The Real World

By Tony Esolen

When my daughter was young, she would often be asked, not usually by fellow homeschoolers, why she kept reading The Lord of the Rings. I told her to reply, "Because I want to know what's going on in the world."

That came to my mind today after a discussion I had with a Catholic men's group at our school. One of the young fellows told me that his professor in Introduction to Sociology -- a typical course assigned during orientation to unsuspecting freshmen -- expressed her disdain for our twenty-credit Development of Western Civilization Program, required of all students. "You should be studying something that will be of use to you in the Real World," she said, "like feminist sociology."

Pause here to allow the laughter to die down.

Homo academicus saecularis sinister, the creature beside whom I have spent all my adult life, is a source of endless entertainment, like a child with wobbly consonants trying to talk serious grownup. I really could not repress the merriment. "If somebody said that to me," I laughed, "who was a construction worker, or who went down in the mines, or quarried rock, or built roads, I'd say, 'Fellow, you're wrong about that,' but at least I'd say there was something to what he'd said." But homo academicus saecularis sinister doesn't really have much regard for the men who do that. HASS never drives down the highway, saying, "You know, I'm quite lucky, because I don't have to break my back in the sun, and I get three months of the year off, and am paid quite well compared with what a man or a woman who does something absolutely necessary is paid, as for instance the men who rolled the asphalt on this road I'm speeding on." Indeed HASS will complain about never being paid in accordance with his or her intelligence, which, according to the most reliable testimony, that of HASS -- who should know best, after all -- is astonishingly high.

When I hear a phrase like "The Real World," I must confess that I fall into the sin of detraction. That is, I immediately detract fifteen points of intelligence and ten points of common sense from my interlocutor. If it's followed by such phrases as "today's society" or "the global marketplace" or "thinking outside the box," I inevitably turn to an object of greater interest, a child playing in a sandbox, a retriever wagging his doggy tail, or the purple streaks of cloud gathering in the west. I dearly hope that my students will never consider the sand-furrowing child, or the galumphing retriever, or the setting sun, to be anything other than deeply Real, mysteriously and beautifully and achingly Real, and that their encounter with the great poetry and art of the west, not to mention that perennial philosophy of Aristotle, and that wisdom-seeking eros of Plato, and the word of God itself, will confirm them in their love for that Reality.

One of the students said, "She's overeducated," but alas, that is not true. If I were to take my friend the truck driver to the Sistine Chapel, he would not be so foolish, I am sure, as to say, "Hmm, a lot of naked people falling all over themselves." He would sense that there was a mystery there to which he'd hope someone might introduce him, to lead him by the hand, saying, "Notice the electric space between the finger of God and the finger of Adam," or "See how Michelangelo has painted his own face in the sagging skin held by Saint Bartholomew." My friend might be slightly undereducated for an hour in the Sistine Chapel -- and who, for that hour, would not be? But the college professor who sniffs at the Gilgamesh, Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the letters of Saint Paul -- just to take the first semester for example -- is not overeducated. That professor is undereducated, andoverschooled, a deadly combination. Deadly, but common enough, from what I see, and especially common among people who reduce all matters to contemporary partisan politics, ashomo academicus saecularis sinister is wont to do.

Posted by Anthony Esolen at 08:20 PM | Permalink from Touchstone Magazine

Middle East Unrest

As Japan has, rightly, captured the world's attention for the past several weeks, how quickly we've forgotten the near-Eastern nations that are undergoing major upheavals internally as some governments are toppled and others seem to be nearing that point:

- Egypt

- Libya

- Bahrain

- Yemen

- Syria

Keep these nations in prayers--that there might be good government in these lands, that the peoples might be protected from violence and tragedy, that church in these lands might be strengthened, and that gospel might go forward amidst all this tumult; that men and women of all ages might find the true liberation that comes in Christ Jesus.

More in the Vein of St. Patrick

St. Patrick and Human Trafficking - From Canada’s National Post: “Green beer sales mark the globalized celebration of St. Patrick’s Day and for many who are only Irish once a year little more is thought of. But it may be time for St. Patrick’s Day to become an occasion of global awareness for something more than the taste of Guinness, namely the problem of human trafficking.”

Who Was St. Patrick?

by Kevin DeYoung

A day late I realize, but I didn’t think about St. Patrick’s Day until my son asked me yesterday who Patrick was. This question forced me to pull down from the shelf one of my favorite history books. It’s not a page turner, but I learned something on every page. Actually, I learned something with almost every paragraph. The book is The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher. For a readable, scholarly treatment on the long, slow, amazing transition in Europe from paganism to Christianity there is simply no better book.

So what does Fletcher say about Patrick?

Well, first you need to know what Patrick did not do.

He did not expel snakes from Ireland: the snakelessness of Ireland had been noted by the Roman geographer Solinus in the third century. He did not compose that wonderful hymn known as ‘Saint Patrick’s Breastplate’: its language postdates him by about three centuries. He did not drive a chariot three times over his sister Lupait to punish her unchastity. . . . He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the Persons of the Trinity for his converts: true, he might have done; but it is not until the seventeenth century that we are told that he did. (82)

Determining fact from fiction for Patrick is difficult, in part because his writings were not always passed along reliably. More important, Patrick wrote in particularly poor Latin. He received little education and did not handle Latin well. Fletcher says his Latin is “simple, awkward, laborious, sometimes ambiguous, occasionally unintelligible” (83). This makes it hard to know too much for certain.

But here’s what most scholars agree on: Patrick–whose adult life falls in the fifth century–was actually British, not Irish. He was born into a Christian family with priests and deacons for relatives, but by his own admission, he was not a good Christian growing up. As a teenager he was carried by Irish raiders into slavery in Ireland. His faith deepened during this six year ordeal. Upon escaping Ireland he went back home to Britain. While with his family he received a dream in which God called him to go back to Ireland to convert the Irish pagans to Christianity.

