Holidays as a Moral Imperative

A holiday is a luxury, and yet I feel in a small sense morally obliged to take one if I have the means to do so.  Taking a holiday for me is like having wine at dinner; it goes beyond necessity into a kind of properly human virtue. Wine bespeaks festivity, a holiday, leisure. Both are jolly with a delight in superfluity.

Leisure poses a challenge to me. I seek out activity--usually intellectual and relational--and find it difficult to rest. During Lent I gave up reading blogs and other forms of internet-delivered news. I was surprised to find the wheels of my mind restlessly spinning. I'm tempted to pile on metaphors here: I kept looking for sneaky ways to supply grist for my mind's mill, fodder for thought. My mind felt like a sewing machine running and clacking and whirring but without any thread in the needle. Josef Pieper writes of restless activity as a species of sloth, which masquerades as the virtue opposite to a dull indolence. For Pieper, the opposite of sloth is not busy-ness, but leisure. My inability to quiet the vain chatter of my mind in the darkness of the nights as I nursed Al shows that this is a sin to which I am prone.

My busy indolence has come even more to the foreground with parenthood. As a mother who is trying to work and be present to her baby, I feel the ticking of time passing as steady forward pressure on my back. If Al is asleep, a million things deferred cry for my attention, and I rush from dishes to laundry to emails to paperwork until she wakes. I wonder sometimes if working is a red herring here, though. I feel "on call" for Al at any time, day or night, and I never know when she will need me, so I rush my other tasks to be ready and available and fully present. I suspect non-gainfully-employed me would feel little different.

So all the more, a holiday has become a moral imperative. It is something I ought to do. And yet, to do it puts another task on my list: planning! But what is another task, really? The list is never all crossed off anyways. I need to learn to live well with my list, and not make myself a slave to its seeming demands.

Update: Another Obstacle to Ethical Stem Cell Research Overcome

It worked in mice, and now in humans! The debate on stem cells has been turned on its head yet again, as Christians can now affirm even more strongly that they are for ethical stem cell research as three separate labs confirm that they can reprogram human skin cells to act like stem cells. No need to destroy embryos, not even to use human eggs - hooray! Sam Brownback has also written about this in First Things, so check it out...

Taking every Hallow's Eve Captive for Christ

One Reformed perspective on Halloween, one BBC Radio4 public-interest story, one mother (mine) who adores the silly-ness of Halloween, and one delightfully stimulating dinner conversation all add up to a question: is it good for our souls to celebrate all Hallow's Eve as a preparation for All Saints' by mocking the devil and showing the his powerlessness after the victory of Christ? Here's a snippet of the Reformed perspective mentioned above by James B. Jordan:

The concept, as dramatized in Christian custom, is quite simple: On October 31, the demonic realm tries one last time to achieve victory, but is banished by the joy of the Kingdom.

What is the means by which the demonic realm is vanquished? In a word: mockery. Satan’s great sin (and our great sin) is pride. Thus, to drive Satan from us we ridicule him. This is why the custom arose of portraying Satan in a ridiculous red suit with horns and a tail. Nobody thinks the devil really looks like this; the Bible teaches that he is the fallen Arch-Cherub. Rather, the idea is to ridicule him because he has lost the battle with Jesus and he no longer has power over us....

Similarly, on All Hallows’ Eve (Hallow-Even – Hallow-E’en – Halloween), the custom arose of mocking the demonic realm by dressing children in costumes. Because the power of Satan has been broken once and for all, our children can mock him by dressing up like ghosts, goblins, and witches. The fact that we can dress our children this way shows our supreme confidence in the utter defeat of Satan by Jesus Christ – we have NO FEAR!

When I first read this I thought that it would be a challenge to get this message across to small children, but the Radio4 story had little girls rattling off without any hesitation that the meaning of Halloween was "the victory of light over dark, which means we don't have to be afraid any more"!

Rather than a Frank-Peretti-style thriller pitching capable archangels against the swarthy powers of darkness, we have here holy laughter and the joy of the Spirit as the answer of Christ's people to the threats and scare-tactics of the devil. We spend many of the days of our year giving the devil more than his due; perhaps it is fitting to spend an evening remembering the joy of the kingdom, the powerless of evil to snatch us from Christ, and Christ's humiliation of Satan by the cross, resurrection, and ascension. Drawn up into the life and victory of Christ, is it not fitting that we too should scorn and deride the pride of the evil one?

