Daily Archives: November 3, 2009

Ha!

Posted by on November 3, 2009 6 comments

Well, contrary to all the hubbub about an alleged uprising of the conservative masses (proletariat?) against the totalitarian rule of Barack Obama, it seems that things have gone differently in the over-discussed special election for one of New York’s congress members. It turns out that a district that has been held by Republicans since 1872 has now been won by a Democrat.

Yeah. The days of Barack Obama are clearly numbered. Thats obviously what this indicates.

Now, obviously all of this fascination with this obscure special election is massively insignificant. However, the one thing it has wound up showing is how utterly nonsensical, ideologically driven, and stupid the whole Beck-Palin cloud of noise is. And maybe it also seems to show that at least some of the electorate isn’t completely captive to these sorts of inane voices.

Conundrums of Simplicity

Posted by on November 3, 2009 Comments Off

Peter Leithart has two great posts wrestling with some of Augustine’s questions about the nature of the relations within the Trinity and the question of simplicity, particularly his struggles with the biblical affirmation that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Augustine labors mightily to articulate how this can be true if the Father is supposed to have these qualities himself. Leithart throws out one provocative possible solution:

Does the Father have wisdom “in Himself”? Yes, because the Wisdom that is the Son dwells in Him  by the Spirit.  Does the Father possess His being “in Himself”?  Yes, because the Son is the fullness of His deity, and the Son indwells Him through the Spirit.  Vice versa: Does the Son have wisdom considered in Himself?  Yes, because what is “in Himself” is the fact that the Father dwells in Him in the Spirit, so that His existence “in Himself” is His existence as the Son indwelt by the Father.

And so on.

This allows us to speak of Father and Son distinctly; it also makes it clear that the Father is not Himself except as He has and is indwelt by His Son, nor is the Son Himself except as He has and is indwelt the Father.

To me this seems like a necessary critique of any sort of pyramidal trinitarianism like that articulated by John Zizioulas, for example.

Also

Posted by on November 3, 2009 Comments Off

Tacking onto the last post about some hysterics over the blogosphere: Can we please stop with this sort bizarre sensationalism? Seriously, when was the public square ever not run by “bullies, sophists, and clowns”? The idea that things around us are suddenly descending into barbarism is just silly. Its been utterly barbaric for time immemorial.

I honestly wonder if people who make this sort of jilted noise really read stuff that has been part of “the public square” over the last couple hundred years or so. I have trouble finding anything today that is significantly more stupid, barbaric, or insane than what passed for public discourse throughout the last few centuries. Humanity has always been stupid, barbaric, and insane and the notion that once upon a time before blogs and interwebs there was a time of glorious civic virtue and rational public debate is just fantasy. All McDaniel’s post provides is hand-wringing nostalgia for something that never existed.

For and Against Blogging

Posted by on November 3, 2009 15 comments

According to a post on First Things, blogging is generally something that cheapens language and isn’t very helpful. Apparently “The blogpost is biased toward speed, brevity, and cleverness. It thus hands the public square over to bullies, sophists, and clowns.”

Take that, public square. I never knew bloggers had so friggin much power.

Now, I’ve certainly commented previously on the very real limits of blogging as a genre. But to claim that an alleged bias toward “speed, brevity, and cleverness” is a bad thing seems rather odd. What would be the alternative? To be biased toward slowness, verbosity, and dim-wittedness? This reads more like simple ressentiment from someone who has a bone to pick with people he things are faster and cleverer than he.

The article also hints that blogging will somehow make it hard for you to read or write longer things, like books. I find this to be one of the weirdest notions of all. Most bloggers I read seem to read a great many more books than the average person, and they tend to write more things outside of their blogposts than most people I know. Now, to be sure, there are certainly hordes of blog commentors out there who fit these sorts of pejorative descriptions. But we’ve known about that for ages and thats another matter altogether.

So to sum up, aside from the irony of attcking blogging via something that look pretty much exactly like a blog post, it turns out that the author just doesn’t really have a clue what he’s talking about.

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