The Gift of the Magi

I found myself with an extra class period for some of my Humanities classes last week (we just broke for Christmas break) and I thought I'd do something a little seasonal. O. Henry's short story The Gift of the Magi made a perfect filler session. O. Henry was William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), an American author living near the end of the nineteenth century. He was famous for his short stories with surprise endings. The Gift of the Magi is among these stories. The story itself can be found here. Below I have posted the questions I gave my class to consider as we talked through the story. If you decide to use this in any way, let me know. I'd love to know what you think of the questions and the discussion they create.
Merry Christmas!

Comprehension
1. Why is Della upset about her $1.87? What does she want to do with her money?
2. How does she feel about Jim? About his watch?
3. What asset does she have with which to get his present? How does she accomplish this?
4. What does Della fear when Jim comes home?
5. What is Jim’s reaction when he sees Della?
6. How does Jim feel about Della? About her hair?
7. What has he purchased for her? How has he purchased this gift?
8. In O. Henry’s opinion, what is the gift the Magi?
Connections
1. Why did the Young’s have the very pretentious name, Dillingham, in their name?
2. Why were they considering dropping it now?
3. Are the Young’s wealthy? How can you tell?
4. Define irony. What is ironic about this story? Briefly describe some other ironic event you have read about or of which you have been a part.
Application
1. What biblical allusions does O. Henry draw from to make his story?
2. Who were the biblical Magi? What gifts did they bring?
3. What parallel does O. Henry draw between the imagery of the biblical Magi and the gifts that Della and Jim offer to each other?
4. Why do we give gifts to each other at Christmas or other times of the year?
5. How do you feel when you receive a gift?
6. How do you feel when you give a gift?
7. What is the most a gift has ever cost you personally?

It's Christmas Time in the City

This is a great video. There are others like it as well. Search for Trans-Siberian Orchestra on YouTube. This is one of those things I'd love to have the time and the money with which to do something like this.

Why Welfare Systems Don't Work

The Puritans had much to teach concerning social action, as did godly Christian leaders from before their time and after. John Calvin, for example, created a "welfare system" in Geneva that upheld the biblical demands to feed the poor and care for the widow and the orphan, and all within the god-given structure of the Church. The Puritans understood the value of working for the common welfare of the community and men like William Ames instructed believers to have a "living religion" not one that was mere empty words. Works of piety and charity were often commended by the Puritans. As recently as the nineteenth century, Thomas Chalmers, through his tireless actions, reduced Glasgow's welfare budget needs to nothing by the careful and directed actions of the local church.
Modern welfare movements will fail for a couple of reasons. For one thing they are trying to do the impossible. Contrary to modernist assumptions Christ has told us that we will always have poor people among us. Therefore any attempt to eradicate poverty through welfare systems or socialism is doomed to failure. Another reason, however, is that the wrong agency is doing the deeds. It should shame us that the state is doing the deeds of the local church. The state was not meant to feed the hungry or clothe the naked. This is the job of the Church and to the extent we have let the state get involved, we have abdicated our responsibility.
Until the Church stands up and takes responsibility for mercy ministry, we will continue to see the state's destructive policies tearing families apart. Many families never make it out of poverty or abject living conditions through state welfare systems. That is because they come devoid of proper instruction. Part of mercy ministry is instruction in righteousness.
I'll get down from the soap box now.

Why We Think The Way We Think About the Puritans

I remember the way teachers at high school and college treated the Puritans in history and literature classes when I was growing up. It was not a pretty sight. The Puritans were presented as very drab and solemn folks who had no sense of joy whatsoever and wanted to make sure no one else did either. They were dogmatic in their beliefs and intolerant of anyone else around them having even a slightly different opinion. In a day when multi-culturalism and cultural relativism was the rule, the Puritans didn't strike my teachers as worthy of anything but spite.
As I read more and more history and literature, I began to see where that thinking came from. It didn't come from reading the Puritans, I can tell you that. It came from, or at least began with, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne (1804-4864) was a descendant of John Hathorne, one of judges in the famous Salem Witch Trials of the late 1690's. Hawthorne (who likely added the "w" to his name to separate himself from his ancestry) despised the actions of his grandfather and linked those actions to the austere Calvinism that pervaded much of New England at the time.
Hawthorne began writing in the 1820's and continued to write until the early 1860's. Many of his novels vehemently attack the Puritanism of New England history or simply picture the Puritans as ineffective and hypocritical. One of Hawthorne's most famous works, The Scarlet Letter, does this masterly. The main characters are hypocritical, ineffective, intolerant, and unloving. This was the version of Puritanism that colored the way generations of Americans view the Puritan movement.
Leland Ryken has done the world a great service by writing Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were. While not a work of classical literature or history, I like to teach this work in the course on 1500 - 1800 to show what Puritans were really like. It helps students see what good ideas they had, while not sugar-coating the bad things they stood for. It also helps frame many discussions that come up in American history; things like education, social action, and attitudes toward work and labor.