This is a truth that can be taught to very young children, and perhaps is a better solution to the "Halloween problem" than harvest parties. I'm still thinking about it...but I have to say, I would love any little girl of mine to have the confidence in God's victory that I heard over the radio.

Ladybug's new calendar

A few days ago, I came home from another day slogging away ineffectually at an article to find roses, a card, and a small package awaiting me -- a surprise from Pancho! My confidence had been flagging to levels of near collapse, but Pancho zoomed to the rescue with encouragement and presents.

In the package was a Moleskine notebook, a posh planner that I've been eyeing for some time now but couldn't reconcile myself to the price (£10 for something I normally pay £3 for) or to the risk of the self-conscious pretension involved in buying myself a 'serious' 'professional' calendar. It bears noting that Moleskine vaunts itself as "the legendary notebook of Van Gogh, Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse and Céline" and the website even carries images of itself carrying the work of such luminaries.* I was amazed at how all those qualms disappeared when Pancho gave me one - if it's a present, it can't be pretentious to have it, right? Now I am only in danger of pretension in the use of it, I suppose.

So I'm a few days into my new Moleskine-directed life, and while I am still entranced by it, I have to admit I feel somehow obligated to live up to it. Though it is essentially a week-at-a-glance calendar, it pairs the week with a blank ruled page, presumably for all the elegant thoughts I would be having if I were Satre, Gertrude Stein, or George Bataille. That the blank lines can stand as a rebuke to me reminds me that pride takes the most mundane opportunities to make you an ass. I'm not really that keen on the thought-life of Satre et al., but neither am I always content with the thought-life of Ladybug, and PhD-ing in particular often makes me feel inadequate and foolish. Still, I think my moleskine is a good thing, an opportunity to take every moleskine captive for Christ, and I've decided to use the extra space to record brief, gloriously inelegant jottings about what I read in the Word day-by-day and go back to the long-lost habit of sermon notes on the blank lines every week, thus substituting a temptation to want to be greater than I am with days read in light of God's transforming work in my life.

Grand plans, and hopefully not wholly prompted by a spiritualized desire to be 'serious'. I take it as a good sign that I almost missed a rehearsal yesterday because I failed to check my new calendar.


* Can we perhaps cite JKR as a possible user, given the importance of Hagrid's 'moleskin' in keeping things safe for Harry in Deathly Hallows?

Stem cell update: turns out, we don't need embryos (or even eggs) after all that hype

After all that hype about how embryo-destructive stem cell research was necessary to save people suffering from disease etc., it turns out (and see here for a UK version of the story)that one doesn't need to destroy embryos (at least, not mice embryos) in order to get the pluripotent cell that carry the promises cited by researchers and advocates of (is it fair to say, relatively unlimited?) stem cell research.

Great news, but at the moment, of course, even better news for mice, since the results are based on research done with mice, not with people, and there are significant difficulties with carrying them over into therapeutic technologies. Not to mention that the side-stepping of one ethical problem hardly obviates them all...but whatever. Now we can say even more emphatically, 'yes I'm for stem cell research when it uses such pluripotent cells or adult stem cells, and doesn't have to destroy embryos or rely on the morally dubious harvesting of eggs from women.' Coincidence that this comes on the eve of the voting on a bill to try to override President Bush's current limitations on research? hmmm...

Interesting report of a recent bioethics conference on totipotency and then a reaction to the news on the First Things blog, particularly helpful in the scientific and ethical distinction between pluripotent and totipotent cells, as well as human life and human beings. My thought: wow, because of a interdisciplinary conversation between Christians thinkers, who care quite a lot about this issue, and others (who may are may not agree) the result is that they all actually think harder and better about both the ethics and the science together, not artificially separated from each other! Their conversation continues; I just wish the general public would follow suit...

Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle: Review, part 1

After a slow and interrupted start, I gobbled up Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle and found in it much of relevance to those who have chosen a life within (or at least within earshot) of the university. I originally picked the book up out of interest in how Berry—an acclaimed poet who is also an essayist, a fifth-generation farmer, a conservationist, and a Christian (I believe)—would approached the issue of ‘scientism’ in contemporary culture. I did not expect to be so directly addressed as a prospective member of the profession of English within university culture.

