Misty Moisty Morning

Things We're Enjoying

Hey there--

Just a quick note to mention some things we've been enjoying this fall. First, John R. Erickson of Hank the Cowdog fame now has a non-fiction book called Story Craft: Reflections on Faith, Culture, and Writing. It has great advice for writers, interesting anecdotes, and plenty of plain speaking (you can do that, Erickson points out, when you refuse to sell yourself).




Second, as part of school the kids and I have been listening to Robert Greenberg explain "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music." It's one of The Teaching Company courses. They're taught by college professors and are aimed at adults who want to learn more about a subject without going back to school, but the ones we've done have been great for homeschoolers as well. Even my eleven-year-old, for whom college-level courses are a bit of a challenge, loves Robert Greenberg, who is absolutely hilarious. (FYI, each course goes on sale at least once a year.)

And I recently discovered mystery writer Nevada Barr's book Seeking Enlightenment... Hat by Hat: A Skeptic's Guide to Religion, which explains how Barr, who started out a decided unbeliever, became a committed churchgoer (though not, at the time of writing, what anyone would call an orthodox Christian). It's painful, funny, and altogether fascinating.

Note to Christians: One lonely night Barr, too depressed to go home, wandered into a church just because it happened to be unlocked; she kept coming back because the people she met there welcomed her, confused and godless though she was.

Note to Southerners: It took Barr awhile to get used to you, but she sure loves you now.

Another question I can't answer off the top of my head

... from the twelve-year-old: "What's the difference between a loin and a groin?"

At least this one wasn't about how space bends.

If Being is finite...

Jonathan read this to us at breakfast a couple of days ago.

From Melissus ("the Samian disciple of Parmenides," disagreeing here with Parmenides, who had declared that Being is spatially finite):

If Being is finite, then beyond being there must be nothing: being must be bounded or limited by nothing.

But if being is limited by nothing, it must be infinite and not finite. There cannot be a void outside being, "for what is empty is nothing. What is nothing cannot be."

"Nothing, or nothingness," said the almost-thirteen-year old.

Exactly. But is Melissus guilty of equivocation--of being tricky by using the same word to mean different things--or is he pointing out that the other side uses equivocation?

We all agreed we'd have to think about this further--except the eleven-year-old, who declared himself too sleepy to think about it at all. Ever.

Boys (and men)

Several of you have been kind enough to wonder if the Witts are okay. Yes, we are. I'm just busy planning for the college composition courses I'll be teaching in the fall, and for home school as well. And we spent three weeks wandering the southwest in a semi-working vacation.

Amongst all that, we're still working on the house. Last week I asked Jonathan if he'd replace a $12 doorknob, and instead he came home with an entire new exterior door and three new windows (yes, they were on sale; yes, they would have had to be purchased eventually anyway; no, the tax credit doesn't apply, though the salesman thought it did). Good thing we have home improvement books and helpful friends with good tools. The windows weren't too bad, but the door is, shall we say, challenging. Once we actually get it in, I'm going to paint it a triumphant purple. (And yes, it's "we." Jonathan works, while I stand by waiting to take him to the hospital. Did I tell you about the nine stitches in his scalp on New Year's Day?)

Our daughter (now 15) is, as usual, serene and helpful. (Apparently she got her lifetime supply of troublesomeness out of her system during those first six colicky months of life.) She's been picking berries and making jam, doing various things with various friends, and working on Celtic songs on her flute. She patiently plays with her brothers, does impossible chores like clipping the dog's toenails and, best of all, seems completely oblivious to a certain young man who has taken to keeping an eye on her.

Our boys--well, now that they're 11 and 12-almost-13, I really thought we were past this stage. But no. Yesterday one of their friends dared our youngest son to kiss a baby frog. "I'll give you one of my bionicles if you kiss it!" he said.

"Nah," said my son. Just when I thought he was showing good sense, he went on. "You don't have to give me anything. I'll kiss it for free."

And that's not even the worst of it. One day recently, Jonathan and I were painting our daughter's floor when the phone rang. I was covered in white paint (I've spent most of the summer covered in paint of one color or another), so Jonathan dashed out and grabbed it.