The Civil War and the One and the Many

The philosophical problem of the one and the many is one that is pervasive throughout western thought. Cornelius Van Til and R.J. Rushdoony have both given us excellent ways of resolving this problem within a Christian world and life view. It is interesting to me how often the problem comes up in history and literature. It is as pervasive a problem in real affairs as it is in philosophy classes. Some of my students have heard me speak of the way it affects the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century before Christ. Recently I became aware of just how important it is in understanding the war between the states (commonly called the Civil War).
One aspect of the causes of the Civil War was the constitutional issue of secession. Could states, once joined to the Union, separate themselves from the Union? Were the states a national union or were they a diversity of independent states? The One (National Union) and the Many (Independent states). The answer to this question, fought over during the Civil War, has been answered by default. A national union was forged in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Ideas have consequences...

Rousseau, Baseball, and Apple Pie

In book four of the Social Contract, Rousseau caps his entire discussion on government with a necessary chapter on religion. Aside from some serious theological errors (Christ did not institute a merely spiritual kingdom), Rousseau posits a distinction between personal religion and civil religion. Personal religion is the religion that each individual has between their own two ears. It is the religion of the mind, of the individual. So long as it stays in between your ears, it is not going to bother anybody, least of all Rousseau.
But the state needs a religion that will enforce the kind of devotion and ritual necessary for the promulgation of the state. Here Rousseau mentions the civil religion. Civil religion "joins divine worship to a love of the law" (Social Contract, 4.8). The law it creates a love for must be the civil law, not a theological law (assuming the two are distinct, which Rousseau would insist upon). Civil religion creates its own "dogmas, its rituals, its external forms of worship" (ibid.). Civil religion is what separates a citizen of one nation from another nation. It works well with modern thinking about nationalism. This can lead to some problems, especially if one nation gets a superiority complex and has delusions of exclusivity. This can lead to some crusade-like activity.
The idea of a civil religion like Rousseau explains isn't so far fetched as it may sound. After all, modern Americans have rituals that define us as a nation. We have apple pie, right (as American as apple pie)? We have the national pass time (don't dare go and not order up a hot dog or roasted peanuts). We even have less pronounced forms of this. We have little colored ribbons that declare how much we support our troops. We have flags flying from houses, windows, and other places. We have patriotism! In our postmodern, post-nationalism world, patriotism has replaced Rousseau's civil religion. If you choose not to engage in any of the practices listed above (and a whole host of others) you run a very significant risk of being labeled un-American. In our civil religion, to not practice the rituals, to not engage in the modern forms of worship, is heretical at best.
The saddest part of this is that many of the people that have fallen for this civil religion are evangelical Christians.

A Student's Canon

I'm beginning to consider what might be an effective canon of works for students to own as part of their high school education. This list will probably grow, but I have some initial suggestions simply because I use these books all the time in reading and preparing lectures and such.
1. A Bible (this should go without saying): I have been steadily using the ESV and NKJV.
2. A Dictionary: I mean a good dictionary. For the kind of work I do I regularly consult the 1828 facsimile Webster edition available through American Vision or Vision Forum (as well as other places).
3. The Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World (60+ volumes of history, philosophy, literature, math, science, and theology). Particularly the Syntopicon is fabulous. This two volume compendium reference volume is usable on its own (so at least get this) but is easier to make references if you have the other volumes as well.
4. A good Systematic Theology. There are so many good ones out there, from Hodge to Berkhof to Smith or Grudem, that I am not even going to suggest which one. Just get one and have it handy.
That's it for now. I'll add more as I think it through.

More Wisdom from Chesterton...

From The Ball and the Cross,
"It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that the moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters 'Mr. Wilkison Still Safe,' or 'Mr. Jones of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.' They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious: they can only represent that is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority."
Think that through as you watch the evening news. These are some interesting thoughts to go along with the conclusions Neil Postman reaches in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Forgotten Transitions, Forgotten Books

