habits will be either impossible or inadvisable. But I would rather the habit be established, and then the mature person can choose to deviate from it for a reason.

Some habits my children are learning inadvertently:

1. Spend the day in your night clothes unless you have to go somewhere.

2. Obey when and if Mom says it a third time and gets THAT tone in her voice.

3. Do your work as soon as you’re reminded to do so.

4. Undress and leave your clothes on the floor.

5. Do as little schoolwork as possible to get by, and when the cat’s away . . . play!

YIkes! How do I replace the second list with a bette set of habits? How do the items on the first list become ingrained habits?

I think “hard work” is at least part of the answer to both questions.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

May1


The Bookseller of Kabul–Seierstad. Recommended at Bookfest.

The Bookseller of Kabul is a nonfiction account of the lives of a real family in Kabul, Afghanistan. Journalist Asne Seierstad lived with the family for four months as a guest, welcomed by the patriarch of the family, a man she calls “Khan” in her story. Unfortunately, her first impression of Khan as a liberal, forward-thinking Afghan intellectual changed as she came to know his family and his family interactions. In particular, it becomes quite clear, although Ms. Seierstad does not include herself as a player or even an observer in the book, that she was appalled by the treatment of women in Khan’s family and in Afghan society as a whole. She describes how Khan takes a sixteen year old second wife and exiles his first wife to Pakistan to take care of his business affairs there. She also shows the way the other women in the family, especially Khan’s sister Leila, are trapped and limited by the circumstances and assumptions that are taken for granted in Afghan family life, at least in this particular Afghan family.

Khan, whose real name Shah Mohammed Rais was rather obvious to anyone who actually lived in Kabul, read the book after it was published and immediately screamed bloody murder. From a New York Times article December 21, 2003:

Seierstad lived with the family for four months, and then wrote a detailed account of the experience — in which she portrayed the bookseller as a liberal intellectual in public but a tyrant to his family. This summer, Rais received a copy of the book in English. And then the trouble began. Furious at what he viewed as Seierstad’s misrepresentations and betrayal of his hospitality, he vowed to sue her for libel in a Norwegian court. He wants damages and a cut of the profits from ”The Bookseller of Kabul,” which became an international best seller (and the most successful nonfiction book in Norway’s history).

I don’t know what Mr. Rais expected Ms. Seierstad to write. Perhaps she flattered him and lied to him and implied that she approved of his polygamous lifestyle and autocratic family governance. At any rate, according to Wikipedia as of 2005, Rais has “declared he was seeking asylum in either Norway or Sweden, as a political refugee. Things revealed about him in Seierstad’s book had made life for him and his family unsafe in Afghanistan.”

This Salon article calls Ms. Seierstad “The Hypocrite of Kabul” and accuses her of cultural insensitivity. However, the same author Anne Marlow, writes approvingly of Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. I guess she hadn’t had a chance to read Mr. Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns in which he directly engages with the tradition and practice of Afghan subjugation and mistreatment of women.

Did Asne Seierstad betray the hospitality offered to her by writing frankly and disparagingly of the family with whom she shared a home for four months? Probably. I wouldn’t have written a book about such a family without at least spending a lot more time and energy disguising the main characters.

Are the women of the Rais family mistreated by my (Western) standards? Absolutely. And I would defend cultural standards that allow women to leave the house without covering their faces and to receive an education and to be more than household slaves, as standards that should prevail in both the East and the West, human standards.

The slave owners in the South didn’t like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book messing with their “way of life” either. On the other hand, she wrote fiction, not a poorly disguised invasion of privacy.

Insightful and illuminating but voyeuristic.

Every Day in Every Way

Apr28

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 6: Vanity of Human Justice.

Ambrose Bierce: A conservative is one enamored of existing evils; a liberal wants to replace them with new ones.

Kreeft: “We don’t want to believe that the evils of our age are only another version of perennial injustice. We want to believe that either they are far worse than those of the past or far lighter. If we believe they are worse, the past becomes our Utopia; if they are lighter, the future does.”

I have been trying to articulate this thought and related ideas for lo these many years. We do not live in the best of times, nor the worst of times. There are things from the past that it would be good to bring back: simplicity, family closeness, extended family networks, a joy in work, a rhythm of work and recreation. But other aspects of the (agrarian) past are abhorrent: lack of medical care, work so hard that it drove many to an early grave, a single dependence on the land and the weather that saw families starve or lose their livelihood in a bad year, harsh discipline of children, lack of educational opportunities.

