Divine Justice

“[Subjects] want crimes to be punished, [citizens] want them prevented.”

-Rousseau

And why do subjects want crimes punished? Because a monarchy is an inherently religious form of government, and God Himself is far more concerned with punishing crimes than preventing them.

God has relatively little interest in crime prevention.

Teachers Are Fed Up With No-Consequence Discipline

“Why enforce attendance or discipline a child for talking out of turn when there’s a fight in the cafeteria? “We’ve got bigger fish to fry!” But if school staff do not hold the line on small fights, bigger fish come along. Highly successful charter schools adopt a “broken windows” approach to school order—even paying staff whose job it is to replace every burnt out lightbulb, wipe up every scuff on the floor, and reorder any school display. Sweating the small stuff communicates to students that school buildings are not places that tolerate disorder, and that instead they expect excellence from everyone who walks through their doors.”

-from an article lately out of the Fordham Institute (read it here)

On Worship & Idolatry

The average modern Christian’s understanding of worship is so vague and undefined, it isn’t helpful to talk about “worshipping the creator, not the creation.” It would be better (and more to the point) to speak of serving the creator or adoring the creator, not the creation.

Our vague understanding of worship has led to a vague understanding of idolatry, as well. When I hear homiletic use of the word “idolatry,” I find it is typically too high a standard or too low; in other words, “idolatry” is typically defined in such a way that nearly everything is idolatry or nearly nothing is. As such, we very rarely think ourselves guilty of idolatry–either because idolatry is too common and omnipresent a sin to worry about (given that many happy, successful people must necessarily be idolaters), or because idolatry is too esoteric and bizarre a sin for the average man to fear committing.

The USPS Is Terrible

I buy and sell things online on secondary platforms. In the last two months, the USPS has regularly taken three weeks or more to deliver packages that are supposed to arrive in two to five days.

Today, nineteen days after shipping it, a package I sent to Texas was delivered to a buyer and the contents had been completely destroyed en route. The buyer demanded a refund through the secondary platform, it was granted, and my claim on the insurance was denied. The package had taken more than seven days to arrive, which voids the warranty.

Not all that surprising the USPS posted a $6.5 billion loss in 2023.

Education, Mildness, and Apostasy

“By the time I finished school I was an imperfectly informed but convinced socialist, pacifist, and agnostic…

I had been brought up as a member of the Church of England, liking God. He knew everything about me but was Love and he was Understanding, so it would be hard to do anything for which he would not forgive me. In the book of Bible stories from which my grandmother read to us on Sundays, he was a figure of remarkable benevolence manifesting himself in a landscape remarkable for its beautiful sunsets, and later, in the Bible itself and in Beckton Church, he was a less material, more complex development of the same spirit.

I have friends who turned their backs on the churches in which they were brought up because of the churches’ irrational rigours; I was able to drift out of mine so easily because of its mildness.”

-from “Instead of a Letter” (1963) by Diana Athill

Compulsory Learning Does Not Stick

“A little more than half way through Plato’s Republic, Socrates says something that’s bold, honest, and dispiriting enough to send even the heartiest of high school teachers on a two-day bender: “Compulsory intellectual work never remains in the mind.”

He means exactly what you think he means. You can’t force someone to learn anything they don’t want to learn—or you can force them to “learn” it for a test, but you can’t force them to remember it for more than a few minutes after classes let out for the summer. Any lesson which is forced on students won’t stick. You can’t force someone to remember the moral lessons of Pride & Prejudice, or the metaphysics of Anselm’s Proslogium, or the acrobatic hermeneutics of Gregory of Nyssa. You can deliver a heartbreakingly beautiful lecture on Till We Have Faces, but if your students are only listening because they have to, they will forget everything you’ve said in a few days.

You know Socrates is right.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

The Enduring Appeal of “The Grinch”

“The Grinch can’t steal the thing that bothers him most about Christmas, which is the singing, but he can steal everything else—and in stealing everything else, the Grinch is fairly sure he’s going to steal their singing, too. He’s going to prove them all a bunch of hypocrites. While the Grinch never makes a wager with God, he still reminds me of Satan in the book of Job. If the Whos lose all their stuff, they won’t be singing anymore—or so the Grinch believes.”

-from The Enduring Appeal of “The Grinch,” my latest for CiRCE