Thinking Christian

My son is an amateur magician, and last night he clued me in to Harris III, an illusionist who has a completely different take on “Illusions of Freedom.” It’s not the same philosophical question we’ve been talking about here, but it’s good stuff.

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BreakPoint has just published my article “Intelligent Artistry: Maybe We Should Read More Poetry,” a response to the new film Darwin’s Dilemma. It’s not a review, but rather more of a reaction to some thoughts the film got me to thinking: What stories might there be for us in the record of nature? What kinds of stories are thinkable? If certain kinds of stories cannot be thought of, is it perhaps because we’ve limited ourselves in our imaginations?

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I read Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors several years ago, and today I just finished it again, on audio this time. I think it’s my all-time favorite mystery novel. What’s yours?

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First question: What on earth could Maine have been thinking?!

Bangor, ME - Today the Christian Action Network (CAN) filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Maine for censoring a fundraising letter state officials claimed contained “an inflammatory anti-Muslim message.” Maine officials fined and banned CAN from mailing any future letters under the threat of criminal prosecution. Liberty Counsel represents CAN.

Source: State of Maine Sued for Censoring CAN .

Second question: This has been rattling around since June. Where are the civil libertarians? Try doing a Google search for “Maine ‘Christian Action Network’” and see if you find any of them standing against government censorship. Or try it this way to get news from earlier in the summer, without the recent lawsuit information: “Maine ‘Christian Action Network’ -lawsuit”.

I’ve sought out independent verification of CAN’s statement on this. Pajamas Media (linked above) seems to have done a thorough job. Other than that, I’m simply led to my third question: where are the media on this? Isn’t this news? Try the two searches I already suggested at news.google.com. You’ll be quite interested especially to see how the second one (“-lawsuit”) comes out.

Fourth question: where is all this heading?

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My college friend Rob Koons was putting together a concentration on “Western Civilization and American Institutions” at the University of Texas, but he got the plugged pulled on him in a manner that was not only unceremonious but also confused, contradictory, and educationally unwise.

He learned some lessons from the experience, including:

Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a “distribution” standard—a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences.

The perfecting of the intellect and the formation of character through the attainment of what John Henry Newman called “liberal knowledge” have given way to engorgement with miscellaneous information. The suggestion that higher education should have something to do with acquiring moral wisdom is invariably met with the sophomoric query, “Whose ethics?” As Anthony Kronman has so well documented in his book The End of Education, nothing in the Uncurriculum encourages students to think through the great questions of life in a systematic manner, with the great minds of the Western tradition as their guides and interlocutors.

The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s own narrow research agenda.

This is further evidence that something is wrong with the American university. I’ll have more to post on this early next week.

Hat Tip: Divine Conspiracy Blog

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… a video commentary. You’ll be astonished. The song is from my all-time favorite musical, the most gloriously Christian of all works of modern popular culture, Les Misérables. Enjoy.

Hat Tip to Stand to Reason

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Quite a story here:

I know the biographer A. N. Wilson primarily because I read parts of his biography of C. S. Lewis for one of my theses; he has also written biographies on John Milton, Leo Tolstoy, Hilaire Belloc, and Jesus. Additionally he wrote the book God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization. Wilson was raised Christian, but abandoned it as an adult and became a high-profile atheist.

In his Lewis biography, Wilson interpreted everything through the lens of Freudianism by finding psychological causes (rather than rational reasons) for Lewis’s Christian beliefs and his attempts to defend them rationally….

Be sure to read the rest of it.

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