Sago Boulevard

Leo Strauss in “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy”:

When we attempt to return to the roots of Western civilization, we observe soon that Western civilization has two roots which are in conflict with each other, the biblical and the Greek philosophic, and this is to begin with a very disconcerting observation. Yet this realization has also something reassuring and comforting. The very life of Western civilization is the life between two codes, a fundamental tension. There is therefore no reason inherent in the Western civilization itself, in its fundamental constitution, why it should give up life. But this comforting thought is justified only if we live that life, if we live that conflict, that is. No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either the one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.

The role of state-church separation in American law has been on my mind recently. Here’s what’s bothering me: I have a vague understanding of what “religion” means, although I’m aware that my understanding of the term is heavily influenced by personal religious biases. But I’m really not sure what “secular” means. Everybody, religious or not, believes certain things about the world to be true and certain things to be false. From a constitutional perspective, what’s the difference between a belief that happens to coincide with that of a major religious institution and one that doesn’t? You might answer that so-called religious beliefs simply have a special legal protection. But that’s not good enough. In order for certain kinds of beliefs to enjoy special protection, there must be some difference between those beliefs and others. Even if you make the silly distinction between “faith” and “reason”, the same problem arises. What about entirely secular beliefs that make no sense? (I can think of a few). Or a secularist who expresses beliefs that are often associated with religion? Is it the belief that is either “religious” or “secular” or is the individual expressing that belief? (more…)

If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think about how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

Maybe we should try that in Iraq.

In American politics, compromising and building consensus are greatly valued. And rightfully so. Speaking broadly, we believe that people in a given community should ideally have equal decision-making power. We further realize that different people have conflicting views about issues of great importance. Compromise seems to be an appropriate way to accommodate varying political values among our citizenry. However, Ronald Dworkin demonstrates that a certain kind of political compromise would be unacceptable. In Law’s Empire, he offers the following puzzle. (more…)

David Klinghoffer asks whether God is a Republican (via Hirhurim). He begins the piece by describing the rituals surrounding tum’ah and taharah (ritual purity and impurity, respectively), as explained in Vayikra. There nothing particularly remarkable about his treatment of the subject. He correctly explains that “a key to cleansing out impurity is ritualized immersion in water.” He also points out a common gloss on ritual contamination - tum’ah resembles death and taharah, life. So far so good. Then Klinghoffer starts talking about the great 19th-century German Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and Charles Darwin. It’s all downhill from there. (more…)

Virginia Tech Professor Liviu Librescu saved his students’ lives by blocking the door with his body while they escaped out the window (via VC). Haaretz reports:

“My father blocked the doorway with his body and asked the students to flee,” Joe Librescu said from his home outside of Tel Aviv. …
“He himself was killed but thanks to him his students stayed alive,” an Israeli student who survived the massacre told Army Radio on Tuesday.

May God comfort his family among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

This New York Times article about Hispanic immigration and secularism is misleading (as I see Keith Burgess Jackson points out). It claims to describe the phenomenon of Hispanic immigrants rejecting the religion of their country of origin. Hence the title: “For Some Hispanics, Coming to America Also Means Abandoning Religion.” Yet, the instances documented in the article imply that while Church membership and attendence may fall among immigrants, belief in God doesn’t. Consider a few of those interviewed. (more…)

Self-hating Jew Norman Finkelstein finds himself in a tenure battle at DePaul University. Dean Charles Suchar has recommended against tenure, claiming he found “the personal attacks in many of Dr. Finkelstein’s books to border on character assassination.” But Finkelstein doesn’t hold the university president or dean responsbile.

[Finkelstein] explained that since the fall the university has been “bombarded” with such pressure that it “had to make a choice between two disasters — deny me tenure and get outrage from students, or have me on the faculty for another 20 years and every month face another hysteria and claims that I am a Holocaust denier and a self-hating Jew. Between the short-term and the long-term disasters, it was prudent to go for the short-term disaster.”

I wonder why anybody would think Finkelstein is a Holocaust denier and a self-hating Jew.

Norman G. Finkelstein’s book, “The Holocaust Industry,” alleges that Jewish leaders have exploited the Holocaust for profit…

Let’s say an academic wrote a book about how the black community exploited slavery for profit and political gain. Do you think he would tenure at a major university?

