Last week, it was RLS’ Kidnapped. Originally published as a serial (which means lots of cliffhangers), it tells the story of 16-year-old David Balflour, a Scottish orphan who begins the novel seeking his wealthy uncle, whom he has never met.  Well, as you might guess from the title, not all goes well for young David.  His uncle, who turns out to be a miserly recluse, sells David to a ship bound for North America, where he is to be sold into slavery.  (The novel is set in 1752, pre-Revolution, but was written in 1886, so even then it had an air of historical fiction.)  But before they even leave the coast of Scotland, the ship is wrecked, and David finds himself thrown in with Alan “Breck” Stewart, based on an authentic historical figure, a Highland Jacobite rebel.  Balfour himself is a Lowland Whig, which means they are on opposite sides of both cultural and political fences.

If you don’t really know what a “Highland Jacobite” or “Lowland Whig” is, don’t worry: neither did I when I started the book.  But the edition I was reading included excellent historical notes, and part of RLS’ genius is his ability to flesh out political and cultural concepts in interesting characters, situations, and plot turns.  I enjoy both reading good stories and learning new things, and Kidnapped gave me both.  I gained an appreciation for Scotland as its own country, and for the cultural, religious, and political divisions in 18th-century Scotland.  If that sounds abstract, believe me, it was not: many in Kentucky are of Scots-Irish descent, and I belong to a church tradition founded by a Scots-Irish minister, so I gained a greater appreciation for the cultural roots that gave birth to both Kentucky’s culture and the Christian Church.

My wife and I recently welcomed our first son into the world, and I look forwad to sharing with him the joys of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novels.

If you decide to go to graduate school, don’t do it just because you don’t know what else to do,

A little later down the page:

Recognize that students who enter grad programs for specific career goals are more likely to graduate than those with vague plans.

And finally:

If you aren’t yet certain what career you want, grad school might give you insight, but there are certainly more cost-effective ways of figuring out your life.  You might be better off working for a conservation organization, teaching English overseas as a second language, or joining the Peace Corps until you’re sure what you want to do.

Rather than being employed for its own sake, the poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes – judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Apparently, the ghost of Shakespeare hangs over Milton studies constantly.  Another good quote, about the difference between Milton and Shakespeare, referring to the debates over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays:

Jonathan Rosen was getting at something like this when he said in a recent New Yorker piece, “No one would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work.”

Milton went blind in his mid-forties, prior to writing Paradise Lost: the magnificent epic that Milton is best known for was composed mentally and dictated to a series of secretaries, including one of his daughters and the poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote the poem “To His Coy Mistress,” a standard of English textbooks.

His blindness led him to compose one of the greatest poems in the English language, “On His Blindness,” which I memorized while I was unemployed following graduate school, wondering whether my long education would ever result in productive employment:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly.  Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.

A quick explication: Milton despairs at going blind, feeling that his one “Talent” (his ability as a writer) is now wasted, and, referring to the parable of the talents, fears that Jesus will return and question him as to why he has not put his talent to work.  (The work “fondly” here means “foolishly” - Milton’s retort that he can’t work because he’s blind, in other words, is a pretty stupid thing to say to the Lord of Heaven and Earth.)  The poem turns as Milton comes to realize that God does not “need” his work or “his own gifts” (i.e. Milton’s talent was a gift from God to begin with).  Instead, what God demands is his readiness to serve.  The image changes to a royal court: thousands of courtiers speed to and fro in their service to God, but “They also serve who only stand and waite.” Milton’s readiness would soon be repaid; a few years after this poem, Milton began work on Paradise Lost.

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

He is writing primarily about elite universities, the same ones that ESN is trying to transform.  Deresiewicz was on the faculty at Yale for 10 years, so he has some background in this.

His argument has several points, but here’s one that stuck out at me.

An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort.  [snip]

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

I think Deresiewicz glosses over another reason why elite universities rob you of the opportunite “not to be rich”: student loans. I was accepted to Yale when I was a senior in high school, but even with financial aid, I would have need to take out something like $20,000 per year in student loans to make it work.  The University of Louisville offered me a full ride; between UofL and my master’s degree at Regent (where I also received a scholarship, and where my parents graciously paid for my thesis), I was able to complete my entire education to date with less than $10,000 total in student loans.  My senior year in high school, for some unknown reason, I was convinced that I wanted to be a high school principal (I still don’t know why), and the prospect of starting a career as a teacher with over $100,000 in student loan debt did not appeal to me.

Over at Slate.com, Meghan O’Rourke has a nice tribute to Anne of Green Gables, which has been published in a new Modern Library edition.  O’Rourke does a good job, but she starts her article playing devil’s advocate: why should Anne of Green Gables, of all things, receive this kind of treatment?