As for the future, I do not believe that every day, in every way, we are getting better and better, nor do I hold to a post-millennial view of history which says that we Christians, as we conform to the image of Christ, are busily ushering in the reign of Christ on this earth. I’m not a premillennialist either, seeing everything getting worse and worse, descending into chaos and judgement. No, rather I believe that this world will end in God’s time, either with a bang or a whimper, and then Our Lord Jesus Christ will reign over a new heaven and a new earth forever and ever. Amen.

Pascal: “When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board ship. When everyone is moving toward depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops, he shows up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.”

The Fixed Point is Christ Himself. I can judge my life and ethics by the life and ethics of Jesus. However, I also become something of a “fixed point” as I follow and conform myself to him. In this, I will be seen as a dangerous reactionary by some and a religious fanatic by others, but as closely as I follow Jesus, I will be less and less changeable and more and more a stable point of reference. Again may it be so.

Vanity, Vanity, All Is Vanity

Apr21

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 5: Vanity.

Pascal: “Anyone who wants to know the full extent of man’s vanity has only to consider the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi. And it’s effects are terrifying. This indefinable something, so trifling that we cannot recognize it, upsets the whole earth, princes, armies, the entire world. Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different.”

Kreeft: “No psychologist, to this day, has ever explained why Romeo falls in love with Juliet. Yet this is literally a matter of life or death. Let us pray that no one ever will explain it.”

There were other girls in the ballroom when Romeo first saw Juliet. Why her? Why are you married to your husband or wife instead of some other woman or man? Chance? Pheromones? Predestination? Does that online dating service whose name I can’t remember really have x number of “compatibility factors” infallibly figured and matched to find you the perfect mate? I doubt it.

First, there’s an attraction, physical and spiritual/mental. Ideas mesh; bodies feel. Then there must be a commitment, an act of the will. A woman says, “I love this man and forsaking all others, I will cling only to him.” Love is somethng you feel, but to become lasting, it becomes something you do, acting in love whether you feel it or not.

However, Pascal is right. None of the preceding paragraph explains completely why I chose Engineer Husband. Perhaps I chose him because he was attracted to me, but that answer begs the question: why was he attracted to me? And what if he had not been?

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost,
For want of the horse, the rider was lost,
For want of the rider, the battle was lost,
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a nail!

Read more about the source of this nursery rhyme on vanity and chance (or lack of foresight according to Ben Franklin) here.

Pascal’s point is that mighty events turn on small and seemingly inconsequential choices. Kreeft concludes, “If there is no God, we easily become determinists.” Or anarchic nihilists.

Animal or Angel?

Apr13

Christianity for Modern Pagans, ch. 4: The Paradox of Greatness and Wretchedness.

Shakespeare: “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.” Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Pascal: “Man is neither angel nor beast .. . Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.”
“This is why life is neither a tragedy nor a comedy but a tragicomedy.”

In the commentary portion, Kreeft goes on to list some of the philosophical movements, both before and since the time of Pascal, that have erred on either the side of animalism or angelism.

Animalism: Marxism, Behaviorism, Freudianism, Darwinism, and Deweyan Pragmatism. (I would add Psychology and Psychiatry in general which assume that all of our problems can be traced to physical/chemical causes.)

Angelism: Platonism, Gnosticism, Pantheism, and New Age Spiritualism.

Shakespeare, of course, genius that he was, wrote both tragedies and comedies and a few plays that are ambiguously considered to be tragicomedies. The wheat and the tares grow together in this world, and no one can separate the two until the harvest. The ending is hope or despair, heaven or hell, life everlasting or death everdying, and the ending determines the nature of the play. Even if sad, tragic, horrible things happen, if the culmination is a wedding, The Marriage Feast of the Lamb, then the play was a comedy all along. And even if we laugh and grab for the gusto, if the end is death and despair, the play is a tragedy, no matter how many grave-diggers’ jest we insert along the way.

So should a writer or a playwright show only the depths of evil and the hopelessness and sin of which man is capable and to which he is prone? Is this the work of a Christian novelist or poet, to bring the reader into the deepest darkness so that he might begin to look for a light? For some writers, the rather paradoxical illumination of human wretchedness might be the calling. Others are called to articulate and write hope in a dying world. Some, the greatest of writers and communicators, can do both.

