Unironic Brooklyn

Francis Morrone, author of some of the best American urban guidebooks, likes cities. In one such book, he describes his move to Brooklyn well before it became white mandate.

What I was unprepared for was the beauty. I'd always fancied myself a connoisseur of cities, one who could see that a dense and aged urban environment could be as beautiful as natural scenery. Yet the Brooklyn I was slowly getting to know was so diversely beautiful, so clearly the product of successive ideals of the good city (however failed many of these visions ultimately proved to be), that I became a Brooklyn addict.

The addiction lead to Morrone's interest in the legacy of the City Beautiful movement at the turn of the last century, "that efflorescence of civic art that for me marks the highest stage of American urbanisim." Then he gets a bit angry.

Seldom is the City Beautiful written about without some studied academic distance, which is in itself no bad thing, except that today academics tend to view the American past through the lenses of irony, sarcasm, disdain, or a kind of (generally perfectly irrelevant) quasi-Marxism. I am tired of irony, sarcasm, disdain, and quasi-Marxism. I am tired, above all, of the prevailing sense, particularly among academics, that we view the past from a privileged perspective. We do not know more than the men and women of 1900 knew. I long to know what they knew, however impossible that dream may be.

I haven't read that kind of historiographical spirit and verve since Rachel Fulton's FJTP (see pages 2-3 and 470). Morrone's rejection of irony enables his Brooklyn guidebook to transcend whititude. Pay heed, Park Slope.

Jeudi Gras

Advent, about which you might consider reading more here, is a fast season. Should this be true, however, it lends new meaning to the pleasures of Thanksgiving. In the Christian economy, fasts draw their meaning from feasts, and vice versa. Accordingly, here are my pre-Advent picks:

Beer: Sierra Nevada's Celebration Ale, like everything that brewery puts its minds to, is superb. Tröegs and Victory are two outstanding East Coast breweries that can hold their own next to Sierra Nevada (try the Pale or Pils), but the seasonal offerings of both sound way too sweet. (A chief micro-brewery mistake seems to be trying too hard.)

Rare Vos is an excellent choice for those corked single bottles, but they're so many of those to try that I'm not ready to repeat just yet. And there's always Chimay (my favorite is the triple), which contains the added benefit of supporting monasticism. Their cheese is great too.

Wine: Due to all the flavors in a Thanksgiving meal, what wine to serve is a famously difficult quandry, but here goes: For red, I suggest the longtime Milliner house favorite, Philippe Teulier's Marcillac. For white, go with the Petit Paris Bergerac Sec. Trust me on these two. Both in the 9-12 dollar range, and for Princetonians, both available at the Screw!

Food: Everyone has their Thursday sugestions, but what about Friday? I almost look forward to our annual Friday Turkey Pot Pie dinner as much as Thanksgiving itself. Expect nothing less from your leftovers. Instead of a formal pie, just fill a glass caserole dish with a sea of turkey pot pie goodness, and place biscuit "islands" on top. Don't forget to open another bottle of Marcillac.

Après dîner: I don't know port or brandy, but when it comes to whisky, the peat-packed Caol Ila 18 cannot be beaten (though Highland Park 12 is a bit sweeter and more affordable).

That is all. Enjoy, knowing a four-week fast season is on the way, a fast that requires one to ignore the fact that Tröegs makes a beer for fasting seasons too.

Your suggestions, granted they're as well researched and refined by years of trial and error as are mine, are heartily encouraged.

Economic Sense

I'd call this kind of sense common, but it doesn't seem to be. In an interview with Walter Williams, John J. Miller asks an intelligent question: "Why are so many well meaning, intelligent people seduced by socialism?" Williams reciprocates with an equally intelligent answer: "People are attracted to socialism because it sounds caring - they look to the hoped for results, not the process. "I'm not against charity," says Williams.

Reaching into one's own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. I think reaching into someone else's pockets to help your fellow man in need is despicable and worthy of condemnation.

For an example of the latter, Burton W. Folsom, Jr. in New Deal or Raw Deal? explains how FDR's economic policy jailed people for lowering prices, and that at one point Roosevelt proposed a 99.5% tax rate to all incomes over 100,000. Because people in this income bracket generally own, operate and start businesses, this "compassionate" policy would have killed said businesses, inadvertently annihilating countless incomes under $100 - but the WPA wasn't just going to pay for itself.

