Fathers and daughters

The young man who wrote this article will likely be good marriage material for some fine young lady: "Fathers, be good to your daughters." So much wisdom in one of so few years.

Reformation Day

On this day in 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. This event is usually considered to mark the beginning of the Reformation.



Among other things, Luther was a prolific hymn writer. His most famous hymn is "A Mighty Fortress," a christological paraphrase of Psalm 46. In its original form it may well have sounded like this.

A clumsy epicurean's poem

THE KITCHEN MISHAP

(a Petrarchan sonnet)

When my turn came to cook, I took the car
Out to the grocery store to buy a few
Ingredients to put into a stew,
As well as items to restock the bar.
Back at my stove, I opened up a jar
And poured it in a metal pot on cue,
Then paused the briefest moment to review
The recipe before I went too far.
But efforts in the kitchen often come
To naught if unaccompanied by skill
Or if the task is rushed and done too quick.
For as I turned, my arm toppled the rum
Into the pot below so as to fill
An ordinary stew with quite a kick!

© 1994 by David T. Koyzis

Solar storm arrives

Apparently we got hit, although I didn't feel a thing. Perhaps my hair was a bit more unmanageable, but that's it.

Now we're hearing that a second major blast is heading our way. Authorities are warning that airline passengers on flights over 25,000 feet in the northern latitudes will be exposed to elevated levels of radiation. In short, a good time to stay home.

To be or not to be conservative

Gideon Strauss writes that he wishes he were a conservative, but, alas, he is not. He comes up with some good reasons, most of which I can agree with. But I think he's missed the most important one: there simply is not enough substantive content in the conservative vision.

There are several varieties of conservatives, and their beliefs may or may not be mutually compatible. In my book, Political Visions and Illusions, I treat conservatism as a political ideology in the third chapter. My biggest beef with conservatism in this sense is that it has no real doctrine of the state and its irreducible task in God's world. This is primarily because conservatism tends to defer to tradition, and, since traditions are multiple and dependent on time and place, they inevitably teach us different things.

Unlike liberalism, whose doctrine of the state is quite clear and revolves around a supposed social contract amongst sovereign, self-interested individuals, conservatism in its several forms is compatible with more than one view of the place of the state. This is why the tendency, especially in North America, to contrast liberalism and conservatism is not altogether adequate. After all, one can claim the conservative label and hold to an essentially liberal view of the state. Conservatives here do it all the time.

Now I recognize, of course, that conservatism needn't be reduced to a political ideology. One sometimes hears of people being described as conservative for whom politics may be of secondary interest. Conservatism in this sense is an overarching attitude towards life predisposing the person to hold on to cherished customs, institutions, symbols and beliefs. Some of these may be political, but most are not. This kind of conservative will value the long-established over the ephemeral, the classic over the trendy, in a variety of areas, for example, literature, music, the visual arts, the cinema. She will be exceedingly wary of current efforts to redefine foundational social institutions such as marriage and family in the interest of implementing abstract egalitarian principles. She will generally be cautious towards proposed reforms and tend to stick with the tried and true.

To some extent we could all do well to be conservative in this sense, although every society needs bold innovators and risk takers as well. Yet the defect of such a conservative approach is that in and of itself it lacks an animating vision of life. It lacks a set of normative criteria permitting us to sort out good and bad traditions. It can't tell us why, say, racial segregation in the American south ought not to have been defended or why absolute monarchy, where it still exists, might not be a good thing to maintain. If some conservatives can defend capitalism and others just as easily decry it, then we should probably be reticent in claiming the conservative label for ourselves without considerable qualification.

Solar ejection headed our way

See here for the latest images of the sun, which is sending a coronal mass ejection our way. Although this could disrupt satellite communications tomorrow, we could also be treated to a rare display of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, as it is often called.

I have seen the aurora borealis only once in my life. This was in the autumn of 1978 at a monastery near King City, north of Toronto. It was an impressive phenomenon, to say the least. The very next morning we awoke to hear the news that Pope John Paul I, Albino Luciani, had died the previous night after one of the shortest papacies on record. A rather odd coincidence.

