As I draw this essay to a close, let me turn to a matter that, in my mind, is very important indeed — but not nearly as solemn as what we’ve been talking about over the past few pages. Recalling Auden’s warning that masterpieces of literature should not be our steady diet, we should affirm the great value of reading just for the fun of it. The poet Randall Jarrell tells the story of meeting a literary critic who said that every year he reread his favorite book, Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, just because he wanted to. Though a critic, he had never written anything about Kim, nor did he ever plan to. That one book he read, Jarrell says, “at whim,” and Jarrell ends his essay by exhorting us all to “read at whim!” ¹²

In my experience, Christians are strangely reluctant to take this advice. We tend to be earnest people, always striving for self-improvement, and can be suspicious of mere recreation. But God doesn’t just create, he takes delight in his creation, and expects us to delight in it too; and since he has given us the desire to make things ourselves—has allowed us to be “sub-creators,” as J. R. R. Tolkien says¹³ — we may rightly take delight in the things that we (and others) make.

Reading for the sheer delight of it — reading at whim — is therefore one of the most important kinds of reading there is. By all means strive to be a better reader, to grow in attentiveness, responsiveness, and charity; but whatever you do, don’t forget to allow yourself to have fun (131).

————————-

¹²Randall Jarrell, “Poets, Critics, and Readers,” in No Other Book: Selected Essays, ed. Brad Leithauser (New York: Harper, 1999), 229; emphasis original.
¹³Tolkien develops this idea of writing as “sub-creation” chiefly in his long essay “On Fairy Stories,” first published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966), 38–89.

Comment 1: I confess not reading on whim often enough. Of course sometimes reading on a whim leads to posts such as this and it’s hard to categorize one’s reading. I’m someone who finds it hard not to share good stuff. One might say that deep down I’m compelled/delighted by that which is good, true, noble, pointing beyond ourselves to the Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. How about you?

Comment 2: Tolkien’s perspective on subcreation, a topic worthy of receiving more attention in a future post(s) . . . If you’ve studied/considered the concept, feel free to comment :)

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(N.T. Wright sings “Genesis” at Hearts and Mind, https://vimeo.com/4214987)

"How God Became King" cover

Last week Mike asked what’s on our various summer reading lists. I’m going to be reading some works by the story-telling minstrel Rt. Rev. N.T. (Tom) Wright, Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. As some of you know Rt. Rev. N.T. (Tom) Wright has recently blessed a number of groups with singing as part of his speaking tour. On Saturday, I had the privilege of hearing him share “Genesis”* and  Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” at Hearts & Minds Books, Dallastown, PA. Thank-you to Byron for hosting the garden party and keeping me “on top of” N.T. Wright’s publications through posts such as this one! I’m starting my summer reading with Tom’s Targum and then will move to the controversy regarding How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (HarperOne, 2012).**

What do you think of the “Wright’s revolution?” Will you be reading some of his work this summer? Any interest in an on-line book discussion? Feel free to start making comments here :)

(N.T. Wright sings Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In”, https://vimeo.com/42149870)

* A song he wrote with Francis Collins while in the midst of BioLogos Conferencing . . . inspired by a taxi driver who sang “Yesterday” to his wife while in Rome.

** “James K.A. Smith’s brief musings (“Kings, Creeds, and Canons”) about a Wright lecture (presented at Calvin College a few months back, you can watch it here).” — Byron, N.T. Wright: A Bookseller’s Appreciation for a Scholar’s Service to the Church and World. (And a reader’s guide to his best books.)

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Back to Robots!!

Picking up from Random Notes on Doctor Bot Ed (5/10/2012) . . .

Back to Robots!! Personally, despite my earlier remonstration, I would be quite happy to learn all sorts of subjects from a robot. A robot is not going to rob us of our humanity and despoil our personhood – after all, we have less to fear from machines ‘wanting’ to behave like humans, as much as humans wanting to behave like machines (Hence, my prefatory diatribe against the social engineering of technocrats and their worrisome bedfellows in academic bureaucrats). A better version of my objections are to be found in William James’ prescient essay entitled “The Ph.D. Octopus” published in the Harvard Monthly in 1903, that anticipates much of the problems that arise when universities and colleges turn into a factory for credentialing. The bean counters have triumphed (by this I don’t mean the social sciences as a whole, but rather a narrow instrumentalist application of a particular philosophy).

Welcoming Dr. Bot Ed into Higher Ed can have all sorts of advantages in terms of research in planetary exploration beyond our solar system, learning foreign languages or even the behavioral sciences, insofar as exercises in situated cognition are concerned and not to mention, advanced mathematics. Even though the thought-­processes in a human mathematician’s mind is distinct from the processes governing automated theorem proving, at the base, mathematics is not sui generis human as much as they are patterns for discovery – imaginary numbers, complex numbers, other forms of irrational numbers even while having no correlates in nature or grounding in empirical reality are still about mind-dependent patterns that are not necessarily confined to our species. As a thought-experiment, there is nothing to suggest that a hypothetical ‘alien’ (play along folks) from an exoplanet, a super earth perhaps, could not independently stumble upon esoteric concepts in mathematics not unlike their counterparts in carbon-based clade of Eutheria upon this kindred clod of Earth. Still, the known history of mathematics despite the obstreperous intrusion of computers and other calculating gadgets is a testament to the resilience, creativity, and genius of human mathematicians. How could anyone not be moved by the apocryphal final words uttered by Archimedes “Do not disturb my circles” as a churlish Roman soldier was incensed to intemperate wrath because our beloved mathematician refused to meet conquering Roman General Marcus Claudius Marcellus simply because he did not want to be interrupted from his study, libations and oblations to Urania, the muse of astronomy. The young scoundrel killed the genius-savant while the stolen planisphere made its way to Rome. Every major mathematical discovery does involve an element of either the sage or the heroic making its history humane and immediate even while its concepts are too arcane for the rest of us.

What do you think about consciousness?

On matters of theology and literature, I must withhold my judgment. The first is about God, and the second is about the human heart; hence the reticence. Perhaps a time will come when computer programs might write a thing or two about the spirituality of machines. For now, I am quite content in ascribing sentience and consciousness to humans, and perceptual awareness to intelligent machines, animals or even electrons. Consciousness involves subjectivity and is bound by neither subject nor predicate. The clever notion that consciousness is and always is a consciousness of something is philosophically rigorous, yet balderdash based on what we know about the brain. In times past, the neo-cortex was easily presumed to be the cognitive center and the limbic system, the emotional center of the brain. Damage to the Hippocampus, a member of the limbic system, can result in all sorts of cognitive deficiencies associated with memory. Even without neurological impairment, the fault lines between reason and emotion, subject and object can become fuzzy. It is quite possible for a person to feel a vague or non-­definable fear while walking through a dark forest at night. In terms of self-report, one could ascribe that feeling to the rustling of leaves, the whistling of the wind, the chirping of crickets, the distant footsteps of an unknown mammal and the like. Yet, the eerie feeling per se is and always is imprecise. It is perhaps a fear of the unknown, or even a fear of fear itself or a fear of not feeling fear on occasions where fear is the norm or a feeling that fear is external to the perceiver, more or less like a demon that possesses a person from without and the list goes on beyond the threshold of tedium.

