Vision
Evolution as Creator
Some advocates of evolutionary theory have become so devoted to their view that they regard it not merely as undeniable and inevitable, but as personal. Philip Ball, for example, asks, “Is the natural world creative?” in a January 8, 2015 post at Nautilus magazine (“The Strange Inevitability of Evolution”). In theory, evolution is an impersonal, purposeless process affecting all of life and the cosmos. In reality, its advocates regard it as something much more than that. I note some of the verbs Mr. Ball uses to describe evolution: Evolution “innovates” and can “find” or “rewire” and “navigate” and “find workable solutions”. The evolutionary process “explores” options and terrain. It “creates” as it takes “a walk along a web of neutral (or at least almost neutral) mutations”. Secular science insists that the cosmos is devoid of intrinsic meaning, purpose, or direction, and that it is ruled by impersonal laws and processes which we can only observe and try to understand and use. But it seems the harder and more closely they look, the less their theory seems like random impersonal forces and more like a living, creative person. Or should I say, Person? 

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution

Back to Humanity
Leon Wieseltier is frequently upset about the state of the humanities, especially vis à vis the ever-encroaching twin threats of scientism and technologism. He explains his position in a January 7, 2015 post at The New York Times (“Among the Disrupted”). He accuses those who insist that science is the only way to truth and technology the solution to all our ills of creating an atmosphere of “posthumanity” which is actually dehumanizing and stifling in the extreme. Journalism, the media, and business contribute to this trend by reducing everything in life to politics or commerce. The humanities, by contrast, are not utilitarian in nature; we don’t need them because of their usefulness. We need them because of their humanness. By humanism Mr. Wieseltier means “a pedagogy and a worldview. The pedagogy consists in the traditional Western curriculum of literary and philosophical classics...The worldview takes many forms” but has at its center “the centrality of humankind to the universe” and “the irreducibility of the human difference to any aspect of our animality...” Humanism provides the best way to understand the world and make our way in it, so we ought to resist every attempt to reduce its importance, for example, in the universities of the land. He insists, “There is nothing soft about the quest for a significant life...In a society rife with theories and practices that flatten and shrink and chill the human subject, the humanist is the dissenter.” His article helps to explain why Christianity has always been a friend of, and has benefited from and contributed to, the humanities in all disciplines. A renewal of Christian interest in and commitment to the humanities would be a welcome development for many reasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/books/review/among-the-disrupted.html?_r=0

Disciplines
Friendship with the Saints
When David wrote, “As for the saints who are in the earth, they are the majestic ones in whom is all my delight” (Ps. 16.3), he may have been thinking about those departed saints whose lives and writings informed his own hopes and decisions. David looked to departed saints like Abraham and Moses for guidance, instruction, and example in making his way as a servant in the covenant community of the Lord. There is precedent here, and elsewhere in Scripture, for all who are seeking the Lord and to fulfill His calling, to take their bearings, at least in part, from those saints who have gone before (cf. Ps. 78.1-8; Rom. 15.4; Heb. 11). Tara K. Soughers goes further, urging readers to discover the value of cultivating “soul friendships” with saints of the past, as with those of the present (“Friendship with Teresa of Avila: Spiritual Companionship Across Time and Space,” Spiritus, Fall 2014). She recounts her own journey of establishing a friendship with the 16th century Spanish nun by close study of her works and frank “dialog” with the saint over matters of agreement and disagreement. She insists, “saints and other historical figures often continue to influence those still living, providing a continuing relationship across the ages, a relationship theologically supported by the doctrine of the communion of the saints.” In order to achieve such a “friendship” we need to spend time with a saint, through his writings and writings of others about him, and try through close and critical reading to find points of identity, topics of mutual interest, places for dialog, and areas in which we might grow through the saint’s counsel or example. In my view, Dr. Soughers goes too far in affirming the practice of praying to departed saints, as Teresa did. Nevertheless, her article shows us how to make good use of historical theology within the arena of spiritual disciplines as a useful approach to growing in the Lord and improving our calling.

Performance Art
Performance art is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of making a work of art, the artist becomes a work of art by performing actions within a set. As Wayne Roosa points out, ancient prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah were commanded by God to take up a kind of performance art in order to confront and offend the people of Israel, by demonstrating the severity of their offenses to God in shocking and even scandalous ways (“The Avant-Garde and Sacred Discontent: Contemporary Performance Artists Meet Ancient Jewish Prophets,” Image, Winter 2014). Mr. Roosa, who teaches art at a Christian college, shows the striking similarities between several contemporary performance artists, who use transgressive and even dangerous forms to express political discontent, with similar actions by certain Hebrew prophets, whose practices expressed sacred discontent in powerful, if offensive, ways. His purpose is to examine the validity of transgressive art forms for making prophetic statements, and he makes some very good points. “The moral force of the performance,” he explains, “is its implication that we, the viewers, have the power to alter social direction, ethical and spiritual contradictions, and political policy.” Performance art – and, by implication, other forms of art employed transgressively – demonstrates “how the deeply felt need to make vital images that confront, negotiate, and enrich human lives within their culture always continues.” This is a disturbing but ultimately positive and hopeful article, which challenges all Christian artists to think about opening the windows of their craft to let in the fetid air of a sinful world, then to breathe that air back on their audiences for the purposes of Christ and His Kingdom.