Ora pro nobis

Could this magnificent piece of iconography represent a peculiarly American protestant version of the doctrine of the invocation of the saints?

New scholarly article

Readers may be interested in the following article, written by James W. Skillen of the Center for Public Justice: "Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea: Herman Dooyweerd's Political and Legal Thought," The Political Science Reviewer, vol. XXXII, 2003, pp. 318-380. The PSR is published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded by the late Russell Kirk.

The perils of the double income

This is from an article by Bettina Arndt in Australia's The Age: "Beware the two-income trap."

Having mum and dad both in the workforce makes a family more economically secure. Right? Well, no. Not according to a recent book by Harvard law professor and bankruptcy expert Elizabeth Warren. Her startling proposal is that two-income families may be more vulnerable to financial disaster because they lack the safety net provided by a non-working mum in a single-earner family.

In the traditional family, if dad lost his job or fell sick, mum was available to enter the workforce and do her bit to tide things over, argue Warren and co-author Amelia Tyagi in The Two Income Trap - Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (Basic Books). Plus the wife played a critical economic role as back-up carer, to look after a sick child or elderly relative.

But the two-income family has no such safety net. "With two adults in the workforce, the dual-income family has double the odds that someone could get laid off, downsized or otherwise left without a pay check," write Warren and Tyagi, producing evidence that the two-income family in the US is more likely to file for bankruptcy than the traditional family.

Today's American two-income family earns 75 per cent more money than its single-income counterpart of a generation ago but actually has less discretionary income once fixed monthly bills are paid, say Warren and Tyagi. One reason is the rise in the housing market, with the two-income family driving up the price of houses by competing for property in areas with good schools. "When millions of mothers entered the workforce, they ratcheted up the price of a middle-class life for everyone, including families who wanted to keep Mom at home."

This would seem to place virtually everyone in bad straits. Single-income families have a tough time making it in a housing market where double-income families have pushed up the cost of living. (Toronto comes to mind here, but even in Hamilton it's not easy.) Yet double-income families are apparently at greater risk for bankruptcy. So where do we go from here?

People versus the environment

This morning two of my colleagues, John Boersema and Henry Brouwer, engaged in something of a dialogue on the relationship between the free market and the physical environment. It was meant primarily for interested students, but I sat in for about half of it. John teaches in the business department, while Henry teaches chemistry and has a longstanding interest in environmental issues. While there was a considerable amount of agreement between them on the divine mandate given to human beings as stewards of the earth, there were also differences. John expressed the belief that creation exists primarily for the benefit of humanity, thus in any effort to improve the environment human costs, such a job losses, ought to be taken into account and balanced against the dangers of pollution. Henry, by contrast, is convinced that human beings must be seen as part of creation, all of which has worth insofar as it is created by God, and not merely for its usefulness to people.

I suppose I am closer to Henry than to John on this point. At the same time, it must be admitted that human beings have a special place in God's creation, as affirmed repeatedly in scripture. After all, swatting a fly is not murder; killing a human being is. Any legal system that would conflate the two acts would effectively countenance massive injustice, to put it mildly. Similarly an environmentalism unable or unwilling to understand the difference between these acts risks falling prey to an ideology in the sense in which I use that word in my book.

I would put the matter this way: The worth of every element in the creation is derived directly from its relationship of radical dependence on God himself. Accordingly we must treat nonhuman creation in the awareness of our responsibility to the Creator who has given us stewardship over it. However, we do not treat all of creation in the same way. To treat human beings as we treat, say, cattle or cacti would be unjust. Creation's diversity means that we properly treat it in diverse ways. This treatment must include the preservation of our physical environment, as both of my colleagues would agree.