This analogy of subject-object, reason-feeling fuzziness applies to consciousness as a whole. While awareness is and always is an awareness of the self or others or the environment, consciousness even in the exercise of self-­consciousness is not straightforward. It is more or less a diffuse stream, acting and being acted upon, unaware of the source of its spew, tending towards a state of rest and restlessness, forever suspended between play and purpose, equilibrium and disequilibrium, the play and the proscenium, the poetry of the senses and the prose of abstractions, moving like a fugue through symmetries and asymmetries, point and counterpoint, clarity and chaos at a razor’s edge where perception speaks the language of personhood. There is no consciousness without personhood, while awareness can be both animalistic and robotic.

Even so, I do not believe that as Christians we are called to place our highest belief in consciousness or even in the leaky vessel of species uniqueness. The twentieth century exploded the transcendent dreams and aspirations of a kind-­hearted, enlightened humanism, as the uglier faces of two world wars – both just and unjust – and manifold genocides, made an indecorous reentrance with all the demons and battalions of Beelzebub and forever confirmed that we are barbarians at best. A species that has designed weapons to extirpate itself from the face of this Earth cannot be deemed wise or even superior to the lowest of microbes, if we are speaking purely on rational grounds. Microbes have done a better job at survival, and their colonies are more cooperative and communal than even Churches. We are better off learning metaphysics from the microbes inside our belly buttons and learn the beatitudes of being and becoming from these creatures even before we turn our heads and gear towards Heidegger. And this action, of course, is slightly different from the nefarious norms of gratuitous navel-­gazing.

The incarnation of Christ and our fragile, paradoxical state as image-­bearers of God, no matter how depraved or besmirched that image, lends the story a different ring. We can dare to call the gospel ‘good news,’ because God and the Angels from Heaven said so. Too often, not heeding Paul’s warning in his letter to the Galatians, we turn to a different gospel of utilitarianism and the comparative ethics of the greater good based on an amorphous social calculus:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel (Galatians 1:6).

For every monstrosity of utter incomprehensibility, there is no greater human good to compensate for the misery. This makes positive thinking in human amelioration through social engineering — as opposed to faith in God’s goodness to better humanity through humble obedience — a dangerous business. Simply because who gets to decide ‘what is the greater good?’ If your vision of the greater good involves my extermination, directly or indirectly, I will excuse myself and flee to the mountains without disturbing the pews and rapt parishioners who say ‘amen’ to your sermon. The Greater Good is mostly capricious and rests tenuously upon the megalomaniacal shoulders of those who want to play God. The Greatest Good, on the other hand, is about God being God. No pretense, no aspirations, no grasping. He always was, always is, and always will be. And this absolute Greatest Good was made available to us through the incarnation of Christ. And for this reason, we are special not on our own accord, but because God said so.

Outside the orb of Imago Dei, even the sweetest sonnet for human uniqueness cloaked in the garb of a good-­intentioned humanism is hollow. The argument for uniqueness of human emotion is also not irrefutable. The ostensible grief that a mama elephant shows, from the vantage point of a National Geographic documentary, when her cub dies ought not to be dismissed as mere instinct. Animals also love. Even the argument from cognitive superiority is not solid, leave alone, a desirable one. Due to tragic accidents and other mishaps there might be neurologically impaired humans who might be less self-aware than chimpanzees or bonobos. It would be utterly callous and reprehensible to view brain-­damaged individuals as less human, and such a moral universe is appalling. A comatose person is as human as a person plucking tomatoes. Even here, despite fantastic titles such as Not a Chimp, the argument for cognitive superiority need not be pressed too far. As a thought-experiment, it is possible to conceive of a cross-­species genetic chimera as opposed to a lab chimera, that is endowed with more cognitive smarts than a present-day human after some madcap scientist tinkers with comparative genomic sciences and comes up with a sustainable transhuman species. The other angle is one that literary critics like Kenneth Burke employ, by speaking of humans as symbol-using animals in contradistinction to Aristotle’s rational animal. Even this can be challenged once robots or even Jane Goodall’s future students from the Venerable School of Chimps and Bonobos employ more abstract symbolism beyond learning the alphabet and tricks beyond the sticks-to-bananas epistemology.

Ultimately, the Bible is calling for a paradoxical response to our own humanity. When we think we are unique, we are humbled by the infinite terrors of the void and the vast universe or multiverse. When we think we are only overgrown carbon slime, the God of the universe reminds us that we are made for so much more, thanks to His Son.

And machines will not usurp this place that God has accorded us, even if they start crafting better sonnets or making better machines. As Apostle Paul writes,

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).

There is no need to alter or amend the Biblical text because created things include “Robots, Synthetic Life, Artificial Life, Scary Movies, Scary etc”

"Paradise Lost: A Poem, in Twelve Books." by John Milton. Cover of 1750 edition.

As Christians, we are called not to justify our uniqueness, but rather to justify the “wayes of God to men.”

That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men. – Paradise Lost, Book I

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Bungy EM 2006. By Eron Main (Own work) (GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0), via Wikimedia Commons)

So let us fasten our reluctant bungee cords and free fall over the falls and the cascade into the hazy mist over flipped palisades and feel the frightening vista of our noses kissing the foam and still realize that there is hope beyond the dip, the cliff and nosedive, for the rebound will takes us back to higher ground.  Five, four, three, two, one . . . jump!

Once we get past the cringe factor, the queasiness and impious murmurs of the belly, the notion of a Robot as academic administrator is going to bat far fewer human eyelids than a Robot as teacher. Since statistical spreadsheets and mind-­numbing diction are the voices and oracles of our time, all the pious pabulum spewing from the literature on inspirational leadership sounds doubly hollow as technocrats enact their fantasies and nostrums on rostrums prized a mile higher than men.  Courage and spirit are vanquished with the vapor and wind. Not all men and women, to borrow a sentiment from C. S. Lewis are withered “without chests.”  Like hapless projectiles approaching the event horizon in a shimmering black hole of bureaucratic gravity and gravitas, their numbers are shrinking faster than the sheared follicles from a bald man’s lustrous pate. Once in a while, the residue from the remnant and the bumbling, maladjusted few offer principled resistance and are thus recompensed with brevity of span and reproached as irredeemable spam in the carousel and annals of institutional memory.  Recalcitrance against this sole bleeding, soul searing conditioning and contest as elite hurdlers over the blades and barricades of red tape or against comporting the extended trot like an Andalusian horse in the exact art of exquisite dressage is a fancy that the system and sprocket wheel cannot brook.

Once workers were the chamberlains of craftsmanship; now they are less than simpering solders in the circuit board of careerism. Medieval craftsmen at times deliberately infused their works with a subtle asymmetry as a way of recognizing their imperfection in the face of a perfect God.  A better version of this sentiment can be found in John Ruskin’s magisterial essay ‘The Nature of the Gothic.’  This ‘asymmetry’ allows for extraordinary variance in creative expression.  If humor can be found in homonyms, a careerist learns the rules of the guild for gild and then leaves the guild with repressed guilt once the falling foliage of time has spoken.   What the Bard writes about King John’s second coronation and the utter superfluity of it all, might equally apply to the ‘enskyed’ and ‘sainted’ gatekeepers of higher education who burden our souls with their prose and purses.

Therefore, to be possess’d with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before,

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, or add another hue

Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess (King John)

Underneath the canopy of euphemism and eudaemonia, careerism is often confused with a fallen virtue that candidates claim as a martyr’s badge of honor, during job interviews, when called upon to adumbrate their weaknesses. A workaholic is simply a person who cannot balance the ratios between time and tasks whereas a careerist treats every task as a time to advance. A workaholic displays a weakness of the will whereas a careerist is willful over the ‘weak.’ There is nothing sinister about ambition, however once the kaleidoscopic colors and ambit turns into a gambit of monochrome where ‘lesser’ mortals are charred at the altar of a daring demigod’s flaming dreams, we should feel emboldened to call careerism a crass ‘sin’ and file it in the open cabinet of Hades’ curiosities.  The soul decaying seeds of careerism can surely stifle the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit.

