This is awful. Thousands of American lives have been lost, and tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani wives and mothers have also mourned husbands and sons.
Let us never forget that war is itself an attrocity.
Thank you for your prayers during this past Sunday evening; my sermon on Isaiah 6 went well, I think. Corrie and I ran into some traffic, and began panicking when we realized we were very low on gas. In the end, we arrived at PVURC five minutes before the service began (rather than our usual half-hour buffer!). But the service went on without other incident. God was glorified–and he would have been anyway, even if we had been a few minutes late.
Lord, forgive my anxiety and worry, and help me to trust you always.
Regarding the audio, I forgot to request a recording of the sermon while I was there, so I’ll have to wait a few days for the CD. I will get it up on the “Papers and Presentations” page ASAP when we get back from Montreal.
On this day four years ago, I married Corrie Elizabeth Hesh. Words can’t describe how happy we are. Now a son completes and compounds our joy. Love is wonderful.
I found this XKCD comic chuckleworthy–and profound. Is every finer taste worth cultivating?
Getting technical, Caplan and Miller demonstrate that more educated people tend to think like economists on economic issues.
I had forgotten the remarkable story of Alexis St. Martin, the early nineteenth-century man who lived much of his life as a scientific "freak show" with an open hole in his stomach.
I’ve been a little light in the blogging dep’t lately. My self-imposed deadline for the submission of my first two thesis chapters (out of six) is next Thursday, as is my fourth wedding anniversary. I’m also preaching this Sunday evening at PVURC in Wayne; I will be "continuing" on Isaiah, this time in chapter six. (C’mon out if you’re in North Jersey! Service is at 6pm.)
The thesis has been quite the project thus far. I realized three weeks ago why I was so restless: the project became at that time the longest piece I’d ever written, measured by word count. I’m now well beyond 15,000 words, and still have aways to go in these two chapters. I feel like I should be resolving my paper, rounding out my argument–but I’m just getting started: this is no article or conference paper. Oh, well.
After my deadline on June 30, we will be spending a long weekend in Montreal with my sister and brother-in-law, who have recently returned from Scotland. This will be our first time in Montreal, and their first time seeing Daniel in person.
If you think of us, pray for my studies and my ministry; for Corrie’s ministry as a teacher, mother and wife; and for our travels. Pray also for PVURC: they have been without a pastor for nearly eighteen months, and they will be receiving a decision this weekend from the pastoral candidate that they called. The head elder told me, "When you come Sunday night, we’ll either be really excited, or really glum!" Let’s pray that they will have cause for excitement and rejoicing.
As someone who works in pharma and is also concerned about the (lack of) integrity of academic research, this article troubles me, if it’s true.
John Hobbins at AHP has some good thoughts (as usual) on the OT canon, and on how to maintain language ability for scholarly activity.
I ran into the “Abba = ‘Daddy'” myth in one of my readings, so with Father’s Day coming up, I thought it would be worth linking to this refutation by Steve Caruso.
In this post I plan to wrap up my series, covering nearly four weeks of my various traipsings through Wisconsin, Minnesota, Amsterdam and South Africa (here, here and here).
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I took my first exam (Old Testament criticism) the Wednesday after I arrived in Stellenbosch. It was the first exam I had taken in nearly three years, since PBU courses didn’t typically require exams. I had never taken an oral examination before, so I was a bit nervous. But supposed that there was only so much Dr. Jonker could ask about each of seven books in an hour–at worst, I’d only have to talk about each book for 8.6 minutes, right? It turned out to be quite enjoyable: we sat in his office and talked about the Old Testament. He was gracious enough to give me quite a high mark–the equivalent of an A on an American scale.
My second exam was not until Monday, and so I took some time Thursday to Saturday for some sightseeing. Thursday I took a wine tour–my first ever. The hotel arranged it, and I wasn’t quite sure what it would be like. Turns out I was the only one on the tour; for about $25, my driver took me to as many wineries in the area as I wanted. At each place I tasted perhaps 7-10 wines–usually for free or a few rand. It was quite a pleasant experience; I had the same “aspiring elitist” feeling I get when I visit art museums (or do archaic things with words, such as using the diëresis)–except that I actually enjoyed myself.
I’ve posted quite a few more photos from the wine tour here.
The wind was quite strong that day, and my touristy, wide-brimmed cloth hat nearly blew away several times. (I decided that looking silly was a small price to pay for avoiding skin cancer, but I was certainly not going to wear the chin-strap-thingy with the hat. I do have a tiny shred of dignity when it comes to fashion.)