Thanks, Julie: Reading Suggestions for a Thirteen Year Old Boy

Apr11

Julie at Happy Catholic referred her readers over here in answer to a question she received via email:

I’m needing some suggestions for books for my 13-year-old son. He’s gone through Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, and now all of Tolkien. He really needs to get out of the fantasy genre and I’m not exactly willing to trust his English teacher on choices. I’ve found some of her suggestions contain language and situations that I don’t approve. I’m sure there must be other parents out there with the same problem.

My son is an advanced reader, but not an enthusiastic one. I did have him read Night by Elie Wiesel and he was quite moved by it. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Julie got lots of good comments on her post, lots of good suggestions. And I said there that I thought the mom was right to question some of the choices that the schoolteacher might send home. A lot of young adult fiction is heavily concentrated around the themes of teen romance, sex, and youthful rebellion, perhaps because the writers or the publishers think those are the only subjects teens are interested in reading about. I’m not saying that authors shouldn’t deal with those and other sensitive themes in their young adult novels, but you know your child better than anyone. And you should know what he or she is ready to read in terms of “adult” content and what your family can tolerate or approve of in terms of worldview.

I also suggested that the mom in the email consider some nonfiction, a few good books about a subject her son is already interested in, anything from cars to sports to electronics to music. The nonfiction would “balance out” all the fantasy, and guys actually tend to like nonfiction. Lady teachers and moms, on the other hand, tend to think it doesn’t count as real reading if it’s nonfiction or if it’s a magazine. So, here are a few nonfiction and fiction suggestions for a thirteen year old boy. Links are to reviews here at Semicolon.

Fiction:
The Declaration by Gemma Malley. Dystopian sci-fi.

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. Mystery/adventure.

Isle of Swords by Thomas Wayne Batson. Pirate adventure.

Cracker: The Best Dog in Vietnam by Cynthia Kadohata. If he likes dog stories that include war also . . .

Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac. Navajo code talkers (radio operators) during WW II.

Code Orange by Caroline Cooney. Excellent adventure about a boy who almost inadvertently starts a smallpox epidemic in NYC.

Heat by Mike Lupica. Baseball fiction.

Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson. Action adventure in the tradition of Tom Sawyer.

Nonfiction: This list is a little tricky because as I indicated, it all depends on what the boy’s interests are. But here are a few possibilities.

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 by Jim Murphy.

Long Way Gone by Ismael Beah. A boy soldier in Sierra Leone. It’s violent and disturbing, but if he read and appreciated Night . . .

The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay. For the mechanically minded.

More suggestions from my readers for a 14 year old male friend of mine.

Any more ideas?

I’m Back

Mar25

For those of you who missed me and for those who didn’t, I am, nevertheless, back to blogging. I took a blog break over Lent, although I left a few post-dated posts, and now I’m back with lots of “stuff” from my reading and thinking and writing over the five or six weeks of Lent.

One of my Lenten projects was Peter Kreeft’s commentary on Pascal’s Pensees, called Christianity for Modern Pagans. In the book, Kreeft takes Pascal’s thoughts and organizes them by subject in an order that makes some sense. Then Kreeft comments on each of the sets of pensees and relates them to a modern mindset. According to Kreeft, Pascal, although he lived in the seventeenth century, speaks quite cogently to the twentieth and twenty-first century man’s dilemma. A lot of what I collected in my commonplace book were quotations from the book, both Pascal’s words and Kreeft’s exegesis.

Chapter 1: Order

Pascal: “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.”

Kreeft: “The root of most atheism is not argument but attitude, not intellection but feeling, not love of truth but the fear of truth.”
“Most apologetics tries to feed spinach to a reluctant baby who stubbornly closes his mouth. . . . What you have to do is make the baby hungry.”
“Why not cultivate neutrality instead? Because neutrality is impossible once you are addressed with a claim as total, as intimate, as life-changing and as sin-threatening as Christianity. Christianity is not a hypothesis; it is a proposal of marriage.”

Sherry: And moderns/post-moderns are afraid of marriage commitment just as they are afraid of Christian commitment. The job is to make people see that there is no neutral ground in regard to Christianity just as there is no neutral ground in regard to eating or marriage. Either you eat or you starve. Either you’re married or you’re not. (“Living together” is an attempt at compromise in this area, but it’s a very poor compromise.) You can’t decide to be neutral about food or marriage. The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. Agnosticism says, like Satan in the garden, “You will not surely die.” And people fear that Satan may be right and try to hedge their bets. But there is no middle ground. Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40) and also “He who is not with me is against me.” (Matthew 12:30) We all must choose, and even those who think they are not choosing are making a choice, whether they will or no.