In its current dispensation, the culture of academic governance does not generally evince much care towards Christ’s pithy and carefree chiasmus “the Sabbath was made for man; and not man for Sabbath.” The genius of this aphorism resides in its protean manifestations; whereby the style and substance remains unassailably true even while the context varies over time and place. If we substitute the term “Sabbath” with “institutions,” “technology,” “procedures,” the incandescent logic of Christ still comes shining through. A consequence of a reversal of Christ’s aphorism into “man made for Sabbath” is the not so surprising obliteration of individuality.

Individuality is not to be confounded with individualism; the first embraces uniqueness in trim and tatters while the second preens with Persimmon as the elder sibling of Narcissus. Devoid of dulcet dreams, divine nourishing and human flourishing (as opposed to mere advancement), an administrator makes a bureaucrat, a mirage and microcosm for a system whose rules and responsibilities are codified into an adjudicating algorithm of yes or no decisions. A plethora of tasks do not detract from the overall presumption that administration is very easily about a sequence of steps that can be routinized. Hence, imagination is not a term that we readily ascribe to bureaucrats, and for very good reasons.  Perhaps, in an alternate universe, this deficiency of imagination has been addressed and the language of inspiration will spout like a geyser flooding academic memos, minutes and meetings with sonnets and serenades from the Muses. If I am overstating the case by sauntering into the zone of hyperbole and hubris, may the spirit of Kafka chide me and be your better guide.

I'm a Genius, Baby. You can upload your own picture and be a genius, too. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), http://www.eurekalert.org/babygenius/.

‘Child is the Father of Man’ wrote Wordsworth in lyrical irony. At times, the content of our reveries from childhood does become the lineament and liniment of our character into the fading and fraying blossoms of adulthood. And is there not an aesthetic to a profession whose cadence can be apprized even as a child? Kids do grow up dreaming of becoming astronauts, athletes, rock stars, surgeons, artists, scientists, presidents and/or prime ministers, and in the rarest of instances, a teacher.  An advanced toddler who dreams of becoming a Dean or a Provost, a College President or Chairperson of the Board of Trustees should certainly be advanced to the care and counsel of a psychiatrist, just to make sure that there are no portentous abnormalities in any part of the brain. Professors on the other hand, need no artifice and are by nature expected to be an inspiration as this value is implicit in the very job description itself, even if the appraisal of their worth bodes a sadder story. Being a professor, at least on paper is entwined with the concept of individuality, and despite all the dogmas of professional socialization and curses of communitarians, students are ultimately animated or display animus towards the person and personality of a professor as much as they are by the subject matter. I know of a person who despised calculus and the menacing mien of a hoary teacher, eons ago when corporeal punishment with bamboo canes still existed. Years later, he wept like a child (metaphorically speaking), and shed many, many tears of joy as he read David Berlinski’s Tour of the Calculus. If style is the man, then pedagogy despite its cacophonic chime is a person. Even so, the question cannot be easily dismissed as a trifle. So after my prolonged peroration, shall we begin in pronto the purpose of this post: “Can a Robot also be a professor?” Emphasis ought to be placed on ‘also.’

Who is King?

It is a rendition of the theme ‘Can Machines think?’ Alan Turing in his classic essay ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ replaced the question “Can Machines think?” with a supposition about function. Can machines partaking in the imitation game, trick the subconscious with imperceptible parleys whereby the human interlocutor is too flummoxed to tell the difference between man and machine. If a computer could perform a function that requires intelligence when performed by humans, Turing believed that the machine should be deemed intelligent. It is interesting after all that Turing was not speaking of Chess or even of solving a mathematical theorem, both well-defined domains or closed systems, instead he was subjecting the machine to the grueling challenges of improvisation. Conversation is a form of improvisation and despite its speciously facile form is maddeningly complex to simulate. Social conversation, in particular, tests a person’s adaptive ingenuity in a vein quite distinct from scripted and bounded exchanges at restaurants, banks, hospitals and the like. A script, as programmed by early researchers in Artificial Intelligence such as Roger Schank, is an instance of case-based reasoning. Hence the term. Since interactions in every day life beyond the paternosters of phatic communication are quite unscripted, researchers in Artificial Intelligence are naturally drawn to learning algorithms and embodied cognition whereby robots are subject to a wide variety of tasks such as navigating obstacle courses, playing ushers, engaging in curatorial conversation at a Picasso exhibit and ultimately engage in full-­fledged conversation alongside their three-­dimensional counterparts endowed with organic brains. Given the superiority of algorithms in its voluminous capacities at data mining, the notion of robots designing and delivering extraordinary keynote lectures in various fields such as Topology, Comparative Literature, Ethics, Relativity, Art History and so forth should become as benign a sight as seeing cranes lift objects that are a bit too heavy for the human arm.

A person who screams a shrill ‘No’ most earnestly believes that a professor is much more than a robot, and in a state of righteous rage might even call the person raising the specter of this scenario as an unforgivably inhumane and morally dissolute, rabid reductionist. How could an endeavor as sacred as teaching, dare I mention mentoring, be rendered into a bagatelle of mechanical mummery? Oh l’horreur.  Turing’s consolations with the tongue-in-cheek reassurance of a mild-mannered non-believer goes as follows:

In attempting to construct such machines . . . we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.

What kind of salve or solace is it for those who are still reeling from the depredations, devolution, deforestation and other pitiable miseries that we have ravaged upon bluish green Mother Earth? Is the Anthropocene going to yield to an even more hellish Meccano-cene? No reasonable sentient being that I am aware of displays any nostalgia for the age of the pre-Archaean eon of the Hadean wherein the earth was devoid of the sound and stirrings of life from the lowliest and loveliest of cyanobacteria to the bourgeoning of higher-order Carbon based life forms?  Even a cold-hearted misanthrope, it appears to me, is not too eager to herald the beginnings of a new Earth entirely divested of humans, whereby even traces of our genome are entirely deformed and reformed into an unrecognizable species and vast tracks of land are infested with metallic bots in a cruel Robot Farm without an Orwell to allegorize our passing into desuetude.  A ‘cyborg’ like Kevin Warwick who is a bit too eager to move on beyond his humanity, wants to do so primarily out of a fear of not being enslaved by machines in the future. So, in a rather twisted way, he does care about humans.  For now, I would advice every God-fearing, Bible-believing, homo sapiens loving Christian or humanist and tree-tending naturalist to desist from composing the requiem for our obsolescence. We should indeed be more petrified of asteroids than robots – for isn’t there plenty of room still for both the human imagination and our own subjectivity?

Your experience of a brilliant sunset is qualitatively distinct from mine . . . (Note: 2012 CMDA Northeast Winter Retreat, Sandy Cove, MD).

A person’s subjectivity is his or her own or it may be better described as God’s gift to each person, and this uniqueness will not be extirpated by an electronic brain or a genetic clone (for the clone is also its own person) or even mind-reading technologies. Your experience of a brilliant sunset is qualitatively distinct from mine, and even some sort of probe into my brain is not going to let you experience exactly what I experienced – and that is actually a good thing because phenomenology is and always is first person even though we can sit around a camp fire, hear the embers crackle and share stories about the ‘self’ and the glory that once was or the glory that might have been.

