“Terror successfully marketed as Christianity is still terror.”

I don’t recall the last time I had any cough drops before today. And it occurred to me, as the cough drop simply fell away from the untwisted paper, that I have no memory of ever opening a cough drop that wasn’t stuck to the wrapper. That is, I expect all cough drops to be stuck to the wrapper. I assume this is because all the cough drops I had as a kid were old and/or had lived several lives melting inside my grandfather’s pocket before they made it to me. 🙂

Excerpts from Iain McGilchrist:

• “As far as I’m concerned, Hannah Arendt is almost a saint. Her work is so important now, there’s almost nobody who, if you haven’t read them, I would more urge you to read.”
• “Imagination is the opposite of fantasy…. Fantasy is what takes you away from reality, but imagination is the only chance you have of entering into reality. If you don’t use your imagination, you remain remote from whatever it is you are encountering.”
• “I’m a great fan and proud to call myself a friend of John Cleese. And I think that his humor is one of the reasons for living.”
• “When you ask ChatGPT a question it goes out and does a trolley dash around the internet and comes back with a vanilla milkshake.”

Currently Reading: On the Natural History of Destruction by W.G. Sebald 📚

These essays are made up of a series of lectures Sebald gave in Zurich in the autumn of 1997. The letters of response to which, as Sebald mentions in the foreword, were telling.

The inadequate and inhibited nature of the letters and other writings sent to me showed, in itself, that the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions in the last years of [World War II] had never really found verbal expression, and that those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed it on to the next generation. 

This is in some ways perfectly understandable, he adds, “given the force of the absolute uncertainty that emerged from our order-loving minds.”

In spite of strenuous efforts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition. We do not feel any passionate interest in our earlier way of life and the specific features of our own civilization …

I am not German and I cannot confirm what Sebald says about German culture. But I can say that I recognize something of what he is talking about in my own culture. And I will certainly be reading this book, as I’m sure Sebald intended, with at least one eye on the fact that he acutely describes a more universal problem, and one that we are intensely suffering from in the U.S. right now.

“We are always looking and looking away at the same time,” he says, and so we are left with “a half-consciousness or false consciousness” that serves to consolidate moral resources in a culture that has been, or ought to have been, morally discredited. “The redefinition of their idea of themselves … was a more urgent business than depiction of the real conditions surrounding them.” 

Sebald notes that, in response to these lectures, he received “sharp reprimands from people unwilling to see that … a basic stance of opposition and a lively intelligence … could easily turn into more or less deliberate attempts to conform, and that later a man in the public eye … would therefore have to adjust his presentation of his career, through tactful omissions and other revisions.”

From my perspective, this is not only shockingly and obviously the case in American culture and politics, but it is in no way limited to the “man in the public eye.” To expand on Sebald’s terms: Every single citizen is preoccupied — at first naturally and then, apart from great effort, militantly — with an ongoing and retrospective improvement of the self-image that they wish to hand out and to hand down. The result is the inability of an entire generation, if not multiple generations, to describe what we see and to convey it to each other’s minds.

Finished reading: Including the Stranger: Foreigners in the Former Prophets by David G. Firth 📚

This managed to be both a quick read and an excellent depth of study — one, in fact, much more biblically scholarly than anything I have read in a while or that I expected to find here. I don’t recall how I came across this one, but the title attracted me for what should be obvious reasons.

Here’s Firth on why he focuses on the narrative materials of the Former Prophets rather than the legal texts:

There is value in a more focused study that considers the contribution of the Old Testament’s narrative materials. Walter Houston has pointed out that laws can change a society’s behaviour only when justice is taught and not only enforced, and one of the key ways in which this teaching happens in the Old Testament is through its narrative materials.

There are, however, more fundamental reasons for turning to Israel’s wider narrative traditions. One important point is that the law provides not an ethical maximum but rather a minimum. That is, law recognizes a problem that needs to be addressed, but what it provides is the least that should be done, not necessarily the ethical goal towards which a people should aspire. By contrast, [Gordon] Wenham has argued that the narrative texts of the Old Testament are didactic and so try ‘to instil both theological truths and ethical ideals into their readers’, and that therefore the narratives offer a form of paradigmatic ethics. […]

In the end, although there is no one method and there are some figures whose status is never entirely clear, many foreigners are mentioned in the Former Prophets, with many of these included among the people of God so that the boundaries of this people is constantly being challenged.*

While I wish Firth had said more in the closing pages, what he has done — what he draws out of the text and into proper attention — is remarkably important.

A few summary take-aways:

• Ethnicity itself is never a problem. (Hear ye, hear ye, fellow descendants of those belligerently god-awful — but sometimes fun — “New Atheism” debates: Ethnicity in the Bible is never a problem.)
• Often within the narratives, groups of people or even prominent characters themselves who we today might assume to be ethnically Israelite are not.
• Not only are “foreigners” generally viewed in a positive light, but they are often, and in some narratives usually, the ones who understand Yahweh and his purposes much better than “God’s people” do.
• The only Israel in the text that matters — and by extension, for Christians, the only church that matters — is neither ethnic nor geographical nor national. The only one that matters “is the the one that is continually reminded that their existence is for others, for foreigners.”

Bonhoeffer (from prison, of course) describing hilaritas: more than “classic jocundity,” it should be more widely appreciated “as optimism about one’s own work, as boldness, willingness to defy the world and popular opinion, as the firm conviction that they are doing the world good with their work, even if the world isn’t pleased with it, and a high-spirited self-confidence.”

Imagine it’s nearing springtime.

Everything outside is melting and mucky.

Slushy puddles abound.

You’re 14 months old…

…and you have a stick.

W. J. Hennigan (<—gift link):

Thanks to Mr. Trump’s words and actions, the perceived value of acquiring nuclear weapons among allies appears to have quickly gone up, while the confidence in extended deterrence has gone down.

To once again quote Charles Krauthammer in 2016, this time at length:

We are entering a period of unprecedented threat to the international order that has prevailed under American leadership since 1945…

At a time of such tectonic instability, even the most experienced head of state requires wisdom and delicacy to maintain equilibrium. Trump has neither. His joining of supreme ignorance to supreme arrogance, combined with a pathological sensitivity to any perceived slight, is a standing invitation to calamitous miscalculation.

Two generations of Americans have grown up feeling that international stability is as natural as the air we breathe. It’s not. It depends on continual, calibrated tending. It depends on the delicate balancing of alliances and the careful signaling of enemies. It depends on avoiding self-inflicted trade wars and on recognizing the value of allies like Germany, Japan and South Korea as cornerstones of our own security rather than satrapies who are here to dispatch tribute to their imperial master in Washington.

It took seven decades to build this open, free international order. It could be brought down in a single presidential term. That would be a high price to pay for the catharsis of kicking over a table.

Predictable and predicted, as they say. Yet has any of this required even the slightest prophetic vision?