Musical Us
Human beings are, it seems, made for music. Something in our make-up predisposes us to absorb music and, in many of us, to benefit from it in various ways. According to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, writing in an 8 January post at Aeon, “the more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts...” (“The music in you,” Aeon, 8 January 2015 http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/how-all-humans-got-to-be-music-experts/?). We are all susceptible to music, and much more skilled in it than we might admit. This is the result of some innate “proclivity” coupled with the fact that human beings tend to be surrounded by music from their earliest years: “So strong is our proclivity for making sense of sound that mere listening is enough to build a deeply internalised mastery of the basic materials of whatever music surrounds us.” This is a good thing, because not only is music delightful, it stirs emotion, facilitates and solidifies memory, sorts experience, and enhances community. This natural human ability to absorb and benefit from music is ultimately inexplicable, at least, from a secular perspective: “In fact, for all its remarkable power, music is in good company here. Many of our most fundamental behaviours and modes of understanding are governed by similarly implicit processes. We don’t know how we come to like certain people more than others; we don’t know how we develop a sense of the goals that define our lives; we don’t know why we fall in love; yet in the very act of making these choices we reveal the effects of a host of subterranean mental processes. The fact that these responses seem so natural and normal actually speaks to their strength and universality.” Made in the image of God, we are what we are because of Who God is. And God loves music. 

Outcomes
Aesthetics
The democratization of artistic value, championed by postmodern theorists, is ruining the objectivity of aesthetics and the quality of literature. So argues Arthur Krystal in a January 5, 2015 post at The Chronicle of Higher Education (“What We Lose if We Lose the Canon” http://chronicle.com/article/What-We-Lose-if-We-Lose-the/150991/). The late 20th century saw the canon of great literature and poetry held up to ridicule and scorn, and every aspiring writer or poet taught to believe that his offerings were every bit as worthy as those from the past, if not more so. Enter the Internet and the problem is exacerbated enormously. Aesthetics has been reduced to mere opinion in an artistic and literary world where one person’s view or production is as valid as the next. Mr. Krystal correctly reminds us, “Literature has always been a conversation among writers who borrow, build upon, and deviate from each other’s words. Forgetting this, we forget that aesthetics is not a social invention, that democracy is not an aesthetic category; and that the dismantling of hierarchies is tantamount to an erasure of history.” The unending volume of bad poetry, appearing within the pages of bad journals read by bad poets, is partly to blame, not only for the decline of interest in poetry but for the quality of human life in general, as Czeslaw Milosz argued in The Witness of Poetry. Even the world of Christian art and poetry reflects, in the main, this anti-aesthetic trend. And in doing so, Christian artists are failing to bring forward, for the benefit of all believers, the treasury of cultural richness which they prefer to leave buried in the dustbins of our unexamined and unappreciated past. Shame on us.

Forgiveness
One of the hottest academic topics of the day is forgiveness. Psychology departments around the country have begun studying and teaching the benefits and practice of forgiveness, and researchers are translating their findings into practical tools for everyday use. So reports Amy Westervelt in a post at Aeon (“Letting go,” Aeon, 5 January 2015). Forgiveness – especially forgiving oneself – provides relief from guilt and shame, and opens the way to a variety of health benefits. “It is this rare freedom for the soul that has made forgiveness a cornerstone of all major world religions for hundreds of years as well as an increasingly popular subject in modern psychology – both the traditional and pop varieties,” Ms. Westervelt explains. At present, the secular scientific community is the most active sector in promoting the practice of forgiveness: “religion may help to motivate or oblige people to forgive, but it’s the secular realm that is bringing the idea of forgiveness to the masses. It’s also teaching us precisely how to do it.” It seems the primary focus in much forgiveness theory and practice is not with reference to God or others we might have offended, but with forgiving oneself. This is what we might expect in this increasingly narcissistic age. Still, even such forgiveness, if it’s real, entails a change in behavior. This is the aspect of forgiveness that people find most difficult: “What all of the researchers and pop-psych proponents of forgiveness agree on is that it takes practice and that it is hard work.” Science might be seen here to be catching up to faith once again, but not without doing damage to the very practice it wants to promote. But this is what we might expect from a discipline that wants all the benefits of a transcendent worldview without the inconvenience of God.

http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/we-all-agree-forgiveness-is-healthy-but-why-is-it-so-hard/?

Envoi
Sunday Choice

I’d shut down once the text is read,
and wish I’d just stayed home instead.
What do they teach these guys in school?
Must boredom be their guiding rule?
When insipidity’s their claim
to weekly homiletic fame,
and sin can sit at ease, unfazed
with all the rest whose eyes are glazed,
while humor or some story take
the place of exposition – wake
me when it’s over, if you please.
The devil’s tools are such as these.
Before them lies the Word of Life:
It should dissect us like a knife
and cause our sin-sick souls to howl
to be exposed so dark and foul.
We should be ushered through the gate
of glory, crushed beneath its weight,
then, lifted by a skillful hand,
there made with joy to safely stand
before our Savior’s beaming face,
secure in His redeeming grace,
and all astounded to be seen
in His eyes loved, forgiven, clean,
and fitted to His bidding do.
Instead, we are subjected to
some moral exhortation in
the name of Him Who died for sin,
which most accept too readily
since it requires no change, you see,
but serves to reassure them that
God’s fine with them right where they’re at.
The Church thus weekly sermonized
is steadily more marginalized.
The Kingdom’s coming waits until
those called to preach their calls fulfill
with courage and consistency.

Till then, they’ll not see much of me.

T. M. Moore