As a poet-farmer with an MA in English, Berry has participated at times in university culture but for the large part remains outside of it, ‘in but not of’ its world. It is precisely the framework of that world and its capitulation to the ideals of science-technology-industry that draws a lot of fire from Berry, often causing me to wince and mutter an appreciative and somewhat chastened ‘ouch!’ at thundering denunciations such as this:

“The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers. The academic ‘profession’ of literature seems now to be merely tumbling from one critical or ideological fad to another, constantly ‘revolutionizing’ itself in pathetic imitation of the ‘revolutionary’ sciences, issuing all the while a series of passionless, jargonizing, ‘publishable’ but hardly readable articles and books, in which a pretentious obscurity and dullness masquerade as profundity” (69).

Lest you be tempted to dismiss Berry as an injured poet uninitiated in higher criticism, it is well worth noting that renowned literary critic and theorist, Peter Brooks, has also recently militated against the dominance of ‘ideological criticism’ and argued for the profession to return to poetics (although emphatically not to the liberal humanist assumptions that once drove the study of poetics).

To my mind, Berry’s most crucial insights are the way he links respect for mystery to the quest for knowledge and his insistence on the distinction between creatures and machines which in turn impacts not only economics, but ideas of community, ecosystems, and what and how it is that humans study in the university. I will treat these two in two separate posts.

Ignorance and Mystery
Berry in many ways regards ignorance as a fundamental part of the human condition, and not necessarily a negative part. Ignorance is not the mere absence of knowledge for Berry, but can also signal the human encounter with mystery. Some mysteries—and certainly the most important ones—cannot simply be reduced into problems to be solved as scientism demands. In contrast to scientism’s faith in the future solution of all problems and the limitlessness of human knowledge, Berry postulates that “The mystery surrounding our life probably is not significantly reducible” (11). As a result, the question of most importance is not a technological or educational question that pushes forward into new frontiers of knowledge, but “the question of how to act in ignorance” (11).

As someone writing up a PhD and worried about what I’ve left out, “how to act in ignorance” describes a daily dilemma. When faced with what I do not know, do I run to the library and spend days and days to try to gain exhaustive knowledge that, while very informative, probably will be left on the cutting room floor at the end of the writing process? How much time should I spend increasing my knowledge of _insert ancient or modern foreign language here_? How can I possibly publish my own opinions or claim a place in intellectual culture when what my PhD reveals to me is how little I know? Berry’s comments on knowledge and ignorance are worth repeating to myself on a daily basis:

“If there is an economy of the life of the mind—as I assume there has to be, for the life of the mind involves the distribution of limited amounts of time, energy, and attention—then that economy, like any other, subsists upon the making of critical choices. You can’t think, read, research, study, learn or teach everything. To choose one thing is to choose against many things. To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance” (59-60).

This statement may at first appear dismaying, but should not be. Ignorance is natural to us, and it signals not just our limitations, but also our interdependence and the grace of our encounter with mysteries both human and divine. To regard a limit to our natures solely as something bad is to not only to envy what we have not been given but also to desire to grasp at the place of a god, unlimited in knowledge and agency. To regard an encounter with mystery as a disappointment instead of a grace also shows the temptation of Adam and Eve to see ‘as God’ to be quite familiar to their sons and daughters. The question of writing up my PhD and preparing to be in some ways ‘an intellectual’ is not a question of knowing everything or even of knowing the ‘right’ things in order to pass muster, but is fundamentally a question of how to live in the state of ignorance, a question of ethics: “How does one act well—sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage—on the basis of partial knowledge” (149). And the crucial insight of Berry is that the answers we find to such questions are not limited to the concerns of the minutiae of our studies, but must address a context, a community, and a common purpose outside of those concerns. For me, then, how to write my PhD on the basis of partial knowledge is a question that includes but also goes beyond the details of late-medieval England, beyond the professionalism required of bona fide medievalists to include concerns larger than obscure understandings of literate history or my career.