"Uhhhh, I'm gonna say no to that," he said, and hung up.

"Salesman?" I asked.

"No, our daughter. They're all over at the neighbors' house and she wants to know if the boys can eat ants."

"Yuck," I said, then considered. "Actually, Jonathan, I'm kinda surprised you said no. I mean, I would have said no, but I'd have thought you'd have let them. Dad always said he ate ants in France. Chocolate-covered ones. Or maybe those were grasshoppers ... "

"Yeah, well, the ants aren't the problem--it's all those woodchuck traps, and that dead deer out in the woods. Who knows what decomposing carcass the ants just crawled out of."

Before I could respond to that disgusting image, the phone rang again.

This time I couldn't hear the conversation, and Jonathan returned shaking his head. "That was our youngest," he said.

"And?"

"He says it's too late. He's already eaten two ants. The other boys asked their dad if they could eat ants, and Hugh said sure, eat them all. And our son wants to help eat them."

Oh, tough call. I wouldn't want to make our boys feel prissy compared to their friends and their friends' dad ... nor, no doubt, would Jonathan want to look prissy compared to Hugh. Besides, how likely was it that the ants had been mining a putrid woodchuck, instead of cavorting wholesomely on a nice green leaf?

"So what did you say?" I asked.

Jonathan smiled. "I said he could eat exactly as many ants as their dad was willing to eat."

Mr. Potato Head Constitution

Jonathan has an article, "The Mr. Potato Head Constitution," up at The American Spectator Online. As the title indicates, it's both funny and scary.

"But I didn't mean to ..."

Here's Anthony Esolen's response:

Let us suppose I have a fancy revolver with twenty chambers. Suppose that we put one bullet in the revolver, in one of the chambers. Suppose also that I and my pal enjoy the frisson of terror and risk that rushes up our spines when we spin the chambers and hold the revolver to the other fellow's head and pull the trigger. Of course, I do not want to kill my friend, and he does not want to kill me. But we are both willing to incur the risk of death to have that spasm of glee and fright.

Now, it won't do to compare our actions to those of, say, a bridge-painter, who knows when he climbs up his ladder that there is a measurable chance that he will fall to his death (it is, I'm told, one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and therefore fabulously well remunerated). That is because the purpose of a ladder is that it be climbed, not that it be fallen from, whereas the very purpose of a gun is to shoot a bullet.

Suppose that my friend and I play this game of American Roulette once a year, on one of our birthdays. Now suppose that my friend's number comes up, and I shoot him through the head. By law, and by the moral philosophy that undergirds the law, I do not get to plead that I did not intend his death. Perhaps I did not want him to die, but I certainly did intend the chance that he would die: I intentionally used a weapon against him, a weapon whose purpose it is to kill, and I used it in a way that would ensure his death, if the right chamber came up. It would be up to judge and jury to assess the correct punishment in my case, but as a matter of fact I am a murderer.

Except in the case of rape, there are no "unintended pregnancies," none.

....pregnancies are the result of intention. The problem is that the children are not wanted, and that is a very different thing. For the question we should immediately ask is not, "How do we dispose of this child we do not want?" but "What is wrong with us that we do not want this child?"

The rest is here.

Work with your hands

In grad school I had a brilliant literature professor who loved to cook because, he said, it was hands-on and gave an immediate reward, unlike his professional life. He needed something concrete.

I understood that. About that same time Jonathan and I were both longing for children, longing for something to balance the cerebral world in which we spent most of our waking hours. Too much thinking, we'd learned, can drive you crazy--and I mean that literally. Too little contact with physical reality, with flesh and blood, laundry, dishes, gardens, and so forth, allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that everything is amenable to our clever manipulation, our spin doctoring, our slant.

Don't get me wrong: Ideas are real and have real consequences, but we have to exercise moral and intellectual integrity to remember that, to treat them as if they're real, logical, and not just malleable fodder for a publishable article. The physical world insists on its immutable truth more forcibly. When the washing machine breaks, it is broken; either you can fix it, or you can't.

This guy--Matthew B. Crawford--writes about this sort of thing. In discussing the benefits of hands-on, physical labor, he notes:

Work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions ...