During my meanderings about town, I ran across many interesting buildings and signs.
The Burgerhuis Museum is in a small Cape Dutch colonial house:
This is the Moederkerk, the oldest “Mother church” in Stellenbosch:
The University has a horticulture program and beautiful botanical gardens:
This is the store of a local eccentric who repairs–you guessed it–guns and clocks:
A strange advertisement on a car–outside the liquor store, no less:
I didn’t get an explanation on this one until later:
I had made arrangements with the brother of a friend of a friend (who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon) to see Cape Town on the Saturday before I left. Piet and his girlfriend, Colette, gave me the grand tour of the city, including a cable-car ride up Table Mountain, sushi at a fine restaurant and a hike through Kirstenbosch Gardens. I took dozens of photos, including these near the mountain:
Table Mountain runs the length of the Cape Peninsula, so from the top you can see the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the coast leading up to Namibia to the north, and the Indian Ocean to the south and east. The city is between the mountain and the Indian Ocean. The mountain, as its name suggests, is long, flat on top, and steep down the sides. It is possible to hike to the top, but we took the cable car (a much more pleasurable experience in the near 100ºF heat). The Gardens were incredible; South Africa has more species and varieties of flora and fauna of any nation on earth.
I spent nearly all of Sunday in my hotel room, reading for my Philosophy of History exam the next day. I was dismayed by how uneducated I am in the area of philosophy, but heartened by my experience earlier in the week with an oral exam. My hope was that Dr. Vosloo would focus on Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, with which I am starting to feel reasonably comfortable. My hopes were realized, and the exam turned out just fine. I was quite pleased with a B+ grade–not bad, seven years removed from Honors Philosophy in college. More important than the grade, I feel that mastering those readings gave me a stronger theoretical foundation for the historical component of my thesis.
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Helen, the owner of the hotel, drove me to the airport for my 11:50 flight Tuesday night. As I awaited the boarding call, I reflected on my first time in Africa. I didn’t come up with anything terribly introspective or brilliant–just that I had enjoyed myself but was pleased to be returning to my wife and baby. How nice it would be, I thought, to bring them here. Someday….
What if your life were your own personal The Truman Show, with cameras and everything, capturing every experience–but with your full knowledge and consent? What if everyone else did the same? Would history be perfect?
In the second section of his mammoth tome on historiography, Memory, History, Forgetting (K. Blamey and D. Pellauer, trans.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Paul Ricoeur discusses the difficulty of gathering and evaluating testimony during the documentary phase of writing history:
The document sleeping in the archives is not just silent, it is an orphan. The testimonies it contains are detached from the authors who ‘gave birth’ to them. They are handed over to the care of those who are competent to question them and hence to defend them, by giving them aid and assistance. In our historical culture, the archive has assumed authority over those who consult it. We can speak, as I shall discuss further below, of a documentary revolution. In a period now taken to be outdated in historical research, work in the archives had the reputation of assuring the objectivity of historical knowledge, protected thereby from the historian’s subjectivity. For a less passive conception of consulting archives, the change in sign that turns an orphan text into one having authority is tied to the pairing of testimony with a heuristics of evidentiary proof. This pairing is common to testimony before a court and testimony gathered by the professional historian. The testimony is asked to prove itself. Thus it is testimony that brings aid and assistance to the orator or the historian who invokes it. As for what more specifically concerns history, the elevation of testimony to the rank of documentary proof will mark the high point of the reversal in the relationship of assistance that writing exercises in regard to ‘memory on crutches,’ that hupomnēmē, or artificial memory par excellence, to which myth grants only second place. Whatever may be the shifts in documentary history–positivism or not–the documentary frenzy too hold once and for all. Allow me to mention here from a more advanced phase of contemporary discourse (to be considered below), Yerulshalmi’s dread confronted with the archival swamp, and Pierre Nora’s exclamation, ‘Archive as much as you like: something will always be left out.’ (169)
Verifiability of testimony is a noted problem in historiography. But the rapid progress of technology has permanently changed the historiographical operation. Rather than searching through archives for a few documents on a person or event, we now have hundreds of thousands of Google hits to wade through. We used to be lucky if we had an eyewitness account of an ancient event; the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination didn’t put all doubt to rest. Now, most of the developed and much of the developing worlds are filled with camera- and video-phones, so literally seconds after the shooting started at Virginia Tech or the tsunami assaulted Japan’s coast, anyone with an internet connection can watch.