Our private language even while amenable to other minds, by virtue of recounting experiences from our life or the much more insidious and creepy form of mind-reading (a technology that is being gradually unleashed upon this world) is still the incantation of an idiolect that blockades the fenetre and fenestra of translation.  It is the equivalent of asking a person the meaning of the brim in their chests or the bumps and kindling of kutis ansterina upon their epidermis while they are listening to a rousing piece of music. The musicologist who writes the program notes does an excellent job highlighting the subtleties and nuances of a given piece; but the evocative aspects of a piece cannot be reduced to the crude language of one-to-one correspondences because such a gesture presumes uniformity of emotional states. The wiser wordsmiths tell us that music is ineffable, since they attempt to express the inexpressible. And just as we settle our thoughts and our souls on this sentiment, John Keats takes a step further by affirming

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, plan on

A private language is the communion of the soul that does not find readymade reference, and has a ringside view of the roundtable of mysteries. And in this silent space, for better or for worse, we weave our tangled webs. The mind-reader and the overlords of scientific divination may see the pictures in our head, without knowing the meaning behind the tropes and turns, the metaphors and montage flitting in our heads.  In fairness, mind-­reading technology can be beneficial for severely disabled patients  – and even in those cases, extreme care ought to be exercised because consent from the patient and family ought not to be a license for peremptory invasions of personhood. If somebody can read your mind, couldn’t that person also have the ability to influence and/or alter your mind in some sort of bizarre inter-cranial hypnosis conducted remotely using magnetic resonance and other forms of imaging technologies now turned into remote sensing communication devices (without those funny looking helmets dotted with electrodes) whereby images and sentences from without are reversed into brain wave patterns within? Perhaps, a smart phone or any networked gadget with a screen could become that device. All sorts of upheavals insofar as frame-of-reference and chain of causation become possible by tinkering with the temporal lobe, implantation of false memories and a host of other nightmares far beyond anything Orwell ever conceived. Put another way, it gives brain-washing and propaganda a whole new meaning – and this could turn into a new form of terrorism whereby a cabal of psychologists, neuroscientists, law enforcement officers and a host of others with a disregarded moral compass begin to target large swathes of the population or a few ‘suspicious-looking’ individuals to sinister ends in the name of safety and security. The worst aspect of it would be mind-control and making harmless people say damnable things; and under these circumstances anybody outside the orbit of these secret experiments in social psychology and shadow governance could become susceptible to the power of suggestion with a future empirical science actually backing up these results.

Let your imagination loose a bit, and picture people confessing to crimes they never committed or uttering hateful propaganda against the state simply because somebody needs a fall guy in order to release a menagerie of minatory visions whereby humanity in a state of mass hypnosis will look to the chosen Leader not unlike North Korea. There can be interference with people’s sleep patterns and confusing their minds to a state where they no longer know if they are dreaming or awake and a host of even more fiendish scenarios enabled by nano, pico or even femto technologies at a scale and level that could very well align with apocalyptic visions of the Book of Revelation where the Anti-Christ is the Great Deceiver of mankind.  Personally, I have never been as paranoid about any technology as much as mind-reading, simply because there are no deterrents to this technology and the cloak of secrecy (no pun intended eh, especially with technologies of invisibility) enables a select group to wield a more menacing power, greater than the government itself. Truly, this dystopian dream I pray will never come true, yet it is not outside the realm of possibility and adds a whole new meaning to the age-old expression “Don’t mess with people’s heads.” Pick any of Thomas Jefferson’s ruminations on tyranny and liberty and juxtapose them with these applications, and gradually it becomes clearer that Christians, people of different faiths, humanists, and the like should rally around this issue.

Lucifer, on his way to bring about the downfall of Adam. Gustave Doré's illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 739–742.

I do not believe that there is a single cause that is so sacred that requires one to violate another human being’s personhood. If I may make an informal foray into microwave exegesis, let us contemplate the relationship between God and Satan. God can read Satan’s mind – yet He does not use His infinite power to alter Satan’s volition and return Satan into Lucifer, the archangel who once worshipped God. If Almighty God himself desists from such forms of coercion against the very fountain-­head of much evil and instead resorts to persuasion, we humans are better advised against playing God when God himself seems to have all sorts of qualms about the uses and abuse of power. Human amelioration in the name of science and technology is undoubtedly an extension of the cognitive faculties that we are blessed with.  Even so, the muse of Machiavelli is not the Muse of Christ. . . .

Random Notes on Doctor Bot Ed: Part II

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Vineyard on Montebello Ridge. Author: Brian Sterling

After heeding the Surgeon General’s statutory warning that lives, bridges and sermons are not to demise on the reprise of this theme, shall we visit the premise of charlatanism and test its truth and troth. Charlatans are contextual chameleons who can hold a conversation about any topic without having a deeper insight into definitions or knowing whether or not their claims are based on factual grounds. I am hard pressed to meet a Christian or sober-­minded secular intellectual who will sanctify this concept. A few years ago, an eminent philosopher wrote a masterful essay On ####; an expression that has been bowdlerized into Bovine Scatology for our more august audience. Harry Frankfurt makes a careful distinction between a liar and a person who specializes in the craft of the second letter of the English Alphabet in juxtaposition with the nineteenth letter in majuscule form. A liar seeks to intentionally mislead, while the person who practices the afore-­mentioned ineffable craft of which one shall dare not speak, is informally speaking, phony. On a personal note, I have been to a few wine-­tasting events without knowing the first thing about wine. Obviously, there is an element of phoniness at play here, an appearance of connoisseurship sans savoir or connaitre. Even so, sommeliers and avocation-­seeking amateurs are not the only ones granted entrance into these nose-­rubbing spaces of snobbery and shallow conversations. Even a die-­hard puritan is more inclined to pronounce a dire indictment on the ‘diabolical’ art of pressing dead grapes and the attendant ‘evil’ enzymes involved in fermentation rather than anathematize the innocuous act of gathering for conversation.

The censure or prejudice that the titular protagonist (of Frankfurt’s philosophical essay) faces is nothing compared to the ostracism a charlatan faces in academic circles. The more generous euphemism for such a person is ‘Generalist.’ In olden days or even in the new-­fangled age of quack remedies and alternative medicine, the quack, shaman and/or advertiser is a person who takes the craft quite seriously even while treating empirical evidence as the ‘frenemy’ (a word that has entered the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary -­- a piece of trivia for those who are genially grimacing). As stated earlier, lives are not to be trifled with, and a person requiring an operation is better off going to a surgeon rather than a cobbler, although both of them are astute fellow travelers in the glorious genre of stitching. However, the scorn that a specialist heaps upon a generalist in academic circles is entirely unjustified. While a fresh Ph.D., I gladly called myself a specialist in a field that had fewer fellows than the digits in my left hand. Over the years, I gradually learned to embrace the opprobrious term ‘generalist’ despite the unflattering insinuations and connotations attached to it. I feel quite certain that to be called a generalist in a university or even a liberal arts setting is a left-­handed compliment, a hasty characterization of a person without depth. And breadth is a bad word, a very, very bad one, among serious-­minded specialists. Too broad is a no-­go.

Castle Beach – Singapore. Author: William Cho.