“The question for art, then, is exactly the same as the question for science: Can it properly subordinate itself to concerns that are larger than its own?....It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture....to be operating strictly according to ‘professional standards’, without local affection or community responsibility, much less any vision of an eternal order to which we are all subordinate and under obligation” (88, 93).

Ignorance and the University
You may have already noticed the connection here between ignorance and the university. The partial nature of human knowledge is in many ways the founding condition for the university as a sort of ‘convocation’ in Berry’s terms, a coming together of those called to different specialties. A specialist chooses myopia, chooses to be ignorant of many things in order to see distinctly a few things up close. A convocation of the near-sighted needs to have a conversation which takes on the far-sightedness gained by questions from outsiders as well as by a sense of being subordinate to something larger than one’s own narrow concerns. To do so is not to eliminate ignorance; we don’t have a conversation to become specialists in more things. To do so is an appropriate act in response to the isolation and hubris that partial knowledge outside of community can occasion. To do so is to recognize our higher obligations outside of the concerns of our specialties, even beyond the range of our knowledge, and to work together to meet those obligations as best we can. As Berry puts it:

“[To become a conversation] the convocation would have to have a common purpose, a common standard, and a common language. It would have to understand itself as a part, for better or worse, of the surrounding community. For reasons both selfish and altruistic, it would have to make the good health of its community the primary purpose of all its work” (60).

Cross-/interdisciplinarity is clearly not enough, because its goals tend to be too narrowly focused on the narrow agenda of enhancing or spicing up one’s own work. Interdisciplinarity may stitch together various bits of knowledge into new forms and uses, but such translocations are not the main point of conversation within a university and tend to be done rather poorly. What is needed to inspire this conversation and determine part of its agenda is a larger vision of what academic work is for, and thinking hard about that larger vision in the context of a local community. The work of the academy has its own places after all, and there are not the virtual places in the pages of refereed journals or briefly popping into existence for a day conference, but real, solid, embodied places, each of which has a unique nature and provides a home to living creatures of all sorts. These are places and creatures to which we owe our stewardship as well as our loyalty as we make our home with them; in other words, we owe our love to them.

Support the ONE Campaign!

JMR on Scriptorium Daily the other day posted an open letter to his daughter, Jane, responding to her first blog. While I often enjoy his posts on homeschooling his children, this post was rather dismaying to me. JMR uses the ONE campaign in comparison to a church collection for the poor as an example of how one should not confuse like-sounding ideas (‘let’s feed the poor as a church’ and ‘let’s feed the poor as a nation’). Apparently there is some rumbling going on at Biola about supporting the campaign, which it appears by his comments on the post that JMR is not keen to do.

After listening to Jeffrey Sachs' BBC Reith Lectures on development (and reading the Jubilee Manifesto, and going to the Acton Institute several years ago...) I wanted to pick him up on a few things about the ONE Campaign that he mentioned, but I ended up writing a 6-page open letter! It was a bit out of proportion to his original post, but I got excited...and, well...it just happened. If you're interested in reading my arguments in favor of lending vocal support to the campaign, click through and have a read - they cover (briefly) such things as certainty and moral action, subsidiarity, corruption, international promises, Christian thought on international development, the different claims of the local and the global, etc., with loads of links to follow up on. I'll post my rousing conclusion as a teaser:

Yes, more and better aid, and let’s be optimistic about alleviating some forms of suffering, but let’s not fool ourselves that better material conditions alone can somehow create human flourishing.

At the end of the day, the ONE Campaign is not a cure-all for extreme poverty nor should it be an encouragement to ‘leave it to the government/UN’. We can support the campaign in a way that emphasizes that public sector solutions on their own are also inadequate and that the only way to reach goals such as the Millennium Development Goals is with a combination of and a conversation between public and private, local and global. The Acton Institute’s blog offers a riposte to Sachs and shouts out, “don’t wait for the government!”—a sentiment I whole-heartedly affirm. The ONE Campaign isn’t the only way to act, and it is not an excuse to do nothing else as individuals, as churches, as universities, as members of World Vision, Tearfund, Compassion International, and so forth. Let’s not wait for the government to uphold its promises and its responsibilities as a government, let’s do more starting now!