It is amazing how a book can be sitting right on your bookshelf and you never see it or look at it. It is equally amazing how that book, if you are forunate enough to pick it up can enlighten you in many ways. C. Gregg Singer's A Theological Interpretation of American History has been that way for me for a few weeks now. I ran across it thinking I had to have something that dealt with American Transcendentalism from a quasi-biblical perspective. Little did I know how helpful the book would be.
Singer (1910-1999), a former professor at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary makes a direct connection between the Deism of the founding fathers, the Unitarianism of their successors and the Transcendentalism of the early 19th century. In Singer's opinion, Transcendentalism was only the most recent option in terms of having a fully modern, intellectual faith. In order to exist in a world bent on modernity, people suckled on the Enlightenment had to have an intellectually defensible faith.
Deism was one step in that direction, but still held on to the distinctively Christian tradition of the Trinity. Unitarianism did away with that, but still insisted that Christ was divine. Transcendentalism finally exorcised that demon by presenting to us a faith "like Christ's" instead of a faith "in Christ." You see Christ was not divine, he was just the first person in a very long time to understand that we are all made in the image of God. Understanding this allowed him to act like God and be fully human, as God intended.
Transcendentalism, in turn, led to the reform movements of the nineteenth century, including women's suffrage and abolitionism among others. Once man was perfectible, it was not a long walk to the reform position on many social ills of the nineteenth century. We are still Transcendentalists at heart, bent on removing the last vestiges of orthodox Christian doctrine from our social lives. Unlike the Transcendentalists though, we no longer appear to believe that we are created in the image of God. Thank you Mr. Darwin.
If you want a good read on American history, pick up Singer's book. I'm not sure it is still in print, but I'll bet you can find a good used one. It is not a history textbook. It assumes a casual knowledge of the basic events in our history, as well as Europe.

New Baby Boy

Been a little busy the past several hours. No reading, no posting. We've been having a baby. Joseph Owen was born at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 16. He weighed 9lbs. 4oz. and was 22.5 inches long. Everyone is doing well. This was my first home birth. We coupled that with a water birth and had a very good experiences. I was nervous about aspects of it right up until delivery, but my wife did a fantastic job and everything went smoothly. We are all resting now. The siblings are home for a little while and have been loving on Owen nonstop.
A bit on the name, Joseph Owen. Joseph happens to be my fathers middle name, and we like to use family names when we can. Aside from that, we both love the biblical narrative of Joseph. It is one of the best stories in the Old Testament in my opinion. Owen was a name we've wanted to use for a boy for a while now. Owen is taken from the Puritan minister John Owen (1616-1683). Owen is best known for his several volume commentary on Hebrews and his writings on the Atonement (The Death of Death in the Death of Christ), mortification of sin in the believer, and the Holy Spirit. He was Oliver Cromwells' chaplain during the English Civil War (1642-1651). Although not participating in the Westminster Assembly, he was active in the creation of the Savoy Declaration, which is based on the Westmisnter Confession of Faith.
OK, here are some pictures:

Even Dance has a history, I guess

I was shown this quite a while ago and I doubt there are many who haven't seen it, but I felt it was worth posting. Any historian has to be open to the many things that can have a history. Done in a humorous way, this man illustrates the history of dancing over the second half of the twentieth century. It is very funny and deserves watching once in a while.

Lincoln on Revolutions

There is no way I am the first person to see the irony of this. While reading Abraham Lincoln's speech to the US House of Representatives in 1848, I came across these comments by Lincoln:
"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor it this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much territory as they inhabit."
I am, of course, wondering where this sentiment went thirteen years later when secession broke out among the Southern States? According to George Grant, and I think he is right, one of most fundamental planks of the revolutionary faith (as developed by Karl Marx) is that all further revolutionary action must be put down. There can be no revolution against the revolution. So long as Lincoln is speaking of Texas becoming a country or state everything is fine. However, when the issue becomes part of the United States wanting to leave, to disrupt the normal flow of the revolution in favor of a more conservative government well, we must put a stop to that.
This little tidbit just helps me understand the constitutional basis of secession a little better.

Do we have prophets?

Sunday evening, in the midst of a great sermon on self-control, my pastor made a reference to Titus 1:12 -

One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons."

I checked my footnotes in the study Bible I use and was intrigued by the comment that Paul was quoting a Cretan poet from around 600 BC. Paul places this particular statement, by this particular man, on a par with prophecy because he told the truth. It does not make his writing in general Scripture in any way, but it gives some more insight into the office a prophet and how this office may be connected to our own day. I am not a believer in the prophecy if charismatic preachers who declare that God told them something personally last night. O.P. Robertson has a great little book on that called The Last Word, if you are interested. I don't believe that "Thus Saith the Lord" is still around. But I do find myself compelled to consider that people who make startlingly true pronouncements are fulfilling the office of the prophet in our own day. Like Epimenides, we have those who say things that are so true that we must take them as prophets.