It is not inconceivable–as it would have been even eight years ago when the original French edition of Memory, History, Forgetting was published–to imagine a 24/7/365 video camera on every one of Earth’s seven billion people. Yes, it is unlikely and prohibitively expensive–but it is not beyond the realm of possibility: the hardware and storage space are cheap enough.
If we had video cameras on everyone, then, wouldn’t we capture every human event from every perspective? Historiography would still exist in the writing of narrative, which “adds its modes of intelligibility to those of explanation/understanding; in turn these figures of style can be recognized to be figures of thought capable of adding a specific dimension of exhibition to the readability belonging to narratives” (276). But disputes over simple documentary facts would be obsolete, right?
Wrong.
It would be quite naïve to think that, even if the problem of forged video “testimonies” could be solved, that human beings would care “what actually happened.” Even events for which we have easily accessible testimony are mis-remembered in the minds of the public. Was it Al Gore or Dan Quayle (or neither!) who actually said, “I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people”? I’ve received e-mails to each effect, and I’m sure the sender in each case was fully convinced that the vice-presidential candidate of the other party was stupid enough to have said it.
Speaking of VP candidates, the realization that prompted this post was an internet search (settling a bet with a coworker) on one of Sarah Palin’s more infamous quotations. As “everyone” knows, she said that Alaska and Russia were so close that she could see Russia from her back porch.
GIBSON: But this is not just reforming a government. This is also running a government on the huge international stage in a very dangerous world. When I asked John McCain about your national security credentials, he cited the fact that you have commanded the Alaskan National Guard and that Alaska is close to Russia. Are those sufficient credentials?
PALIN: But it is about reform of government and it’s about putting government back on the side of the people, and that has much to do with foreign policy and national security issues Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that’s with the energy independence that I’ve been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy, that I worked on as chairman of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, overseeing the oil and gas development in our state to produce more for the United States.
…
GIBSON: Let’s start, because we are near Russia, let’s start with Russia and Georgia.
The administration has said we’ve got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?
PALIN: First off, we’re going to continue good relations with Saakashvili there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain’s running mate, that we will be committed to Georgia. And we’ve got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable and we have to keep…
GIBSON: You believe unprovoked.
PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.That’s why we have to keep an eye on Russia.
And, Charlie, you’re in Alaska. We have that very narrow maritime border between the United States, and the 49th state, Alaska, and Russia. They are our next door neighbors.We need to have a good relationship with them. They’re very, very important to us and they are our next door neighbor.
GIBSON: What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you?
PALIN: They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.
GIBSON: What insight does that give you into what they’re doing in Georgia?
PALIN: Well, I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relation with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.
Quite different! Now, I’m no fan of Sarah Palin–I think she’s egotistical, bizarre, and not nearly as smart as she would like to believe. But in this context she’s not saying that she literally believes she and Russia are neighbors, only that the proximity gives her more foreign-relations cred than most governors can claim.
Where did the “Russia from my house” meme come from?
Again, let this not be construed as an endorsement of Palin or a criticism of Tina Fey–I love Tina. But it’s disturbing that a parody of a (quasi-)serious public figure is embedded in the public memory in place of the actual figure:
All the information in the world (or of the world) will be useless unless it is consulted, digested and presented. Once it is presented in popular culture (and usually in academic culture as well), it does not matter “what actually happened”–only what is part of the collective memory.
Ricoeur thus finishes the paragraph that I quoted earlier:
Once freed of its disgrace and allowed arrogance, has the pharmakon of the archived document become more a poison than a remedy? (169)
John R. Lott, Jr., never a stranger to controversy, explains that government has grown since universal women’s suffrage, and why.
Michael Smerconish has an interesting take on Gov. Christie’s Helicoptergate scandal. (I’m not sure how I feel about Christie having to reïmburse the state for the infamous helicopter ride. He wasn’t flying a hooker somewhere–he is a busy public official trying to do his duty and also be there for his family.)
On the latest edition of Christ the Center, Camden talks with Dr. David Skeel of UPenn about Christianity in legal studies and bankruptcy law.
I just finished listening to Pride and Prejudice, one of my favorite novels. I hadn’t read it in a few years, and I’d forgotten how humorous and witty Austen was–several times I almost lost it in my cubicle.
Over at Cafe Hayek, Professor Boudreaux (not of Butt-Paste fame) channels Julian Simon, offering a 20-year bet on the number of Americans who will die from natural disasters.
think hard, think well 