But at the same time, we can support the ONE Campaign as a way to keep extreme poverty not just on the political agenda, but on the agenda of public discourse as a whole, providing impetus not just for concerted political action, but for inspired personal action by ourselves, our businessmen, our students, our retirees, our empty-nesters, anyone with time and resources to give in love. This is the vision that I urge you to consider and to write in response to.

Any comments or rebuttals, go ahead and post to here :) As you may have noticed, I'd definitely be interested in them...

Virtuous laundering

A recent blog extolling the virtues of the Fisher & Paykel washing machine reminded me how behind American washers and dryers are in terms of energy efficiency and convenience. They are absolute behemoths compared to my wee under the kitchen sink combination washer/dryer. Moreover, they seem to value power over efficiency, as was confirmed by a chat with a knowledgeable shop assistant at Sears over Christmas. Out of curiousity, we asked him why there were so few side-loading washers, even though side-loading was generally regarded as more efficient in its use of soap and water, as well as amazingly able to spin water out of clothes so that they come out nearly dry. His answer: habit/fashion and apparent size trump operational virtue. He particularly commented on how washer specifications fool consumers by offering them higher numbers where such numbers are generally meaningless. (By the way, the same is true for food processors: the electricity draw of the motor so touted on labels has absolutely no effect on the performance of the appliance according to the good people at Cooks Illustrated.)

The delay start feature is also pretty standard here in the UK, largely because of the way electricity is billed. For those of us stuck with storage heaters (which heat up bricks or oil during the night and then turn off and allow nature and manually operated vents to take over from there), we are billed at much lower rates from 12am-7am when those heaters are drawing electricity like crazy. As a result, the best time to do the wash is...while you sleep! Which is also better for the system as a whole, since night is usually the time of the lowest demand and washers take a lot of power to spin those clothes out.

One final cross-cultural note: a friend from Britain was visiting over Christmas while we were in California and (if I remember correctly?) wondered aloud why in such a sunny climate people didn't just hang their laundry out to dry instead of using dryers. I'd never considered such a thing before on a grand scale, even though we had routinely hung a lot of ours out during the first year of marriage due to a pretty lame dryer. It strikes me as odd that, due to soaring energy costs, I've come to hang up all my clothes as a matter of fact in a wetter climate than my sunny native turf. Now, there is a small sacrifice of convenience, it's true - about a 5 minute sacrifice in my experience when your washer can spin things nearly dry. If California is serious about energy conservation, why don't more green-leaning yuppies (like myself) hang up more of their laundry in their backyards, especially during the summer months when the system gets stretched to its limits by the demands of air conditioning? That doesn't mean never use a dryer, but to suggest that it might be a good idea regard its use as optional, or even exceptional, instead of unquestionable. Or have we truly ceded so much of our God-given agency that we have become slaves to convenience?

Buying kitchen virtue? Take 2 - Buying Generously

I've been chewing this over since Burglar's reply to my original post (and here on The Bourgeois Burglars) and not yet had the time to post again on this. Thanks to Burglar, we know already that the Philosopher says

“the generous person, then, will give for the sake of the beautiful, and in the right way, for it goes along with right giving that it be to whom and as much as and when one ought” and “it is most definitely characteristic of a generous person to go to excess in the giving, so that less is left for himself, for not looking out for oneself is part of being generous.”

At the same time, Burglar comments:

“whether or not you are completely virtuous is not entirely up to your will. For example, a person who is wealthier than you will be able to exercise the virtue of generosity more than you. But it seems you can still be generous, though perhaps not as often since you must also be prudent.”

So an Aristotle-inspired consumer ethics seems then to have four considerations or aspects (if we take “giving” as also applying to “paying”):

1. Buy for the sake of the beautiful - This involves having a proper esteem for the object or service prior to purchasing it. This would forbid (generally) buying something shoddy, as well as a mindless materialism aimed vaguely at buying 'the next thing' or the newest gadgets, slavishly following the latest fashions. Questions to consider here would be focused mainly on the worth and nature of the object/service: is it well-made or well-designed, what kind of life does it encourage or discourage, what kind of virtuous action does it enable, is it aesthetically beautiful, etc.
   