Hiding in the Odyssey

This is nothing new to those who have studied the Odyssey and and have a knowledge of Greek, but I have just a smattering of Greek so it struck me as fascinating. The word Apocalupsis (from which our English word Revelation is taken) means unveiling or unhiding. This immediately has eschatalogical implications that I am not even going to consider here. At the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus is on the island of Kalypso. Kalypso, is a root of Apocalypse. Let's go ahead and put two and two together here. Odysseus is hidden while he is on the island of Kalypso and he begins going through an Apocalypse, or an unhiding, from the moment he heaves the island.
Initially he is reluctant to reveal much about himself. On the island of the Phaiakians, he only reveals his identity after Demodokus' song affects him deeply. When he first arrives back on Ithaka, he is disguised by Athene and slowly reveals himself to Eumaios, Telemachos, and finally the entire household. The revealing of Odysseus is an event that is built toward throughout the poem. As he is slowly revealed, order begins to be re-established in Ithaka.
What does this tell us about our own quest for anonymity? We know that God established a Church through His son, not a mass of individual believers. Peter refers to each of us as living stones (1 Peter 2:5). Paul's favorite analogy is of body parts that must work together for the mutual edification of the whole man. No single part is independent of the others.
The world is in chaos at the beginning of the Odyssey, while Odysseus is hidden. As he is revealed, order begins to be established. If we find our world in chaos and the church ineffectual, perhaps we should examine our own level of hidden-ness. Perhaps we need to be revealed as children of the living God and then act that way. Perhaps then, like in the Odyssey, order would be restored. Perhaps we have hidden from the world far too long.

Hopkins on Global Warming

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I think we forget that we are in a covenantal world with a covenantal God. The same God who created the world has promised not to destroy it by Flood (cf. Gen. 8:21). Those who think we are on the verge of natural cataclysm by virtue of our industrial activities should read Hopkins' poem carefully. The first stanza begins by declaring the grandeur of God and then listing all the ways this appears not to be the case. Using words like seared and bleared, smudge and trod, Hopkins gives us every reason to doubt his opening assertion. If the poem stopped here it would be a lament of the highest order. But he then goes on to declare how what is unseen, but declared, protects the world from all the horrors mankind can unleash upon it.
This does not give us an excuse, mind you. We are given the command to take dominion over the world, not reduce it to filth and muck. It takes a clear understanding of the covenant and the gospel to understand how we can live in an industrial and commercial world, trust in the power of God to protect that world, and still be responsible for the way we treat the world God has given us.

Wisdom from Chesterton

From Orthodoxy:
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same man shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of every-day advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill-book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life an a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage which is a disdain of life."

The Landmark Herodotus

In the tradition of the Landmark Thucydides, the Landmark Herodotus is now on bookshelves. I pre-ordered mine through Amazon and got it today. It is a lovely volume with tons of maps and a running sidebar timeline to help you keep track of where the narrative is going. This volume presents a new translation by Andrea Purvis. I am looking forward to reading it (perhaps over Christmas break). I am linking to it as well, for anyone who wants to get themselves a copy of one of the greatest history books ever written.

The importance of the French Revolution

I often wondered why Wil Durant's great Story of Civilization series ended where it did. I understand that Durant died in 1981, a mere six years after the Age of Napoleon was published, but I always figured there was more to the story than that. As I begin teaching Rousseau's Social Contract for the third time in my teaching career, I think I've figured a little bit of that out. To Durant, the French Revolution and the imperial reign of Napoleon was a much more important event than it is to most modern minds. The French Revolution has been eclipsed, to a degree, by the twentieth century. In essence, Marx stole Rousseau's fifteen minutes of fame.
I have often heard Rousseau called the architect of the French Revolution. I don't doubt this one bit. It is pretty sad for him that he died eleven years before the Revolution took place. Nonetheless, it would be hard to have had a Marx if Rousseau had not laid some serious intellectual groundwork. Rousseau codified, to a great extent, what George Grant calls "the revolutionary faith."
The bottom line, I guess, is that one event is inevitably eclipsed by another. The French Revolution was eclipsed by the World Wars of the twentieth century. The Social Contract was eclipsed by the Communist Manifesto. I wonder what is the dominant statement of our day and what will (has) eclipse it?

Teachers sometimes feel like this

Humility in the Odyssey

As I was reading and talking through book seven of the Odyssey with my seventh grade humanities class, I noticed something interesting about Nausikaa. I doubt it is anything some imminent scholar has not commented on before, but I'm going to mention it anyway. For a princess she is very humble. Consider why she is at the beach to begin with. She is there to wash clothes. Yes, I know the whole scene is Athene's idea and it is arranged so that Nausikaa will find Odysseus. However, we have been sold a bill of goods that says royalty have other people to do that kind of stuff for them. If that is the case, why does it appear that Nausikaa does this often? I think it shows a concern Homer had for making sure no one believes themselves to be too good for anything. This theme is found all across the Odyssey, at least. Telemachos is not to proud to go and do some leg work to find news about his dad.
It serves as a gentle reminder that we are not too good for certain activities. If the princess of Phaiakia is not too good to go awashing, neither are we too good for taking out the trash, chopping firewood, or cleaning up our rooms. Don't sit in affluence and dream that you are above the menial cares of the world. Get up and do some chores!