To some, this canonical promotion of a writer who would probably now be classified as a Y.A. (young adult) author might seem preposterous. To certain left-leaning cultural theorists who won’t embrace a heroine with a less-than-revolutionary CV—Anne, once the Island’s best young scholar, chooses to become a devoted wife and mother of six—the Modern Library’s decision may appear to be a reactionary cave-in to nostalgic sentimentality.

Compare this to Deresiewicz’s point about elite education: using a bright mind, or an elite education, to become something as pedestrian as a mother is, well, “wasteful,” when you could be doing the “real work” of becoming rich or “successful.”  There’s nothing wrong with being a banker, hedge fund manager, or what have you, but let’s be very careful here.  The Victorians elevated motherhood to an idol; we have lowered to a calling of last resort.  I had a feminist professor in college who liked to read aloud articles that described how much a mother would be paid if all of her jobs were added up (e.g. chaffeur, personal shopper, maid, etc.).  I think she thought she was being flattering to mothers by noting their worth.  And she was, but she was also buying into our society’s preoccupation with salary as a measure of importance.

Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me?
Put your faith in God,
for I will yet praise him,
my Savior and my God. (Psalm 42, TNIV)

Here’s Piper’s sermon on Psalm 42.  Piper notes that the psalmist is confident in God’s love, though his current state of mind is depressed.  The psalmist speaks to his own soul, educating his soul in the truth of God’s love.

At Lakeside, I’ll be teaching a series, beginning next month, on the same psalms that Piper preached on.  We’ll be focusing on inductive study of the psalms, but I’ll be recommending Piper’s sermons as good listening for the week after our own study.

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. Aassve put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

This is something I have repeatedly heard in nonprofit circles.  Because there isn’t a government program for a particular something, the “U.S. isn’t very generous.”  Mind you, this is only talking about government programs for child care and maternity leave, not benefits from private companies, low-cost programs from nonprofit organizations, or community programs from churches or other groups.  ”Society” is narrowly defined as “the government.”  I think this brief quote speaks volumes about the different cultural assumptions between the U.S. and Europe. 

But, praise God, the result was that new relationships were formed and old relationships were reconciled, and InterVarsity at Georgetown was able to regain official affiliation.  Ironically, the daughter of Alec Hill, InterVarsity’s president, was a student at Georgetown during this entire ordeal.  Now, Alec has written up this thoughts about what happened, and where InterVarsity stands after a long process.

Two Year Turnaround by Alec Hill

Let’s assume for one moment that Jesus was not the Son of God, and that there is no Holy Spirit. Jesus wrote nothing himself; all of the records of his life and teaching come from his followers and his followers’ followers. According to some scholars, we can’t even be sure that he really said what his followers say he said. According to some other scholars, the rest of the New Testament after the Gospels - the letters of Paul, Peter, et al., the Revelation of John - are dramatically different than what Jesus “really” taught. Again, I’m not endorsing these thoughts, but just telling you what some people think.

What then are we left with? The text of the New Testament has spurred on some of the most profound moral achievements in the history of mankind: Augustine’s philosophy, the great monasteries, the life of Francis of Assissi, humanitarian projects like hospitals and orphanages, the dramatic rise of literacy in the West, the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Theresa. The list could go on and on. Not bad for a group of smalltown fishermen and merchants.

The New Testament was written by a small group of people, mostly from a couple of villages in Galilee. Luke and Paul probably had the equivalent of a university education, but the rest were tradesmen. Yet their writings triggered not only dozens of moral revolutions over the last 2,000 years, but also radically reinterpreted the Hebrew Scriptures, completely transforming an entire religion. Assuming that authorship is correct, then we have, at minimum, seven of the world’s greatest moral geniuses - the 4 Gospel writers, plus Paul, Peter, and James. I would argue that the work of any one or two of them would be enough to found a religion, yet we have at least seven, not even counting the anonymous author of Hebrews, or considering whether any of their attributed writings were written by someone else. And remember: most of these “geniuses” were Galilean tradesmen, considered uneducated by their neighbors. All of them were contemporaries with one another, and their collected works were written over a span of no more than 50 years. Along the way, they created from scratch a new literary genre (the Gospel), wrote the highest achievement in all of Jewish apocalyptic literature, and redefined the possiblities for letter writing.

Either this is the greatest coincidence that history has ever seen, or there’s something to this idea that Jesus is the Son of God and sent the Holy Spirit to teach and inspire his disciples.

Please be in prayer for safe travel, and also for a peaceful home while I’m gone for Elizabeth and the kids.