The Compass, the Knife, and the Spyglass

Two weeks ago, a friend from church lent me his copy of The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman. Enthralled, I read that book plus the two others in the trilogy: The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Together, the three comprise an epic that Pullman calls His Dark Materials—a phrase borrowed from Milton to describe the raw stuff of matter, energy, and spirit out of which God allegedly created the world and all life.

Readers may recall a recent uproar from Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization whose vehement denunciation of Pullman, his books, and the resultant movie probably sold more books for Pullman than the movie itself did. I, for one, knew nothing of His Dark Materials until I heard of Focus’ new, well, focus. And I am sure I am not the first Christian to read Pullman with great interest after James Dobson’s literature patrol alerted us to the danger that lay within.

With just a brief nod, though, to my brothers and sisters there at Focus on the Family, I intend to argue (over the next few days) that His Dark Materials, in its unhampered critique of Christianity and the Church, actually provides a surprisingly helpful framework for the debate over fundamental philosophical questions—questions that Christians are notoriously clumsy about answering, and that the attackers of Christianity (as a result of our clumsiness) tend to assume they’ve already won.

Put simply: Christians should thank Phillip Pullman for the second chance to get right what we have often gotten wrong.

Burn our biofuel–and eat it, too

Critics of ethanol as a substitute for petroleum-based gasoline have long predicted that growing corn for fuel would lead to a food shortage.  Well, we’ve seen the “10% ethanol” sticker on the pumps for a couple of years, now; food prices have gone up, but not so much as to cripple us.  We’re making it, and we seem willing to pay a bit more for food as long as we’re still able to drive the food home in our cars.

But read this: in Haiti, Egypt, and elsewhere, food is so scarce that hungry people are rioting.  Some say food prices have increased forty percent in the last six months; others say they’ve doubled in two years.  There is simply not enough food to go around. 

An Aristotelian Other-Examination

My friend’s comment on the post “An Aristotelian Self-Examination” (see below) was long enough and substantive enough that I decided to devote a whole new post to it.  (For those who are emphatically NOT interested in virtue ethics…force yourself to keep reading.  It’ll do you good.  Just kidding.)

An Aristotelian Self-Examination

“While actions are called just or temperate whenever they are the sorts of things that a just or temperate person would do, the one who does them is not just or temperate unless he also does them in the way that just or temperate people do them…”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

So, how do “just or temperate people” do just or temperate actions? If doing the actions isn’t enough to make me virtuous, then what is?

According to the philosopher, there are three distinctive attributes of the manner in which virtuous people do virtuous actions. They do them

1. Knowingly,
2. For their own sake, and
3. “Being in a stable condition and not able to be moved all the way out of it.”

Eh?

A Call for Dangerous Learners

Today I was reminded of these lines from Alexander Pope.

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Thoughts?  Questions?  Personal and/or world connections?

A Matter of Means, Part 2

The following is a continuation of my previous post, “A Matter of Means” (see below).  Here, I will explain and defend my claim that the “new literacy” isn’t new; that it is merely a simplified version of a Western Classical liberal arts education.