In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Crawford has a Ph.D. , but repairs motorcyles for a living (and, obviously, writes). Here's another one of his articles, this one about medication:

The semantic shift wherein “unhappiness” is replaced by “depression” has real consequences: Our self-understanding becomes infected by medical categories that may not be appropriate, issuing in a kind of moral inarticulacy. With this comes a different disposition toward one’s own experience.

Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison psychiatrist in Britain, suggests that an overly broad concept of depression implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

Gotta love a man who quotes Dalrymple.

And Crawford has a book just coming out: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.

Why Capitalism is the Solution, Not the Problem

Update: The Michael Medved Show streams here.

Our friend Jay Richards will be on the Michael Medved Show today talking about his new book, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Jay will be during the show's third hour. If your station carries it live, that's 2-3 p.m. Pacific, 4-5 p.m. Central, and 5-6 p.m. Eastern.

Go here to see if a station in your area carries the show.

Social In-Security

It’s no mere accounting blunder that Social Security cannot fund the long retirements of the baby boom generation. It’s no mere regulatory glitch that these same retiring boomers will not be able to sell their homes at a delicious premium.

The boomers didn’t raise enough customers for all of those homes, didn’t raise enough workers to fund, build and service the retirement lifestyles many came to expect.

The rest of Jonathan's article is here. Jonathan quotes from an interesting article by David Goldman, newly available online.

Friday Fun with Garage Doors

Jonathan's dad called a couple of days ago and told us this story:

He was in the house when Jonathan's mother started hollering something incoherent from the garage. He dashed out to see what was wrong: The garage door was raised; so, therefore, was the cat-door that's set into the garage door; and so, therefore, was the cat, Elmo, whose tail was caught in the cat door.

Jonathan's mom had inadvertently opened the automatic garage door while Elmo was coming in the cat door.

The angry cat was hanging from on high, so reasonably enough, Jonathan's dad pushed the button to lower the garage door--but when it got near the bottom, the dangling cat triggered the automatic safety eye, and up went the door and the cat.

(I'd feel worse for her, but she's the cat who threw up all over me at Thanksgiving.)

Jonathan's dad tries again. Down goes the door. Dangling cat triggers safety mechanism. Up goes the door. And again--down, trigger, up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Elmo is screaming; Jonathan's mother is not amused.

Finally Jonathan's dad tries to lift the cat down by hand. The doctor says his wounds will eventually heal. Next, he gets a broom handle and pokes at the cat door, trying not to poke the flailing and screaming cat, until finally the door opens and Elmo drops to the concrete floor.

She lands on her feet, blinks, and strolls over to her food bowl. She, at least, is unscathed.

Friday Fun: Tim Hawkins

To get the next one, you first need to have seen Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel"--a song whose sentiment I appreciate, its sentimentality not so much.



Tim Hawkins' take is really funny:

Where did that come from?

Yep, we did it. We got chickens.

After three days, eight hens, and thirteen eggs, we have learned that:

Isa Browns like to play outside, only dashing in to lay an egg in a nesting box now and again. Then they go back outside and scratch around some more. They've tilled up almost all of our garden plot already.

Barred Rocks venture out to take a dust bath occasionally, but they much prefer hanging around in the hen house gabbing. When someone climbs into a nesting box they all gather round and peer inside. "What's she doing? Scoot over, I can't see. Oh look--it's an egg! Isn't she clever!" They themselves drop eggs wherever they happen to be--outside in the dirt, inside standing in the feed pan, whatever.

In short, though Barred Rocks are undeniably pretty birds, Isa Browns are smarter. Just in case you wondered.

Giving

From Rodney Stark's Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome:

In 362, when Emperor Julian launched a campaign to revive paganism, he recognized that to do so it would be necessary to match Christian "benevolence." In a letter to a prominent pagan priest, Julian wrote: "I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence ... [They] support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us."

But his challenge to the temples to match Christian benevolence asked the impossible. Paganism was utterly incapable of generating the commitment needed to motivate such behavior. Not only were many of its gods and goddesses of dubious character, but they offered nothing that could motive humans to go beyond self-interested acts of propitiation.

He is Risen!