I’ve got lots of book reviews, a couple of memes, more Pascal and Kreeft, and even some essays and Biblical commentary. So as they say, stay tuned.

Secret Believers by Brother Andrew and Al Janssen

Jan24

Secret Believers: What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ by Brother Andrew, author of God’s Smuggler and co-author, Al Janssen.

I read God’s Smuggler when I was a teenager. For those who don’t know it’s the true story of a Dutch man, Brother Andrew who smuggled Bibles and other Christian literature behind the Iron Curtain to persecuted Christian believers prior to the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. The book made quite an impression on me at the time, and I continue to pray for those believers who are living in countries where freedom of religion is an empty and meaningless phrase.

As the Cold War ended and Christians in formerly Communist countries became more free to practice and spread the message of Christ, Brother Andrew and his organization, Open Doors, became concerned with supporting the persecuted church in other countries where there was no freedom of worship. This book, Secret Believers tells the story of Christian believers, particularly believers from a Muslim background, in predominately Muslim countries. These Muslims who convert to Christian faith in Isa as they call Jesus are persecuted by families, tribes, and by the government of their own country. They are often barred from educational opportunities, discriminated against economically, and not allowed to talk about their newfound faith or even to openly change their religious identity. In many countries, Christians, those who are born into Christian families, are allowed to convert to Islam, but Muslims, those who born into Muslim families, are never allowed to identify themselves as Christians. And the established Christian churches often won’t allow Muslim converts to come into the church because of the danger that brings to the churh in countries where evangelization and even attempting to convert a Muslim from Islam to Christianity is a crime punishable by prison or death.

The stories of Ahmed, Salima, Mustafa, and others, all MBB’s (Muslim background believers) is compelling and convicting. It made ashamed of the things I complain about and of the easy life I live, and it made me want to do something to help those who are suffering for their faith. The last part of the books has some suggestions along those lines. The most frequent request from Muslim believers in Christ is not for money or political action, but rather that we pray for them. And they don’t even ask that we pray that they be delivered from hardship and persecution but that we pray that they would be strong and unwavering in their faith in Christ.

Surely I can do that much.

For more information:

Secret Believers website.

The Voice of the Martyrs.

Persecution Blog

Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam

Jan23

Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital by Alex Beam.

Even so, I must admire your skill.
You are so gracefully insane.”

Poet Anne Sexton, an admirer and student of poet Robert Lowell, in a poem called Elegy in the Classroom that she wrote about Mr. Lowell’s mental illness

Gracefully Insane is a name-dropping history of McLean Mental Hospital in/near Boston, Massachusetts. A list of the alumni of McLean reads like a combination of Who’s Who in the arts and business and the Boston social register: navigator Nathaniel Bowditch, Edward and Robert Emerson, brothers of the more famous Ralph Waldo, International Harvester heir Stanley McCormick, art collector and patient for a time for Dr. Freud himself, Scofield Thayer, another of Freud’s unsuccessful analysands, Carl Liebman, poets Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, musicians James Taylor, Kate Taylor, Livingston Taylor, Ray Charles, and Clay Jackson, author of the McLean memoir Girl, Interrupted Susanna Kaysen, and many other very rich, socially prominent people whose families could afford to have them live in a mental hospital/resort. For many of the patients, the records are still sealed because McLean promises, among other amenities, perpetual confidentiality. William James may have been a patient at McLean, but nobody knows for sure because the documents in the case, if there are any, are sealed and inaccessible.

In addtion to as much name-dropping as is possible under the circumstances, Gracefully Insane tells the story of how mental health care and treatment for the insane and the distrubed has changed over the past hundred years. At first (1817), McLean was a refuge for the members of Boston’s First Families who were unable to cope with, or unwilling to follow the rules of, Boston society. The eccentric and the insane were housed in luxury and with minimal treatment at Charlestown (later called McLean) Asylum. They were sometimes given cold baths or treated with purgatives or other medicines, but mostly they were admonished to behave themselves and left to their own devices as long as they stayed within the purvey of McLean’s rather small staff. Many inmates brought their own servants to minister to their physical needs.