David Novak has an excellent review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Already in the first paragraph Novak sets a scholarly tone by taking Dawkins argument seriously and by addressing the important philosophical issues without resorting to the dismissive rhetoric so common in today’s religious debate.

Being an argument (however badly presented), the basic assertions of this book deserve a reasoned response, even though its overall tone is more likely to elicit an emotional reaction–either a positive reaction from those who love Dawkins’ atheism or a negative reaction from those who hate it.

Novak indeed provides a reasoned response. In doing so, he articulates a key philosophical problem with Intelligent Design and offers an alternative view that I think is much more in line with traditional Judaism. (more…)

See Rob Harvilla’s brilliant logical analysis of the breakout single from Mims, “This is Why I’m Hot”.

It’s hard to overstate just how good Sidney Crosby is. Yahoo! Sports drives home the significance of Crosby’s break-out season. (more…)

Bill Vallicella explores three concepts of salvation and argues that “religious salvation” cannot be either merely physical or merely mystical. I think he’s basically right and, although he deals specifically with orthodox Christianity, the idea he develops can be applied, at least generally, to Judaism as well. In fact, Judaism probably emphasizes bodily resurrection even more than Christianity.

Religious salvation is not a mere physical salvation. But I doubt that it can be identified with what I am calling mystical salvation: it is not (though it may involve) a transformation of consciousness in which the apparent meaninglessness and evil and vanity of life is redeemed. Religious salvation seems to involve both elements. Or at least this is the case in orthodox Christianity which preaches the resurrection of the body. The Christian does not look forward to existence as a pure spirit after death, but to an embodied existence. Thus he looks forward to having his individual physical life saved. Saved, but also tranformed, since the post-resurrection body will be a body not heir to the usual fleshly incapacities and debilities.

David Van Biema makes a compelling case for teaching the Bible as literature in public schools in last week’s Time Magazine. The article does a good job of going over arguments for and against, reviewing some of the constitutional issues involved, and the impact such classes may have on upcoming elections. It’s obviously a very thorny issue and I appreciate the sentiment that, in a largely Christian country, it would be difficult to maintain objectivity. But the Bible a simply too important to leave out of school curriculum completely. And I say this knowing full well that much of what’s discussed here is only applicable to the Christian Bible. The fact is that Christianity has played and continues to play a major role in shaping American culture and politics. I went to a Jewish high school and, in 10th grade, my English teacher spent a few classes going over some basic Christian themes so that we could identify them in our reading. I wrote a paper for that class on references to the Trinity in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

[W]hen your seventh-grader reads The Old Man and the Sea, a teacher could tick off the references to Christ’s Passion–the bleeding of the old man’s palms, his stumbles while carrying his mast over his shoulder, his hat cutting his head–but wouldn’t the thrill of recognition have been more satisfying on their own?

If literature doesn’t interest you, you also need the Bible to make sense of the ideas and rhetoric that have helped drive U.S. history. “The shining city on the hill”? That’s Puritan leader John Winthrop quoting Matthew to describe his settlement’s convenantal standing with God. In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln noted sadly that both sides in the Civil War “read the same Bible” to bolster their opposing claims. When Martin Luther King Jr. talked of “Justice rolling down like waters” in his “I Have a Dream” speech, he was consciously enlisting the Old Testament prophet Amos, who first spoke those words. The Bible provided the argot–and theological underpinnings–of women’s suffrage and prison-reform movements.

And then there is today’s political rhetoric. For a while, secular liberals complained that when George W. Bush went all biblical, he was speaking in code. Recently, the Democratic Party seems to have come around to the realization that a lot of grass-roots Democrats welcome such use. Without the Bible and a few imposing secular sources, we face a numbing horizontality in our culture–blogs, political announcements, ads. The world is flat, sure. But Scripture is among our few means to make it deep.

Chag Sameach to all.

A great NHL season is coming to a close next week and the playoffs start on the 11th. Unfortunately, law school has pretty much kept me from seeing any games this year but I’ve caught a few on TV and followed the standings pretty closely. As a Rangers fan, it pains me to watch such a talented team play so poorly. They may end up in the playoffs after all, but I don’t expect them to go all that far. Jagr, Straka, & Shanahan lead an above-average offense and Lundqvist is the best Rangers goalie since Mike Richter retired. But a weak defense plagued the Rangers all season and it will be an even bigger problem in the playoffs. (more…)