2. Pay whom you ought - For consumer ethics, this seems to concern issues of justice and accountability, giving your money to the proper person. Forbidden here is paying Peter for something Paul owns, obviously. It arguably involves a concern that your payment benefit those most concerned with the creation of the beautiful object/service. Questions to consider here would focus around the seller: does this seller own the object and therefore have a right to my payment (or does someone else?), what part does this seller play in the creation of the object/service, does this seller take responsibility for the quality of this object/service, can I purchase from another seller who does, etc. Even more arguably this could involve a consideration of what the seller then does with your payment, and this is where the logic of boycotting may come in. Or perhaps Aristotle would pshaw at a boycott? Burglar???
   
3. Pay when you ought - This seems to me likely to involve issues of proper payment on the buyer's part. In other words, having acquired a good/service, it is vicious to avoid or delay paying unnecessarily or arbitrarily. Writing bad checks is an obvious (and illegal) example of violating this principle, but other areas to consider might be abusing lines of credit or delaying prompt payment of bills even within legal bounds (e.g. waiting until the last minute to pay that bill for no practical reason). More thorny issues might involve the use of financing (which does usually benefit the seller, but is arguably not a virtuous economic system - see Jubilee Papers Biblical prohibition of interest, and again here, or on limited liability and debt, and on Christian investing, which is a slightly different application but I think still relevant). Questions to consider (besides those of basic legality) would then be, can I pay promptly for this object/service, do I need this object/service enough to justify credit or fincancing, am I responsible about paying my bills on time, etc.
   
4. Pay as much as you ought (with self-forgetful excess where prudence allows) - I think this is likely the trickiest one, this balance of self-forgetful generousity and prudence. Perhaps it might involve choosing to live below your means in order to enable self-forgetful generousity within prudential bounds? For example, if we spend $15 less than we could every week on food, we can self-forgetfully throw a few excessive dinner parties a month! Does that count? This may also mean paying as much as I am willing (see below for more) for an object, rather than waiting for it to go on sale for less. I wonder too if this can line up with the To Whom aspect to prompt the question, am I paying as much as I ought to the producer of an object/service? By purchasing from another seller, can I pay more generously a producer of a beautiful object/service?
   

And with that in mind, let's go back to the original questions

• By spending only 85 bucks for years of aid in chopping and slicing by a well-made machine, do I dishonor the labor, both manual and intellectual, that went into its production?

It seems not necessarily, if my esteem for the object is proper and I am operating within the contraints of justice and accountability as well as within those that prudence places upon the impulse to excess within the virtue of generousity. However, in this particular case, I would have been willing (and able) to pay more without imprudent excess - 40 bucks ain’t gonna burst the budget - so was I indeed vicious after all? Should I not send in the mail-in rebate form for that extra $20 off?

• In demanding the lowest price possible, the "steal", the bargain basement blowout, am I buying virtuously?
• If I wait to buy an item until the retailer is desperate to dump extra merchandise, am I doing something akin to blackmail?

Again, it's the fourth consideration -- excess and prudence -- that is coming into play here, and it depends on my motivation for seeking lower prices, which itself depends upon circumstances somewhat outside of my control (my own wealth) or constrained by other choices for other aims. However, both of these are still problematic if I can afford the higher price and have high esteem for the item.

• Should I insist on paying at least the cost of production when searching for my bargains?

This question is really too simplistic, because it assumes I can know the cost of production for an item and doesn’t take into account well enough how production and distribution work. It needs to be better articulated. I think this is also where the Philosopher may not be able to help as significantly, because of differences between our global economic systems and his. Now obviously trade wasn't only local for Aristotle, but the global dimension of trade has increased dramatically in the last two centuries, as well as the industrialization of production, even of agricultural products. As a result of this globalization (which I'm not assuming is evil, by the way), the networks of production and distribution are much more complex. Most problematic for me is the alienation of the buyer from the producer of the good/service, which chips at accountability on both ends: the accountability to provide beautiful or worthy goods/services and the accountability to properly pay or even reward those who provide such goods. It's harder to disclaim accountability for sweatshops in a village economy, for example. There's no going back, of course, so the tough questions really are how to keep relational accountability between buyers and producers in a global economy, when there are multiple layers of sellers between me and the farmer in Brazil who cultivated the banana I had for lunch. When many of those sellers are essentially middlemen, who add little to no value to the object, do they really remove ethical accountability to producers from the buyers, or do they transform it? Key to this is the (I think) 20th century concern with process (both in art and in philosophy, at least) - is it ok to buy a beautiful object from a legal seller when part of the process of getting the item to me involved injustice or a culpable lack of generousity?