One reason I found this book interesting is its association with one of the books by Caroline Cooney that I just read, Out of Time. In that book, set in the 1890’s, Hiram Stratton, Jr., heir to a great fortune, is imprisoned by his father who is the villain of the piece. Strat, as he is nicknamed, has had a serious disagreement with his evil father, and his father sends him to a mental institution. There Strat recieves no treatment for mental illness, but is subjected to the most horrifyingly dehumanizing treatment imaginable. Cooney implies that commitment to a mental asylum was a common way for the very rich to get rid of undesirable relatives. Although McLean was a much more humane place than the fictional hospital where Strat was imprisoned, Gracefully Insane corroborates the idea that eccentric and embarrassing relatives were sometimes sent to an asylum to be genteelly incarcerated and kept out of circulation.

Gracefully Insane is both a history of a particular hospital and a history of American psychiatric practices in general. I can’t see that we’ve really learned too much about the causes and cures of mental illness in the hundred or so years since McLean first opened its doors. Those wealthy families who can afford it still send their mentally unstable members to some sort of hospital/resort to maybe recover, and the poor and middle class still cope as best they can. Cures are as hard to come by nowadays as they were a hundred years ago.

Two interesting sidenotes:
The cover from the Amazon site (above) has a different picture and a different subtitle from the books I got at the library. In my library copy, the emphasis on the cover and in the subtitle is on the hospital itself. In the Amazon incarnation, the emphasis is on “life and death”, the people of McLean. Was this a change to sell more books?

I found this book last year sometime recommended by Marshall Zeringue at Campaign for the American Reader.

A Royal Affair by Stella Tillyard

Jan14

I had no idea that at the same time, or just before, George III was dealing with his rebellious American “children,” he was also in the throes of despair over his siblings’ rebellion and scandalous behavior. As the eldest brother and the king, George III felt responsible for his younger siblings’ behavior just as he considered himself a father figure for the American colonists. He was ultimately disappointed in all of his surrogate children as well as some of his own fifteen children, including the Prince of Wales, later George IV.

The next younger brother in George III’s family, his brother Edward, was a rake and a womanizer, but since he died young, he was unable to do too much damage to the royal family’s reputation. The other siblings made up for his short life and lack of opportunity.

George’s eldest sister, Augusta, married the Prince of Brunswick who proceeded to ignore her and patronize his mistresses instead. She became, understandably, bitter and made her brother George miserable with all her complaining letters.

George’s younger sister Caroline Mathilde, also given away in a diplomatic marriage to the crown prince of Denmark, found her husband to be uninterested, uninteresting, and quite insane. She didn’t just complain; she had an affair with her husband’s doctor and took over the country with her lover’s help and in her husband’s name. King Frederick was content to just sign on the dotted line anything his loving wife and her paramour prepared, and for a while the three of them had a satisfying menage a trois. Eventually, Caroline’s political enemies took charge of the mad king and broke up the party. George had to clean up his sister’s mess by rescuing her from a court that had turned against her. Soap opera material.

Two of George’s brothers contracted secret marriages to less-than-desirable women without their kingly brother’s permission. This disregard for his royal prerogatives made George III quite miffed, and he refused to speak to the wives or receive them at court . . . ever. Even worse, prior to his marriage one of the brothers, Henry, the Duke of Cumberland, had a very public affair with a married woman, was sued by the husband, and ended up owing quite a settlement to the husband of his mistress.

If you’re interested in court gossip and intrigue that’s only a couple of hundred years old, George’s scandalous siblings should quench your appetite. George is the only one of the royals in the book who comes out with a decent reputation and an intact marriage. And he’s the one the writers of the Declaration of Independence called “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, . . . unfit to be the ruler of a free People.”

Oh, well, maybe they didn’t know much about the “character” of the rest of the royal family.

(By the way, the big guy on the cover is George himself, but I don’t know why the cover designer cut off part of his head. Do you like the way book cover artists and designers tend to do that these days, crop off body parts including heads? Is it a statement or a symbol of some kind? I think it’s sort of weird.)

Other bloggers’ reviews:

John Sandoe: “Stella Tillyard tells this astonishing tale with bravura and energy. But there is a problem with the book, which is that the story of Caroline Mathilde and Struense utterly overshadows the others.”

History Maven: “Interesting read for those interested in the period. Well written, and makes me realize I don’t know my Danish history. Goody! New topic!”