In Christ Alone

The boundary between so-called "praise and worship" (P&W) music and other types of liturgical music is rather fluid, and it is not always easy to know where to classify a new worship song. Many, if not most, P&W songs will prove to have been exceedingly ephemeral. They're here today and will be gone tomorrow, to be replaced by something else equally ephemeral. However, I will venture to speculate that Stuart Townend and Keith Getty's "In Christ Alone," which is only two years old, is here for the long haul. The lyrics convey a depth of meaning that goes beyond "vain repetition," and, although the vocal range is a little wide, which means that it starts out rather on the low side for most people, the melody is hauntingly beautiful. It's here for the long haul.

Singing his praises

This morning in church the processional hymn was Henry F. Lyte's "Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven," set to Sir John Goss's Lauda Anima. It is a free interpretation of Psalm 103 and is one of my favourites. It is one of the few selections in the hymnal that contains different harmonizations for virtually every verse. According to Cyber Hymnal, it was played at the Queen's wedding to Prince Philip in 1947. It was also played at my sister and brother-in-law's wedding three decades later.

English dialects and accents

Several years ago one of my colleagues pointed out to me that I was the only one he knew who pronounced the aspiration in words beginning with "wh", such as where, whether, why and the like. He suspected this was an affectation on my part, perhaps due to an effort to be hyper-correct by bringing English pronunciation closer to its somewhat eccentric spelling. As I have lived in a number of different places in North America over the decades and tend to be something of a linguistic chameleon, I couldn't say for certain whether he was correct. A little research on my part (this was in the days before the internet, so I had to look for actual books!) revealed that in some parts of our continent when is pronounced as wen and in others as when. Where I grew up people tend to pronounce it in the latter way. In fact, the only "wh" words in which I do not pronounce the aspiration are whoa and wharf. So it definitely was not an affectation on my part.

I have long been interested in languages and their regional variations. In Europe such variations tend to take the form of dialects, which are very nearly distinct languages in their own right. Prof. Henry Higgins sings about these English dialects to comic effect in the well-known song from My Fair Lady, "Why Can't the English." Indeed it is not always easy for someone from Yorkshire to understand someone from Cornwall and vice versa, if they are not consciously imitating the standard "Oxbridge" variety of English.

Similarly a speaker of Schwyzerdutsch, the German dialect spoken in Switzerland, might have difficulty comprehending a speaker of Plattdeutsch, or Low German. (Marianne Scholte will be able to correct me if I'm exaggerating the differences between the two.) Among Greek-speakers, the Cypriot dialect stands out for being somewhat more archaic than standard demotic Greek. Moreover, before the short i and e sounds the k in standard Greek is often softened to a ch or j, depending on which part of the island the speaker is from. (This is similar to what Italian and Romanian do with Latin.)

In North America, by contrast, the variations in English tend to take the form of mere accents, with some differences in vocabulary. These accents tend to be most pronounced on the east coast, whose settlement preceded the era of mass communication and transportation. Here there are slight differences in speech patterns between towns and cities. The Brooklyn accent may be the most famous, as spoken by the 1970s television character, Archie Bunker. As one moves west the variations become more broadly regional than local.

I am reasonably certain that I grew up speaking a kind of standard middle western American English, the sort disseminated by network news anchors. Yet last year I was talking with a brother-in-law of a brother-in-law, who, as it turns out, grew up not two blocks from where I did in suburban Chicago and even attended my elementary school. Much to my surprise, to my ears he had an accent. As I near the half-century mark I can no longer recall whether I ever spoke as he did. I would tend to associate his manner of speech with the urban neighbourhoods of Chicago itself, but its influence in the suburbs may have been greater than I remember.

Complicating all this is the fact that in probably most languages, a particular dialect or accent comes to be seen as proper or even prestigious, as noted, once more, in the Henry Higgins song. The English spoken by the BBC announcer has tremendous snob appeal in Great Britain, and even in North America. This is, of course, the so-called King's English. The same colleague I mentioned above has often said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. In other words, standardized languages depend on a centralized political authority capable of imposing them (I can't really think of a nicer way to put it) on everyone else in the country. If a Northumbrian ruler had succeeded in uniting England more than a thousand years ago, it is probable that something like the Yorkshire dialect would have become the prestige language, as odd as that might seem to us now.

