Vision
The Great American Hope
If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about where America’s lawmakers put their faith for a better tomorrow, one only has to look at the 2015 science budget. Congress recommends spending 98,374,000,000 of your tax dollars on scientific research and development, for work ranging from the smallest known particles to the oceans of Europa, one on the moons of Jupiter (Jeffrey Mervis and David Malakoff, “Science agencies make gains despite tight U. S. budget,” Science, 19 December 2014). By contrast, the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $146,000,000, and for the National Endowment for the Humanities, $146,021,00. The vision our political leaders cherish for the future of the nation is decidedly technological, biological, and interstellar. Morality, beauty, and other matters sublime and wondrous will just have to make do with federal pocket change.

Disciplines
Biblical Interpretation
Marcia Webb offers an excellent example of the benefits and dangers of interpreting Scripture through the lens of other disciplines in her article, “The Book of Job: A Psychologist Takes a Whirlwind Tour” (Christian Scholar’s Review, Winter 2015). Dr. Webb approaches her interpretation from the perspective of recent research on the effects of and response to trauma. She shows the role of worldviews – “schemas” – in sustaining our sense of wellbeing and enabling us to make sense of our experience, and the way trauma challenges and can make revisions to our most basic assumptions about life. She misses the true nature of Job’s sin. He was not, as she claims, accusing God of being unjust. This understanding is informed more by her background in psychological research than by the plain teaching of the text. Rather, Job’s sin consisted in presuming – indeed, demanding – to know as God knows. Instead, God teaches Job to accept the fact of mystery and His sovereignty, goodness, and love. Dr. Webb reaches this conclusion, in spite of her mistaken reading of Job’s sin, and, along the way, she demonstrates the Bible’s profound understanding into the nature of the human soul. This is a useful article, in particular as it serves to remind us what comes first in Biblical interpretation: First, the text; then other useful and informative disciplines, understood in the light of the plain teaching of the text (Ps. 36.9).

Poetry
Andrew O’Hagan reports on his life-long love of poetry and of the benefits of verse for those who read it (“I’m in love with poetry,” The Guardian, February 6, 2015). He wants to believe that great poetry can help us live our lives: “A poet could be a risk-taker, a miracle-maker, a moral panjandrum and a convict of the senses; a poet could divine the landscape, search the heart, shape a living argument about the complications of reality...” Great poetry can get inside us, search and expose us, stretch, refresh, and redirect us. It does this by making connections – between us and the poet, us and the world, us and truth, us and our unrecognized longings and aspirations: “The merit of poetry was its feeling for the common ground, feeling in both senses...” We should all probably read more poetry and spend more time letting verse do its work in our souls. The key is to find great poetry, and great poetry is at a premium these days, when a Gresham’s Law of verse obtains in the journals and websites that traffic in poems. As a discipline for shaping our lives, great poetry combines beauty and truth in ways that can delight, instruct, and, in the rare instance, transform our lives. Andrew O’Hagan is living testimony to the power of verse, as are many others.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/06/andrew-ohagan-love-poetry-seamus-heaney

Outcomes
Morality
Michael Shermer asks, “Are We Becoming Morally Smarter?” and then answers in the affirmative in a February 17, 2015 post at reason.com (http://reason.com/archives/2015/02/17/are-we-becoming-morally-smarte/print). As IQ scores have increased over the last century, our moral behavior has also improved – at least, in the direction of the liberalism Mr. Shermer espouses. He explains that smarter people are more likely to choose liberal values and to embrace a worldview that is inclusive, global, tolerant, and individualistic. He opines, “the moral arc of the universe may be tending in the right direction...” He credits the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, with its refined use of reason and rationality, for today’s progress in moral intelligence. He even believes that abstract reasoning is enabling us to overcome our evolution-instilled, tooth-and-claw attitude toward those beyond our ken. Simply put, from the liberal perspective of Mr. Shermer, smart people choose reason over religion, science over faith, and progress over tradition. I suppose it comes down to what one thinks of as “moral.” Mr. Shermer does not celebrate the applications of abstract reasoning which led to the slaughter of millions of people during the previous century, the blight of pornography and sexual abuse, the enslavement of more people today than in all the years of colonialism and the early American experience, the increase of drug abuse, the breakdown of families, or the dominance of pop culture over the minds of millions. He would say, I suspect, that these are all examples of unreason and not the enlightened reasoning which characterizes really smart people. All of which simply begs the question of what we mean by morality, a matter that cannot be resolved by reasoning alone, since all reasoning begins from a point of belief. In the end, it’s not the shape of reason which dictates morality, but the shape of faith. And, all things considered, the faith of the Enlightenment has yet to prove its claims and mettle.

Envoi
Faith

Faith bores into my soul’s hard ground
and digs an ever deepening well
to mysteries I can’t fully sound.

Or, like a clapper, faith will pound
against my soul, a waiting bell.
It bores into my soul’s hard ground

and rings my soul in rich, profound,
transforming ways. It chimes the spell
of mysteries I can’t fully sound.

Faith parts the veil where things abound
unseen, which life’s true framework tell.
Faith bores into my soul’s hard ground

or strikes soul’s mettle to resound
in peals and chimes of heavenly knell,
in mysteries I can’t fully sound.

As lines within a villanelle
return, and with new meaning swell,
faith bores into my soul’s hard ground
to mysteries I can’t fully sound.

T. M. Moore