If umbrage is the name of the game – a specialist is a person who cares about what can be known, while a generalist is a person who cares about what cannot be known. A specialist seeks invincibility in the kingdom of little and invisibility in everything else.Some choose to call this singular devotion focus. A specialist is sovereign over the sand castle while the generalist prefers to gaze at the scenery along the grains, dunes, waves, sand and sea. While the better arguments for specialization are division of labor and a modest recognition of limits, the less commendable argument for specialization is the oft-­heard expression ‘a well-­defined and narrow research agenda’ and the mindless mantra of depth for depth’s sake. I often wonder if there is a Christian resolution to this impasse between specialists and generalists especially when the score in this iron-­cage of flouncing and flailing is a stark stalemate.

While specialists are clearly winning in research universities and shaping the broader culture in academia as a whole; the very relevance of their research often depends upon generalists and the public intellectual who are not only able to carry on a conversation but also see vibrant connections between diverging strands of research. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s The Way We Think is a useful guide. The argument that the authors make about the blending of concepts from distinct mental spaces is a robust restatement of a well-­known thesis that the birth of an idea is the result of concatenating disparate domains in a refreshing way. Conceptual blends, as they call it, is also manifest in the ability to forge new meanings and new avenues for conversations. Thus, this tendency to exile cross-­disciplinary thinkers who are in effect adept at pattern matching, into an insular ghetto of marginalia can have at least two negative consequences. On one hand, it produces what David Hume warned us against, the sorry state where learning becomes “as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good company.” Hume continued that the separation of the two worlds; the world of conversation from the world of learning has been bad for disciplines whereby a preoccupation with methods comes at the expense of both style and substance. In his words:

Philosophy went to the rack by this moping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery.

An analytic philosopher could provide us with a masterful treatment of the concept ‘is,’ while a public intellectual or generalist can help us understand the value of the work on ‘is.’ In the absence of this bridge, the rest of the world will wonder what the point is. The world of conversation aids us in asking larger questions, and may I dare say better questions while the expert delivers on detail.

Charlatans in the role of dabblers, ingénues, amateurs, curiosity-­seekers, treasure-­hunters who hop from one discipline to another, one topic to another, restlessly while not guaranteed access into the highest echelons of disciplinary accolades, mixed metaphors aside, are still the lifeblood of thought and bridge-­building between disparate domains. Instead of maintaining a lively tension or balance between the generalist and the specialist, for all intents and purposes, the generalist is gradually becoming an endangered species within the genus of thought. In other words, academics are now asked to be their own niche marketers as specialists and experts in the marketplace of ideas and haberdashers of habit with the encrustation of thought into the procrustean bed of myriad methods and manifold madness.

Even outside academia, people are advancing themselves as experts in self-­help, dating, mating, and coping with loneliness and many topics underneath the blistering sun. Dame Common Sense and her companion Conversation once presided over these spaces, and have now been entirely banished. Now people who say ‘take it or leave it’ (as opposed to ‘give and take’) and cannot withstand a good challenge to their work and ideas are the ones who preside over these spaces as experts, extremely overzealous and territorial, combining their learning with duties as patrol officers and bouncers to keep real and imaginary prowlers and trespassers at bay. Once learning took place in Palazzos, gardens and open spaces; now they take place in fortified ‘castles’ where deference to the discipline matters more than a disciplined deference to the world of ideas.

As an ode to the departed spirit of Isaiah Berlin, there is indeed an understated beauty to the history of ideas. True, the figureheads in the pantheon can be reshuffled like bobble-­head dolls remade in our own image –

• Monday is for Montaigne and Montesquieu
• Tuesday is for Thales and Turgot
• Wednesday is for Whitehead and Weil
• Thursday is for Thrasymachus and Tai Chen
• Friday for Freud and Foucault
• Saturday for Schopenhauer and Sartre
• Sunday for the Sabbath and a little Shakespeare.

Come what may, ideas have consequences and sometimes dreadful ones on the bargain counter of barter and breath. Yet, the history of ideas is rich and is the armchair and arrondissement of an enthralled humanity effervescing with faith and folly. And a person who chooses to walk through this labyrinth of tangents, muttering in unison with the tribe of Tolkien that “not all those who wander are lost” are often treated as wastrels, dingbats and distractions in the Temple of Learning.

The natural response of entrenched establishmentarians to any sort of lament is to respond defensively that the intellectual world we inhabit is far more complex than the world of the Florentine Camerata, the culture of English Pubs and French Salons during the Enlightenment or even fin-­de siècle Paris. While one should be willing to submit to the veracity of such a claim in part, the broader implication is untrue -­- as if the human brain is unable to deal with complexity from multiple domains. Could not a person read as much as possible about multiple disciplines and conjure up new ideas at the crossroads of these conversations? Patently, such an endeavor is not going to immediately translate into a vita entry or a promotion or an increase in a paycheck. It is not even necessary to justify these efforts in the name of making one a better teacher or a better scholar, although I believe that refinement of the mind and human spirit does amount to a betterment of our undivided selves.

However, on biblical grounds if I may dare venture an opinion, it is closer to the Pauline spirit of becoming “all things to all people” for the sake of making Christ known. A person who reads widely and is curious about life experiences of people from various persuasions is going to have more things to converse about, and to as many people as possible. This interpretive leap is based on the presumption that more and more people are going to school to get advanced degrees – and it would be nice for a Christian scholar and/or regular Christian to have the wherewithal to hold court with Holy Spirit inspired sprezzatura like a modern-­day Christian courtier, straight out of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier). At the risk of anachronism, Paul in action at the Agoras and Acropolis is an instance of Spirit inspired sprezzatura. And Paul the once scholastic rabbi turned apostle was no intellectual slouch or grouch. Did he not write the joy epistle after all?

Once we eschew foolhardy comparisons with the great Apostle, there is a grain of inherited truth in the spirit of sincere emulation. If we see all truth as God’s truth, a sentiment prefigured in Paul’s teaching before Aquinas inadvertently immortalized himself as the provenance of that maxim, some sort of revival of the Christian polymath or more humbly speaking, the Christian dilettante is in order. I prefer to say Charlatan because it has that cauterizing effect on the human memory or so I think, perchance like a dilettante.

Don Quixote monument, June 2004 Author: Lourdes Cardenal. June 2004. Digital Camera. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

I wondered what sort of meager meditation I could proffer on this subject. Furthermore, when the good Lord was conferring this most exquisite gift of sprezzatura upon his children, He most certainly passed me by. So I had to bid goodbye to the polished muse of the Italian Renaissance and look elsewhere, perhaps to the picaresco tradition of Spanish literature where roguish heroes don the cape and caper of a knight errant. Methought, a dyslexic like me could read 365 books in 365 days and so I picked up my imaginary lance, my pen and person and rushed headlong into the swirling dust of winding words and musty books. After many a mishap and without sweet Dulcinea by my side, I learned that the Lord’s grace and grace alone could lead me home.

Although this assignment was concluded in a shorter period of time, I must assure my dear reader that despite the element of personal vanity, recondite stuntiness, and a host of other self-aggrandizing temptations the end-result is not one of a triumphant person crossing the finishing line of a marathon, but rather the inconclusive feeling of learning without any sense of an ending. And voila, I woke up after a long period from my sedated somnambulism. Like a fool, I had believed that I had to integrate my faith into learning as if the faith was A and learning was B and together A plus B made something else called C.

