Around and About
Around and About
March 5, 2012
A couple of things came to my attention over the weekend. The first is the new devotional from Thomas Nelson. It is difficult to see exactly what this represents. I am somewhat of the old school `Real men don't read Jane Austen' variety, preferring Hardy and Conrad, though I can appreciate what a significant literary development her novels represented. I am, however, a huge Dickens fan, more for the fact he is fun than a literary genius. But a devotional based on their works?
What is going on? Is this the natural outcome of the current nostalgic desire, faced with a pragmatic, 'skills' and information-obsessed educational establishment, for a 'classical curriculum'? A naive belief that reading old books with long words and sentences is just naturally more edifying, more `Christian' and more 'improving' as Ms Austen might have put it? I trust it is not a longing for a world where little boys from the wrong backgrounds were shoved up chimneys so that Mrs Bennett might have the peace and quiet to marry off her daughters. At least Dickens understood that part of 'Victorian values' well. Or is it perchance the triumph of a view of common grace -- or of a certain educational philosophy -- which ultimately blurs the boundaries between the redemptive and the non-redemptive?
More likely it is simply part of the market negotiation in which publishers have to engage to stay afloat in times such as these. In which case, we should probably all be a little worried. I have often felt an affinity for Mr Tulkinghorn but I am not sure I want him shaping my devotions.
The other matter is the intervention on gay marriage in the UK by Cardinal O'Brien and the response by Anglican priest, Richard Coles. While the Cardinal's appeal to self-evident truth is too much even for a dyed-in-the-wool modernist like me, I find Coles' response quite bizarre. It is odd that he sees the Cardinal's opposition to gay marriage as strengthening "the march of aggressive secularism." Of course, he nowhere defines exactly what he means by aggressive secularism. So here is a definition one might play with: it is the emptying of religious language and ethics of any traditional religious meaning such that the content becomes indistinguishable from that which is articulated by those of no religious faith whatsoever. On such a definition, it is not the Cardinal who is here strengthening the hand of of secularism. And, ironically, it is not the honest secularists who are likely to be the most secular.
What is going on? Is this the natural outcome of the current nostalgic desire, faced with a pragmatic, 'skills' and information-obsessed educational establishment, for a 'classical curriculum'? A naive belief that reading old books with long words and sentences is just naturally more edifying, more `Christian' and more 'improving' as Ms Austen might have put it? I trust it is not a longing for a world where little boys from the wrong backgrounds were shoved up chimneys so that Mrs Bennett might have the peace and quiet to marry off her daughters. At least Dickens understood that part of 'Victorian values' well. Or is it perchance the triumph of a view of common grace -- or of a certain educational philosophy -- which ultimately blurs the boundaries between the redemptive and the non-redemptive?
More likely it is simply part of the market negotiation in which publishers have to engage to stay afloat in times such as these. In which case, we should probably all be a little worried. I have often felt an affinity for Mr Tulkinghorn but I am not sure I want him shaping my devotions.
The other matter is the intervention on gay marriage in the UK by Cardinal O'Brien and the response by Anglican priest, Richard Coles. While the Cardinal's appeal to self-evident truth is too much even for a dyed-in-the-wool modernist like me, I find Coles' response quite bizarre. It is odd that he sees the Cardinal's opposition to gay marriage as strengthening "the march of aggressive secularism." Of course, he nowhere defines exactly what he means by aggressive secularism. So here is a definition one might play with: it is the emptying of religious language and ethics of any traditional religious meaning such that the content becomes indistinguishable from that which is articulated by those of no religious faith whatsoever. On such a definition, it is not the Cardinal who is here strengthening the hand of of secularism. And, ironically, it is not the honest secularists who are likely to be the most secular.
