Vision
Vaclav Havel
Reading a review of Michael Zantovsky’s new biography of Vaclav Havel, I was reminded again of the power of vision to change whole societies (Daniel J. Mahoney, “Prague’s Philosopher-King,” City Journal, 26 June 2015). Like his contemporaries Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Czeslaw Milosz, Havel understood that the Czech people and all Eastern Europeans were prisoners of the lie, and that they were active participants in their own captivity by supporting the lie in ordinary, everyday ways. The grocer who hung the Marxist slogan in his window, going along in order to get along, was complicit in his own enslavement, reinforcing a false vision of society in order to stay alive within the noxious atmosphere of the very lie that was destroying him. Havel cast vision, both by his personal example and in his writings, of what was necessary to stand up to the lie and expose its deceptions and dangers. He paid a price for his outspokenness – four terms in prison. Havel was an imperfect man, as Zantovsky reports, but he was a visionary, and he lived his vision courageously, articulately, and consistently at just the right time, inspiring Czechs, Slovaks, and people all over Eastern Europe to throw off the lie and seek the air of truth once again. Without such visionaries – including Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and others – the events of 1989 would probably never have happened. Without such visionaries today it is unlikely the Church in America will extricate itself from the lie of comfort, convenience, and complacency to which it has bound itself and is bound and enslaved in our day.

Disciplines
Art and Science
Mark Sprinkle reports on an innovative collaboration between biological science and art in the Summer 2015 issue of Image (“Ecologies of Knowing”). Botanist Stephen Tonsor and graphic artist Natalie Settles have combined for a number of years to explore what art and science have in common and where they differ as ways of knowing. Settles’ art, like Tonsor’s science, pays detailed attention to ordinary things – twigs, rocks, buds, and a particular kind of grass – in exploring the relationship between individual items and the ideal of the class to which those items belong. Her art pays loving attention to everyday subjects, bringing out overlooked beauty as a way of gaining a glimpse of God. She considers art an important resource for knowing God and asks of her own art, “What does it mean to embrace art as a tool to see a particular facet of God...?” Tonsor, too, looks at his work as a scientist as a way to contemplate what the two “variously call the numinous, the divine, or the sacred.” In her work Settles borrows from a 19th century wallpaper artist, thus bringing forward, in new and valuable ways, contributions from the past. The collaboration of these two reminds us both of the value and limits of each discipline as a way of knowing. Sprinkle derives an important lesson from their work together: “they suggest that only in community – in an ecology of ways of knowing – can we begin to adequately trace the contours of what is.”

Reason and Rhetoric
In communicating the Gospel we pursue two basic goals, the first, understanding, and the second, persuasion. Conviction and conversion, which we would also like to achieve, are the work of the Holy Spirit. Our job is to explain the truth and to do whatever sound reason requires to persuade our hearer of the truth of what we are helping him to understand. The New Testament was written in precisely this way, following the tenets of sound reason as expressed in the rhetorical protocols of the first century. These were decidedly Greco-Roman, as Ben Witherington III explains in an article in the March 2015 issue of JETS (“’Almost Thou Persuadest Me...’: The Importance of Greco-Roman Rhetoric for the Understanding of the Text and Context of the NT”). The books of the New Testament were written to be heard more than read. They were sermons, crafted according to the guidelines of rhetoric practiced in that day. Reading the NT this way can help us to gain new insights into apostolic arguments, and to experience those arguments in new ways and, perhaps, at greater depths. Divine revelation is accommodated to the ways the human mind works. Our own efforts at declaring and defending the faith should follow the pattern set forth in Scripture if we hope to achieve understanding and persuasion in our day. We need to learn from the New Testament, which follows common-grace protocols of reason and rhetoric, how to make the Good News known and appealing to our contemporaries.

The Humanities
Ian Beacock issues a rallying cry for the humanities to shake free from the chains of commerce and resume their place as forges of imagination and values (“Humanist among machines,” Aeon, 25 June 2015). He traces the career of Arnold Toynbee, seeing him as an example for humanists today. Toynbee spoke in behalf of the humanities against the growing stranglehold of science and technology over all knowledge. Just so today poets, novelists, historians, and artists need to pursue their true calling, not the securing of a niche in corporate and technological society, but pointing the way to human values and flourishing by challenging and summoning imaginations to roam beyond the sterile pastures of the techno-economy. He insists, “the humanities are at root about questions of value: what it means to live a good life or how to build a just society.” “The humanities,” he writes, “are most of all a moral enterprise, the pursuit of answers to big questions about how we live together and where we’re going.” I keep hearing this cry for a recovery of the mission of the humanities, and I’m encouraged that, sooner rather than later, the humanists among us – and especially Christian humanists – will rise to the challenge.

Outcomes
Rise in Seismic Activity
That there has been a dramatic rise in seismic activity in certain US sates is doubted by no one, least of all those living in central Oklahoma. “Before 2008, Oklahoma experienced one noticeable earthquake per year. By 2014, that number had soared to almost one a day, and the state is not alone” (Julia Rosen, “Pumped to rumble,” Science, June 2015). Ms. Rosen was summarizing a report published in the same issue of Science, explaining that the cause of increased seismicity is waste water disposed of in played-out mine shafts, in many cases, in an effort to force more oil out the mines (M. Weingarten, et al, “High-rate injection is associated with the increase in U.S. mid-continent seismicity,” Science, June 2015). This is a very measured report which explains two different ways salt waste water is injected into mine shafts, and how one method, and the rate water is injected by that method, alters subterranean pressures in nearby faults, leading to increased seismic activity. Couple of things here: First, as one who can often be critical of the scientific community, mostly when it is carried away with hubris, it pleases me to see this measured report and to think it might be a source of relief from increasing tremors throughout the Sooner state and elsewhere. Second, the report provides a reminder that our stewardship of the earth and its resources must not be driven, in the first instance, by economic considerations. For oil executives to continue to enrich themselves and their stockholders at the expense of the peace of mind and security of property of Oklahomans is not a trade-off we ought to encourage or accept. It’s tantamount to letting our leaf-burning get out of control so that our neighbor’s house and fields are put in jeopardy. Neighbor-love must trump self-love at all times, even on macro scales.

Envoi
Time

Time comes to us sharp-edged and bent,
distorted from its pristine state, 
marred, scorched, unraveled, broken, rent.

Arriving promptly, never late
each moment, as it enters our
environment is changed. The weight

of glory fades amid the sour
air of transgression which explains
our human mode. Each moment, hour

and day must be redeemed. The grains
of sand pass through our hands. We take
them up in turn, with all their pains

and joys. Our duty is to make
of these a gift, which are a gift
to us, and for their Maker’s sake,

to make them glorious, and to lift
each moment, like an offering,
to Him Who everyone shall sift

and sort. Time, time’s the gift we bring
above all others to our Lord and King.

T. M. Moore