Faith is, to borrow a phrase from Shelley, the ‘unacknowledged legislator’ of learning. The literary man and woman will knock my knuckles and tell me that the atheist or agnostic Shelley was speaking of poetry and poets. A little bit of creative misappropriation is the hallmark of a charlatan. And a charlatan is not unlike Chesterton’s “amateur,” a very true lover indeed. No, I must let G.K. speak, “Our play is called amateurish; and we wear proudly the name of amateur, for amateurs is but the French for Lovers.” While the professional has a relatively easier passageway into the heart of the matter, the charlatan must jostle with mind and matter to get only a faint scent of a shadow and sneaking silhouette whose preternatural beauty is sufficient to have the man transfixed like a medieval mendicant pining in unrequited verse for the love of a lady, a princesse lointaine (a distant princess) he could never have, as she dwells in a cruel castle with iron-gates guarded by hirsute men in hauberk and ugly guard-dogs in pincers barking with Herr Ritter Doberman pinscher. While the story does not end well for the medieval mendicant as he dies of an irreparably broken heart, the constitution of a charlatan and a Christian one to boot, is girded with sublime strength. Bach’s Jesu in the joy of man’s desiring does indeed show up once the mendicant learner discovers that his learning ought to be a yearning for the Eternal, for one who is far greater than the Infinite. And in God’s universe, the invitation is and always is to taste and see, to search and find.

Professionally speaking, all this reading and seemingly solipsistic philosophizing did not matter a whit. Such an endeavor is a bit too gimmicky for all one knows. But that was my modest way of worship, stealing a page from Le Jongleur de Notre-­Dame to realize that God does not want us to languish in a chamber of ventriloquists, whereby our persons become only personas in the stage of guilded aspirations. I am tempted to advice you to do the same. To read a book a day or one a week, where you delve into subjects outside your expertise and enjoy a world that you never touched or read. But my saying so would be another form of ventriloquism. Nor can I as a Christian merely say, a chacun son gout (to each his own taste).

It is better to inquire again about what happens when Christ followers become a little bit more curious about the world He created, whether it is through reading, meditation, conversation, service, corporate prayer and other expressions of creativity. At the least, we should consider beginning a support group for Christ-­centered charlatans who believe in a Creator who knows everything and therefore we are set free to explore His world even if it comes at the light-­hearted peril of exposing our own ignorance. If you could say amen, gladly shall you and I scrape the surface of the mystery?

For in Him we live, and move and have our being. (Roy Joseph)

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Even the religious lose faith when they take time to really think: theatln.tc/IdpELp #StudyoftheDay by @hansvillarica

— TheAtlantic/Health (@TheAtlanticHLTH) April 30, 2012

(Unfortunately, one can’t simply assume that poor editing can be blamed for this laughable tweet, because The Atlantic – once a reliable bastion of religion reporting in the secular media – has fallen on hard times. Witness, for example, this atrocious and error-ridden article about Invisible Children’s Kony2012 campaign, which GetReligion dissected a few weeks ago. How bad was the article? It describes Mark Driscoll as an “Emerging Liberal.”)

The study, of course, was not at all about “real thinking,” but about analytical thinking, which is one mode of thinking out of many. The study doesn’t surprise me. In Dan and Chip Heath’s book Made to Stick, they examine the impact of analytical thinking on charitable giving, and it’s not good. There’s a reason why charity campaigns use stories and not logical arguments.

While I’m not surprised at they study, I’m also not too troubled by it. The poorly written tweet – “real thinking reduces religious belief” – gets  the nature of thinking wrong, but I think the study coverage of the study gets the nature of religious belief wrong, too. Further, when considering claims of ultimate truth – whether religious or otherwise – one ought to be skeptical. Greater skepticism could have prevented many tragic decisions over the years. Skepticism, however, should not be our permanent position on every article of belief. There are things worth believing in with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength.

Analysis is not the only way of thinking

There is a reason why we don’t plan romantic evenings around math conferences. Or try to teach a child to ride a bike with an explanation of rotational velocity. Analytical thinking is important and valuable, but it’s not the only way of thinking. Sometimes, it’s completely inappropriate to the situation and counterproductive.

For example, consider the act of writing. It’s extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, to write anything of length while simultaneously editing yourself for spelling and grammar mistakes, much less fact-checking your claims as you write them. There’s a reason why they’re called “rough drafts.” If your goal is to write 500 words on your dissertation this morning, you’ll have to abandon the analytical mode of thinking for a while.

Analysis, in the wrong circumstance, can even be life-threatening. There’s a reason why trauma surgeons spend so many years increasing their knowledge and honing their skills. When the victims from a near-fatal car accident arrive in the OR, it’s time to act, not to analyze, except in the most basic where-is-this-blood-coming-from way. The rapid, intuitive response of a trained professional is not the absence of “real thinking” — it’s the pinnacle of thinking.

A final example: on Saturday morning, my three-year-old son asked me to wrestle with him for “100 minutes.” After negotiating it down to 7 minutes, we began our wrestling match. This kind of rough play is not just good exercise — it can also teach valuable social skills about the difference between play and violence, as well as strengthen my bond with my son. Was I “thinking” in the midst of all this? Of course! I was making sure my son had fun, watching that he didn’t endanger himself (or me!), searching my brain for awesome wrestling moves, while also keeping an eye on the clock so that his eight-year-old sister would get up and eat breakfast in time for her theater rehearsal. To suggest that none of this is “real thinking” is to ignore what it means to be human.

Belief is not mental assent

Second, the study measured religious belief with with a survey asking subjects about their opinions about religion. I know that a study like this one relies heavily on surveys, but we need to distinguish at all times the difference between a survey answer and a person’s real belief system. Mental assent is not the same as belief, particularly in the way in which the Bible speaks of belief.

For the past few years, my mental life, with regard to religious matters, has followed a predictable daily pattern. Early in the morning, I feel confident in my relationship with God and secure in my beliefs. In the evening, however, I face doubts and fears, and thoughts of my own mortality appear seemingly from nowhere, triggered by the most inconsequential moments.

Am I more of a “religious believer” in the morning than I am in the evening? A “better Christian” when I cheerily coast off the endorphin high I get as a morning person? Of course not! In fact, I’ve learned that these evening doubts should be occasions for prayer and reflective reading of Scripture. My experience with Scripture is quite different in these moments, precisely because I’m not reading it “analytically,” but with a strong sense of my need for God and my own inadequacy.

Having lived in the “Bible Belt” for virtually my entire life, I’ve learned not to trust what people say they believe about religion, and instead to pay attention to the whole of their lives. Growing up, everyone said they were a Christian, everyone said they believed Jesus died for their sins, everyone said they loved their neighbor as themselves — but for some people, it was just lip service.

So, this study claims that analytical thinking reduced the subjects’ levels of religious belief. Did anyone quit going to church because of their involvement with this study? Did any of them abandon a habit of Bible study and prayer? Did anyone quit giving money to the needy or stop volunteering? Did any of the subjects decline to partake in Communion on Sunday because they answered a few questions about Rodin’s The Thinker? If those types of things weren’t even tracked, then I’m not sure how much this study can really tell us about actual religious belief. [Update: As Caleb Kemere notes in the comments, the authors of the study are careful to limit their conclusions to the cognitive aspects of belief, which is wise. I wish the media coverage would make similar distinctions.]

Skepticism is not the enemy

Another way of viewing this study is that analytical thinking encourages people to be more skeptical. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are lots of crazy things out there that people can believe in, if they so choose. But this is true about nonreligious ideas, too, not just religious ones.