According to Williams, article 1, section 8 of the U.S.Constitution lists roughly 21 things that government can do (providing life meaning and purpose, by the way, is not among them). If Congress limited itself to these mandated functions, our government would spend 600-700 billion dollars a year, not trillions. Nor would it be in the bailout business, because in a free market, businesses failing are just as important their succeeding.

What perturbs me most in economic discussion is the assumption that if one is for a free market (as I am), then one must not care about the poor. It's not a question of whether or not one cares about the poor (a Christian, at least, has no choice on that score.) The question is which system has the potential to lift the most people out of poverty. While wealth redistribution and third-world grants may sound caring, in reality, we might as well cut out the middle man and build African dictator's French villa's for them. Who should we listen to on this? Progressive biblical scholars, bishops and theologians, or Nobel Prize winning economists?

Muhammed Yunus' experience teaching in India led to a crisis in his economic principles. "What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?" So he went back to the drawing board.

The poor taught me an entirely new economics. I learned about the problems that they face from their own perspective. I tried a great number of things. Some worked. Others did not. One that worked well was to offer people tiny loans for self-employment. These loans provided a starting point for cottage industries and other income-generating activities that used the skills the borrowers already had.

I never imagined that my micro-lending program would be the basis for a nationwide "bank for the poor" serving 2.5 million people or that it would be adapted in more than one hundred countries spanning five continents. I was only trying to relieve my guilt and satisfy my desire to be useful to a few starving human beings. But it did not stop with a few people. Those who borrowed and survived would not let it. And after a while, neither would I.

Let that be your picture of entrepeneurship. Socialism sounds caring, but look beneath the surface: It isn't. The free market sounds uncaring, but look beneath the surface: Mixed with the compassion exhibited by Muhammed Yunis, it can be.

Missing the Points

One can read Alan Jacob's helpful post to refute the Christians-thought-the-world-was-flat silliness, or just look at a Byzantine coin. Our friend Emperor Theophilus is holding what's called a globus cruciger. Is it a sphere or a square? You can do it! (Hint in the post title.)

Without a Paddle

Commenting on Reveal, Willow Creek's well publicized, weirdly-entitled self-study, S.M. Hutchens ("Up a Creek" Touchstone Nov. 2008) inadvertently wins the award for best use of the word "lactations."

Since the criteria used by Willow Creek to measure spiritual growth are by and large the same as those used by other Evangelical churches, if this study is valid the entire movement has been confronted with the question of whether the deeper one ventures into the Christian faith - the better he knows his Bible, the more faithful he is in the service of Christ, the more concerned he is for the welfare and mission of the Church - the less of a modern Evangelical he must perforce become. I have not heard it articulated this way, but think the conclusion inescapable... Something has been learned at Willow Creek that allows the more advanced member to understand he is in a spiritual nursery and can no longer live satisfactorily on its lactations. This means, however, that there must have been a competence of nourshiment to begin with.. and this is no small thing.

Reveal may provide trenchant analysis, but did we really need a published research survey to tell us this? Evangelicalism brings people to Christ (no small thing indeed). But the question is not whether maturing Evangelicals need to supplement their spiritual diet with the older Christian traditions. The question is whether one can do so on an intellectual level (e.g. a literary "taste" for patristic thought), while remaining outside the eucharistic, liturgical frameworks of those older traditions.

As to whether Anglicanism counts as one of them, in the same issue, William J. Tighe's retrospective assessment of Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of the Liturgy suggests that contemporary liturgical scholars have confirmed Dix's view that Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer is essentially incompatible with Catholic and Orthodox traditions, its beauty being "clothed upon the negations of Zwingli."

Since when - I ask in jest - did Touchstone become a subsidiary of The Coming Home Newtork?

Calling the Bluff, Raising the Stakes

Ted Prescott, a sculptor at Messiah College, illustrates an alternative Christian strategy for dealing with critical theory in the humanities:

Evidently we will always have theorists with us, like the poor. Unlike the poor, theorists seem to have plenty to eat. If works of art are food for theorists, it seems obvious that something happens to those works as they are broken down and reconstituted by theoretical digestion... My argument is not with theory or theorists. I have been engaged by my theoretical encounters... and have learned from them. My arguments is with the belief that theories legitimize art, reveal its meaning, and should discipline our perceptions. The best response to such totalizing belief is not more theory. It is art's "wild prayer of longing" (240-241).

That last quote is from W.H. Auden's For the Time Being. Apparently, Prescott is unfamiliar with the more common way for Christians to grapple with critical theory: Folding the hand, surrendering the chips.

Wordless Wednesday

Art historians at work
Originally uploaded by millinerd