In the United States the southern accent generally lacks snob appeal, unless it is a "cultivated" one from one of the eastern cities, such as Charleston or Atlanta. Furthermore, the distinctive black or African-American version of this often becomes a verbal handicap to those phoning for hotel reservations or to seek employment opportunities. That this is unfair does not alter the fact that one's speech, including one's accent, inevitably affects the way others perceive one. My own great-grandmother, Lucy Jane Hyder, reportedly spoke with the inflections of her Appalachian homeland all her life. In fact, my mother told me that she pronounced the neuter third-person-singular pronoun as "hit," a holdover from Middle English, and even Anglo-Saxon, with an obvious resemblance to the Dutch het.

Here in Canada our variety of English is virtually indistinguishable from that of the United States, except for a few differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, not to mention the ubiquitous "eh," which comes as an unconscious tick at the end of a sentence, with an interrogatory rise in voice at the end. There are fewer regional variations here, but I understand there are more in Atlantic Canada, and especially Newfoundland. I have probably acquired many, if not most, of these Canadian distinctives, while not altogether losing my midwestern American speech patterns. Here I am probably heard to be American, while back in Chicagoland (as everyone there calls it) people ask me where I'm from, assuming I cannot possibly be from around there. I have yet, however, to pick up the pronunciation of schedule as shedule, which I rarely hear used by Canadians outside the studios of the CBC.

If the language of the king once became the standard language of a country through the extension of a uniform administrative apparatus throughout his realm, it may be that nowadays the electronic media are effectively homogenizing our languages. The Brooklyn accent seems to be dying. Even my mother-in-law, who was born there, has lost it over the decades. Nonstandard dialects in Europe are similarly threatened, although one sees efforts here and there to protect them and even, where they have died out, to revive them. The ancient Celtic language of Cornish is an example of this.

What this means to the student of politics is that my colleague's aphorism about the army and navy may be obsolete. It might now be said that a language is a dialect with radio and television networks. In this case, perhaps our political leaders are now taking their cues, as in so many other areas, from the media and not the other way round. Whether (not wether) this is ultimately for the good remains to be seen.

The Boykin controversy

In one of my "comments" entries, I alluded to the controversy over remarks made by Lt. Gen. William Boykin while speaking to a series of church groups across the United States. Boykin is deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence and special operations, so he is a top-ranking military man. Here is Jim Wallis' open letter to the general. One observer believes there are probably no grounds for a court martial, although he will likely not be promoted further and could lose his job. Writing in the Washington Times, Wesley Pruden believes that Boykin's comments were no more inflammatory than Bush's and that he is being treated unfairly by the secular élites in the media bent on stamping out any public influence by believing Christians. Ann Coulter obviously agrees with this assessment.

Chaucer on line

The British Library has now posted two complete early printed editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, one likely dating from 1476 and the other from 1483, in the original middle English in which they were written.

A figure from China's past is gone

This news came as a surprise to me. Soong Mei-Ling, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, is dead. In truth, I had no idea she was still alive all this time. Here is her story in the National Post obituary: "Madame with charm transformed China: First Lady of Christendom and Dragon Lady dies in seclusion at 106."

Offensive advertising

While driving home last evening, Nancy and I saw a billboard advertising the recently launched Puretracks.com, the first legally licensed service in Canada for downloading popular music from the internet. Nancy had seen it earlier in the day, and she called my attention to it then.

The billboard showed a woman dressed as a nun. Or, perhaps I should say, she was wearing part of a nun's habit, but enough of her torso was uncovered to solicit what might quaintly be called prurient interest on the part of particularly male viewers.

We couldn't help but wonder whether the company would do the same thing with, say, a muslim woman in a headscarf. Would they dare to use the symbols of Judaism in the same way? If they did, they would unleash a firestorm of bad publicity amid general charges of religious bigotry. For some reason, in this country Roman Catholics are regarded as fair game for this sort of thing. I hope someone complains.