It all depends on what you do with your skepticism. If you’re skeptical about everything, all the time, regardless of the context, then skepticism becomes poisonous. When I first met Elizabeth Westwood at the University of Louisville, I would have been right to be skeptical that she could commit romantically to me. Today, after 13 years of  marriage, in the midst of raising three children together, with all the rest that we’ve been through, any skepticism on my part is a character flaw, not a sign of “analytical thinking.”

A few Sundays ago, our church looked at the story of Thomas from John 20:24-29. Thomas is famously known as “Doubting Thomas,” because of his reaction to the news of Jesus’ resurrection:

Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

That’s not the end of the story, however.

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Our pastor suggested that Thomas should instead be called “Believing Thomas.” He doubted when it was appropriate for him to doubt. When Jesus appeared to him, however, he believed.

Asking questions is not wrong, and it’s not a sin to react to impossibly good news with skepticism. The Gospel is, quite frankly, too good to be true. How can we deserve such grace? Could God actually die for us? Could we be raised to life with him?

Asking hard questions, in fact, can be a critical moment in a person’s spiritual life. It can mark the moment you begin to take ownership of your faith, rather than coasting off the beliefs of your parents, your friends, or your church. But much depends on whether you’re asking the hard questions because you want answers, or whether you’re asking them as a knee-jerk response masquerading as “analytical thinking.”

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"The Sacrament of the Last Supper." Artist: Salvador Dalí. 1955. Oil on canvas. Dimensions 267 cm × 166.7 cm (105 in × 65.6 in). National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

An incendiary title of this nature might lead one to presume that this is a debate about the two natures of Christ; fully human/ fully divine with a heretical temptation towards emphasis on one at the expense of the other. As the New Testament so poignantly illustrates, the two natures comprising full humanity and full divinity is fully reconciled and harmonized in the person of Jesus Christ in a fashion that is quite inscrutable to our inquiring, yet finite minds. Even analogies such as wave-particle duality of light and sundry features of quantum mechanics are bound to break down after a certain point. The ‘Two Christ(s)’ here is a figurative shorthand to highlight conflicting perspectives on the person of Christ within the ranks of those who self-identify as Biblically orthodox Christians; reformed and evangelical and the like. The popular discourse of Christ from the pulpits to pews of churches surrounds Christ as Savior and comforter. When life’s travails beset us, it is natural and even necessary for every kneeling Christian to seek refuge in the fact that our destiny is safeguarded in the everlasting arms of the Father, through the atoning work of His Son and through the comfort and guidance of the Holy Spirit. A reminder of our salvation and the hope of future glory is very much part and parcel of the gospel and there is no denying that. However most Christian scholars with similar creedal commitments treat with justifiable suspicion the articulation of salvation and comfort in an entirely emotivist vocabulary. After all, there is more to the faith than feeling and the reason for the hope is a reason after all, that cannot be dissociated from loving the Lord our God with all of our heart, strength and mind.

However the Christ of Christian scholars is also very much a fractured Christ. The picture is almost indubitably that of the twelve-year old Jesus debating scholars in the Temple or the grown-up Jesus outsmarting the Pharisees in verbal jousting. The pre-pubescent Christ or the young adult Christ the intellectual debater who out-Socratized Socrates also constitute an integral part of the gospel, yet a subconscious and exclusive preoccupation with the Christ of Scholastic Debate renders Christ into a first-century Jewish Palestinian version of Winston Churchill trouncing his rhetorical adversaries with pungent wit, bon mot, and unsurpassable repartees. Such a hobby horse does come at the expense of his full humanity and full divinity. Personally, I have encountered very many smart Christians who look askance when I mention — that for Jesus to be Christ, he also has to surpass the brilliance of the likes of Einstein by both infinite degrees and Eternal kind. Couldn’t Christ discuss particle physics with Polkinghorne or phenomenology with Dallas Willard and restore them with his trademark embrace after beating them really good at their ‘own’ game? After a condescending smirk or concurrence, the focus almost instantly shifts to the parables of Christ, his rhetorical comebacks at the careerist and mendacious inquiries of the Pharisees, a theological discussion about Christ fulfilling Biblical prophecy and anodyne readings of Genesis Chapter 1. Come now, think of it.

First, if Christ is indeed the Son of God who is co-equal with the Father and the Holy Spirit, was He not present before creation and actively involved in the art of creation? Even if it were possible to reverse engineer all the biophysical and chemical processes involving the emergence of life, there is no guarantee that life would emerge. All the disciplines in the world even cumulatively speaking, come short in addressing the question of what it takes to create an extravagant universe or multiverse and populate it with extraordinary astrophysical phenomena and sentient creatures as well. Recent research in Artificial Life for once is a cartoonish illustration of the insurmountable difficulties one might encounter in trying to create something out of nothing, for humans do a better job in creating something out of something else. Hence God is the only person with the ability to create Ex Nihilo. Wouldn’t it be nice then for Christian scholars to reconcile Christ the Redeemer alongside Christ the Genius or Super-Genius as well?

Second, let us pay attention to Christ’s response to his parents after they found him:

So when they saw Him, they were amazed; and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Look, your father and I have sought you anxiously. And He said to them, “Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business? But they did not understand the statement which He spoke to them (Luke 2:48-50).

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, please bear with me for I am now going to shock you. Christ was indeed speaking the truth, yet his communication style (not content) at least evinced from the passage befits a twelve-year old. And one should not fault Him for that, for twelve year olds even ones belonging to the ilk of prodigious scholar savants are not held up to the highest standards of either human or divine empathy. However, if we focus on this aspect of Christ alone where He underscores the paramount nature of His Father’s business” (ergo my human parents take a back-seat) we miss out on the Christ who entrusts Mary his mother to John the apostle while He was dying on the cross. We also miss out on the Christ who wept on hearing the news of Lazarus’s death. Not to mention the Christ who grieved over Jerusalem. There was something about “My Father’s business” which includes taking care of our loved ones that is encrusted within the sentiment, yet ostensibly cryptic and obscured by the communication style.

For instance, if I were to call a Christian friend and ask him or her for a few minutes because I need prayers or comfort and this friend were to respond “kingdom concerns are more important than yours,” logically that assertion would make sense yet phenomenologically speaking, it would be utterly callow and also reprehensibly unbiblical. As Christians we are called to speak the truth, but also to speak the truth with grace, and grace if I am not mistaken, is involved in the business of comforting. We are called to worship Christ the Lord but also emulate Christ the servant. This two-fold aspect of truth with grace, reason and feeling, the doctrines of Christ with His embodied personhood make both approaches – i.e. both popular evangelicalism and Christian scholasticism (evangelical, reformed or catholic) deeply unsatisfactory or even wanting. While the Christian Church encompasses a diversity of gifts, the call to compassion, which speaks directly to our humanity and our responsibility as image-bearers of God, is never an option. The perspective about Christ in contemporary versions of populist evangelicalism has been well critiqued, but the perspective of Christ in Christian scholastic circles which is incidentally a caricature of sorts is rarely treaded upon for fear of bringing offense to an already beleaguered and besieged minority. With the first group, we may achieve comfort and with the second, we witness the scandal of the Christian scholarly mind. It is a picture of Christ without wounds and Christ without glory. ‘Christ without wounds,’ is self-explanatory in that it alludes to a lack of proper sensitivity towards a practical theology of suffering. I say ‘Christ without glory’ due to my utter dismay at the lack of awe that many Christian scholars (myself included) display towards the mysteries of creation, the gift of life, and the creative Genius that goes behind it not to mention the professionally sanitized lack of curiosity towards anything that does not pertain directly to one’s line of research. Furthermore, the tyranny of approval and appeasement of the broader scholastic community can be so paralyzing that Christian scholars even the decorated ones are wont to be utterly unoriginal. The critiques that apply to CCM (Christian Contemporary Music) equally apply to CCS (Christian Contemporary Scholarship) as well. Does faithfulness to the gospel require us to be unoriginal and insipid?