That's all for now...! Further insights on this matter are super-welcome. In the meantime, the snowfall outside has lessened so that I no longer fear to venture forth, so away to work I go.

Buying kitchen virtue?

Thanks to Kitchen Daily Deal and a mail-in rebate, I was able to purchase aforesaid virtue-enabling appliance (the 750 model) for a whopping $85! Not bad for an item that normally retails at about $250 and even Target sells for only $200.

Is it possible to buy virtue? I think we all must agree that it isn't, but I can certainly buy virtuously!

The real question is, is buying something so good for so much less than it is worth the act of a properly virtuous person? Here are other variations of the same question:

• By spending only 85 bucks for years of aid in chopping and slicing by a well-made machine, do I dishonor the labor, both manual and intellectual, that went into its production?
• In demanding the lowest price possible, the "steal", the bargain basement blowout, am I buying virtuously?
  
• If I wait to buy an item until the retailer is desperate to dump extra merchandise, am I doing something akin to blackmail?
  
• Should I insist on paying at least the cost of production when searching for my bargains?

I am not looking for a laissez-faire reply referring vaguely to market forces making any good-faith economic exchange ethically ok, but a more wide-ranging discussion of what it could mean in principle to purchase virtuously.

Is there such a field as consumer ethics?

On Table Manners and Worship, 1

Warning: the moralizations and gross speculations of a shade tree theologian follow (unfortunately we don’t get much sun in the UK, and thus we don’t get a whole lot tree shade either… what this means for what follows I’ll leave for the reader to figure out)

I want to suggest that table manners, can become genuine instances of and opportunities for Christian worship.

One argument that I’ve dreamed up roughly runs this way

1. Table manners are ascriptions to the worthiness of mankind (another way of saying this is that they are expressions of human dignity)

2. To ascribe worth to something is to say, in whatever measure, that it is beautiful or good or both.

3. Christians believe that beauty and goodness are qualities rooted in the character of God. They are not free-floating concepts with an existence all their own nor are they merely linguistic tags identifying human feelings about things. It is possible to speak of a thing’s beauty and be more or less right or wrong in saying so. ya ya… a controversial statement but read C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man.

4. Christians believe that God’s goodness and beauty are expressed in his creation. Beauty and goodness in creation are derivative of God’s beauty and goodness.

5. To express the worth of something (its beauty and/or goodness) in creation is to express appreciation of God’s worth – even if indirectly, or unintentionally – who has made it so.

6. Worship is essentially proclaiming the worth or worthiness of something. The word ‘worship’ is a shortened form of the word ‘worthship.’

THUS!> The practicing of table manners can be a means to worship God. HA!

I’ll try and unpack this a little more in my next installment.

Food for Thought: Some Thoughts about Food

On Monday, I overheard on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme a few startling words in relationship to small-holding farming in West Virginia: "more noble," "elegant," and "creation stewardship". (If you want a listen, there's a cordial debate between the farmer, Joel Salatin, and his ideological opposite, Dennis Avery, former agricultural analyst for the US State Department and small-holder himself.) So much of self-proclaimed evangelical Salatin's vocabulary regarding his farming enterprise seemed flavored by Aristotelian ethics, that we couldn't help but check him out further. "No Bar Code" is an article by Michael Pollan (very much in sympathy with Salatin), while "Dining Dilemmas" is a review of Pollan's book on Books and Culture. We're interested in trying to collect more informed points of view from the different sides as well, but we both are really struck by the notion of paying attention to a chicken's "chicken-ness" and crafting an ecosystem as well as an economic system that pays attention to the nature not only of animals and plants, but their human consumers. All very glowingly idealistic -- can it still feed the world? Avery doesn't think so (and for credible reasons), but Salatin is optimistic. Is there any way to balance these two together?

On a related front, here's a healthy reminder by my new favorite journalist Agnieszka Tennant not to get blindingly self-righteous about the relationship between our purchasing and our virtue!

The theme here - thinking about the relationships between what we eat, where it came from, how we purchase it and prepare it, and cultivating virtue and creative stewardship of the earth.