Just war principles

It might be helpful to remind ourselves of the various criteria to be used in evaluating whether or not a given conflict conforms to the principles of just war. These principles are generally divided into ad bellum (whether the war itself is just) and in bello (the just conduct of war) categories. They were developed over many centuries by a number of philosophers and theologians, including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suarez, and Hugo Grotius. They are accepted by the major branches of Christianity, including Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed.

A. Ad bellum principles:

(1) The cause must be justified.

(2) The intention must be right.

(3) The war must be waged by a competent authority.

(4) The war must have a reasonable probability of success.

(5) It must be fought only as a last resort.

B. In bello principles:

1) Non-combatants, neutrals and third parties cannot be harmed.

2) Existing laws and treaties, e.g., the Geneva Convention on the rules of war, must be honoured.

3) The means must be proportionate to the goals.

4) The enemy must know the terms on which peace can be achieved.

5) The goal must be the return of the aggressor to a rightful place among the nations -- not its extermination or subjugation.

It perhaps ought to be emphasized that, in just war theory, the primary agent responsible for determining the justice of a contemplated military action is the duly constituted political authority itself, in much the same way that a judge or jury are responsible to determine the guilt or innocence of a defendant on trial. The role played by individual citizens in either of these is necessarily secondary, in part because of the lack of sufficient information available to those not occupying such authoritative offices. In short, we may come to a preliminary assessment, but of necessity it lacks the certainty we might wish for, as well as an authoritative character.

This is why I myself, in advance of the attack on Iraq, was unwilling to rush to judge whether or not Bush's contemplated action conformed or failed to conform to the ad bellum principles, although I was certainly sceptical about this and remain so. Once the war had started, however, our ability to assess the conduct of the war was somewhat easier (though by no means crystal clear), largely because of the role of the media in disseminating such information to the public.

Given that there have been no "smoking guns" found in Iraq, there is good reason to doubt after the fact that the American-British attack was a just war. On the other hand, given the brutal nature of the Saddam Hussein régime, it is difficult to argue that the Iraqi people would have been better off under his continued rule. Thus there are a number of factors to take into account which further complicate our capacity to assess the recent war from this perspective.

An emotional return

This morning Nancy and I took Theresa down to St. Joseph's Hospital here in Hamilton for an allergy test. While we were there, we took the opportunity to go to the maternity ward and the level 2 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where Theresa spent just over seven weeks of her life after leaving McMaster University Medical Centre (MUMC), where she was born 14 weeks early. Although there is construction taking place and a number of departments have been moved, the NICU is still in the same place. We walked down the hall until we were standing right outside the door and could see inside.

Day after day in late 1998 and early 1999 we would enter through this door, take off our overcoats, scrub our hands and arms, and put on smocks over our street clothes. Then we would enter the NICU proper where we would find Theresa's incubator (or isolette, as they called them there) amongst several others in the room. For most of the time she was there, our Theresa was the smallest of the babies -- and certainly the one born the earliest. Her first slightly more than three weeks had been spent at the level 3 NICU at MUMC. Transfer to St. Joe's meant she was out of danger and being "fattened up" to go home. (In fact, the people at MUMC referred to the St. Joe's NICU as the "fat farm.")

Standing outside the door to the NICU this morning brought tears to my eyes. I probably would have got even more choked up if it had not been for Theresa herself, who was blithely unmoved by the experience and continued to chatter away about the pumpkin decorations on the door itself, the flowers at the maternity ward desk, the Anne Geddes babies on the walls, &c., &c. She had other things on her mind, and her own unusual beginnings have yet to make an impression on her. That's probably as it should be now. And it was enough to keep Daddy from getting too emotional.

Theresa turns 5 a week from monday.

Where is Gideon?

It seems Gideon Strauss is having more server trouble. His weblog has vanished again. Even when it is functional, it loads very slowly. Perhaps it's time to return to blogspot.