If any of what I shared either resonates or makes sense, it seems to me that the future of the faith should not lie tendentiously upon the shoulders of the preacher with a famous pulpit or the grey eminence professor teaching or researching at a Christian university. We should pray that God would raise a loose-collection and less formal gathering of faithful and intellectually curious individuals with a throbbing heart for human suffering, primed in the truths of Christ and the Church, immersed in the Living Word and living for Christ without the tyranny of appeasement. Think of Renaissance courts, pubs in London and the salons in Paris during the Enlightenment. Whether or not we agree with all or any of their ideas and morals, we cannot deny that they were indeed spaces of active conversation and intellectual energy, which surpassed Oxford and Padua. The bad news is that seminaries, Christian universities and colleges are submerging in the high-tide of careerism and all the accompanying pitfalls that make the dream of institutional reform both an oxymoron and a petering pipe dream. The good news is that there is nobody to stop you and me from getting together a group of friends and strangers and have a conversation about Christ and culture without obsessing over Niebuhr’s typology. And perhaps, this conversation might spread like a wildfire where Christians are involved in all or any topics ranging from art to cosmology and seeing these pieces fit majestically underneath the canopy of God’s glory.

What are our spaces going to be? And who are these faces going to be? I do not have the answer. Yet I believe that even emerging scholars ought to discard the idolatrous and illusory image of a fractured Christ and instead worship the actual Christ who is creator, redeemer, suffering servant, risen Lord and friend.

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Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, which is both a cathedral and a college chapel

Last week, I asked for recommendations for resources on how academics view evangelical Christians. Thank you for all of your great suggestions! In addition to the comments on the blog, I received several more suggestions by email, as well as a generous offer: T. M. Luhrmann, whose book When God Talks Back inspired by post and research project, contacted me and offered to send me a review copy of her copy. I’ll be writing at least one post about the book later this year, most likely in June.

Image credit: Wikipedia

So, here is the tentative reading list I’ve assembled from your recommendations, in no particular order. Do you have any comments or further suggestions? 

• T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God
• Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America
• George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (in truth, I feel silly for not having read it years ago)
• Omri Elisha, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches
• James Bielo, Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study
• D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite
• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (not about evangelicals per se, but it seems like a good complement to understanding the relationship between academics and evangelicals)

I also plan on looking at Paul Bramadat’s The Church on the World’s Turf : An Evangelical Christian Group at a Secular University if I can find a decent price on it, as well as the Evangelical Studies Bulletin, which came recommended by James Sire. I’m not sure if ESB fits my original request, but when Dr. Sire recommends something, I read first and ask questions later.

Any additional suggestions? In addition to Elaine Ecklund’s excellent book, does anyone know of research on the interactions between scientists and evangelicals?

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Yesterday, in From Silicon Valley, A New Approach To Education, NPR highlighted the free-online class offerings of Coursera. If the purpose of Coursera was solely “to bring more classes from elite universities to students around the world for free online,” then an ESN Facebook wall recommendation to check-out Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (and other offerings) would have been plenty. Why? In an idealistic way I agree with Daphne Koller (Stanford), “By providing what is a truly high-quality educational experience to so many students for free, I think we can really change many, many people’s lives.” . . . Question: Do you agree?

But I was taken aback by the assertion, that “online classes could bring university classes to millions of people who are now effectively cut off.” Why?

1. On-line education demands the resources necessary to access it.
2. The question of the “value” of free on-line classes to those “effectively cut off” when no credit is offered.

Three stories:

• Free online classes and the questions they raise are not as new as one might think. A friend of ESN working in The UofC law library shared with me
• “Ever since I came across Yale’s online courses about 2 years ago, I have wondered when this idea was going to catch on. Yale has quite an array of courses online, though they are not set up for human interaction or for grading. Why do this?? . . . Colleges and universities can extend their influence quickly and extensively with such courses. People from anywhere in the world would be able to take courses they would never otherwise engage. Major challenge – how many free courses? How much to pay for the rest, so that they can count for a degree (bold added by author of this post).”
• An ESN Facebook wall response to my initial post asking “Can/will online classes ‘bring university classes to millions of people who are now effectively cut off’?”

• “The issue of geographical isolation from university level education is something that we have had to think about a lot in the Scottish Highlands, a region (half the country) which never had a university until 2011, despite the Lowlands of Scotland having four dating from the fifteenth century! Establishing the University of the Highlands and Islands has been part of the reinvigoration of a historically deprived and exploited region which still has significant geographical challenges. We use a mix of online courses and ‘blended learning’ which enables students in remote locations to participate in tutorials using video conferencing. In Scotland university education is free for all undergraduate students anyway, so cost isn’t an issue as it is in the above article. The advent of this type of technology though, has meant that people in ‘remote’ (a very relative term!) areas have been able to access higher education for the first time, without having to abandon already fragile communities. . . . This link is to my own department, which is at the forefront of developing these regionally sensitive methods of learning: http://www.history.uhi.ac.uk/ . . . I’d be fascinated to know where the students were located who were taking advantage of the course featured in the article (bold added by author of this post).
• I have a friend who serves with the Haitian Connection Network. They are establishing learning centers in Port–au-Prince, Haiti in partnership with the University of the People. Currently, University of the People offers the following four “practical” undergraduate degrees:
• Associate (A.S.-B.A.) and Bachelor (B.S.-B.A.) degrees in Business Administration
• Associate (A.S.-C.S.) and Bachelor (B.S.-C.S.) degrees in Computer Science.

A Wrap (for now): It strikes me that Coursera is ideal for the academic/curious, homeschoolers (maybe they could get credit for it), high achieving high schoolers, a retirement community group, a local discussion group, etc. The material provides an excellent opportunity for continuing ed (a more interactive form of The Great Courses), an avenue to get ahead, a broadening of  horizons. But to “bring university classes to millions of people who are now effectively cut off” through on-lines classes:

1. significant resources are necessary to participate in these classes, i.e., focused web resource/access for the on-line class offering. In the United States, I think partnerships with libraries, local community centers, and educational outreach programs are vital. From a “global” perspective, how helpful are the classes to “bring university classes to millions of people who are now effectively cut off?”
2. an opportunity for recognition/degree completion is necessary for those “cut off” to take the next step.  Maybe building skills and listing on-line classes on one’s resume will open some doors, but to consider that enough at present is Fantasy and Science Fiction of an unhealthy kind. Isn’t the “degree” still considered a key piece of employment?

Tossing it back to you:

1. “Can/will online classes ‘bring university classes to millions of people who are now effectively cut off’?”
2. Are you in some way involved with on-line education (or the researching of it) as a form of serving a wider community? If so what does it look like, what have been its challenges? Feel free to share links . . .
3. What are ways that followers of Christ can best use free on-line classes to share loving God with “head, heart, & hands” AND loving neighbor? What is an avenue you’d recommend a campus ministry such as InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and a focused ministry such as the Emerging Scholars Network consider exploring?
4. As always, I want to read/hear what you have to say regarding what I’ve shared. Please help me refine my thoughts/musings . . .

More thoughts regarding on-line education in queue :)

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