In his Confessio Patrick writes movingly about his burden to evangelize the Irish. He explicitly links his vocation to the commands of Scripture. Biblical allusions like “the nations will come to you from the ends of the earth” and “I have put you as a light among the nations” and “I shall make you fishers of men” flow from his pen. Seeing his life’s work through the lens of Matthew 28 and Acts 1, Patrick prayed that God would “never allow me to be separated from His people whom He has won in the end of the earth.” For Patrick, the ends of the earth was Ireland.

Over decades, Patrick made “many thousands of converts.” He evangelized in cities and in the countryside. He encouraged the monastic way of life, ordained priests, and planted churches.

Patrick, says Fletcher, “was soaked in the Bible.” This was commendable, but not completely unusual. What was new was Patrick’s embrace of the missionary mandate to lead the nations to Christ.

Patrick’s originality was that no one within western Christendom had thought such thoughts as these before, had ever previously been possessed by such convictions. As far as our evidence goes, he was the first person in Christian history to take the scriptural injunctions literally; to grasp that teaching all nations meant teaching even barbarians who lived beyond the border of the frontiers of the Roman Empire. (86)

Sounds like a man deserving of his own holiday. It’s too bad today the forefather of western missions is chiefly celebrated by drinking beer and dreaming of leprechauns. We don’t know much for certain about Patrick. But what we know of his ambition and ministry should be enough to make all of us a little green with envy.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Mark [O']Driscoll writes on why St. Patrick was one of the greatest missionaries to ever live, and Russell Moore writes on what evangelicals can learn from Saint Patrick.

Moore also recommends Philip Freeman’s St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography:

This biography gives contemporary evangelicals more than a pious evangelist to emulate. It also reconstructs a Christian engagement with a pagan culture, in ways that are strikingly contemporary to evangelicals seeking to engage a post-Christian America.

Read both of their posts for more details.

via: JT

The Frightening Chronicles of Me

You know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Corny, I know. But looking through my FB profile picture album (a showcase that, arguably, demonstrates important snapshots of one's recent life), I found it downright spooky how well it chronicled the past 5 years and how much drastic change has occurred.

Namely, the oldest photo depicts and goofy, careless junior-year high schooler enjoying a week at camp; the most recent shows a groom walking down the aisle with his bride.

Like I said: spooky.

https://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=278447&id=608940085&l=560237a215

Facebook Makes Us Miserable

by Tim Challies

Just about everyone has joined Facebook. And just about everyone has since considered giving it up. There are all kinds of studies today telling us how much time Facebook is sucking—700 billion minutes between the lot of us every month. That’s a lot of time. But when you divide it 500 million ways it doesn’t seem quite so bad. That’s not why most of us have considered giving it up. There are studies telling us how Facebook is invading our privacy and selling our personal details to advertisers. That’s annoying, but not reason enough to quit.

The reason so many of us have considered giving up on Facebook is that it makes us miserable. A recent paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looks at a series of studies involving how people evaluate moods—their own and those of others. The study itself is not as interesting as the implications. What the study found is that people tend to underestimate how dejected other people feel and that this in turn increases a person’s own sense of unhappiness. Put otherwise, we all believe that others have better lives than we do and this makes us feel bad about ourselves. That’s strangely significant.

Where do we find this phenomenon in clearest form? On Facebook, of course. We log on to Facebook, look through the photographs and status messages our friends post, and believe that everyone is happier and more successful than we are. And when I have spoken to friends and family members who have considered giving up Facebook, this is exactly the reasoning they have given. They look at other people and feel miserable in comparison.

What an interesting phenomenon. It seems clear that Facebook is exposing something, some ugly little corner of the human heart. Facebook is all about making life seem joyful—we “like” one another’s happy status updates, not the sad ones; we post photos of our parties, not our funerals; we use it to celebrate births and marriages and new relationships, not to mourn deaths or remember break-ups. Facebook is meant to be a happy place for happy people. But it doesn’t seem to work out so well. We all think everyone else is happy, but we don’t feel the joy.

And it strikes both ways—when we portray ourselves through social media we do so on our own terms. And of course this means that we present ourselves in the way we want to be perceived, whether or not this is an accurate portrayal. So even while we put only our best foot forward, we look at others and assume that their portrayal is more accurate than our own; we believe that we are the only pretenders, the only ones stretching and exaggerating, trying to keep up. We resent another person for being happy—“She has an amazing life and I don’t!” Or we resent her for being falsely happy—“I know her and I know that her life isn’t all that!”

Either way, we all end up miserable. We all end up trying to be something we are not and believing that everyone else has a better life. Libby Copeland spoke to the author of this paper and he quoted Montesquieu saying: “If we only wanted to be happy it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.” We do not want to be happy—we want to be happier. It becomes a competition, a point of comparison. But we can never be happier because we constantly drag ourselves down by believing that we are the only ones who are miserable.

What a ridiculous lot we are. What a sad, jealous, envious, idolatrous lot.

Facebook makes me believe, even stronger, in the value of the local church, in the value of true, deep fellowship, or genuine community. This is just one more reason that we need to live in community—in real community with real people. When I mediate my life by Facebook, I am the one who controls it all. I curate it by tagging the photos I like, by offering up the statuses I like, by making myself who I want to be rather than who I am. But when I live before others, when I live a real life in the real world, well, that is where people see who I really am. And they love me on that basis. In fact, they love me more on that basis.

The fact is, we want to love real people and we want to be loved by real people. Facebook is fiction. Local church is fact—the most real community we can experience this side of eternity.

The World's Most Typical Person