Ripped from the Headlines of Today:
Culled from the Archives of the Past:
Especially rich from farther down in the latter is this:
The State is preparing itself for long-term growth and short-term planning as it provides the incentives for local government involvement in both intergovernmental cooperation and business improvement.
That worked well. Tell me again why we should listen to these guys?
I’ll leave a formal review of Alister McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis to others . C. S. Lewis Studies has now become a Field, and not one in which I play. For those interested in the man and his work but who have not read any of the biographies before, it is very, very good. For those who have a working familiarity with his life and writing, it has the great merit of making one think afresh of the subject; can one ask more of a biography? So, in a disorganized way . . .
• To my eyes, CSL and his brother show some of the signs, the scar tissue, of a damaged, maybe dysfunctional family. Flora Lewis’s early death may be enough to account for this. Albert Lewis’s personality remains elusive. I’ve read the Green/Hooper, Sayre, Wilson, and now McGrath biographies. None quite explain the brothers alienation from their father. What happened? Family relations are unpredictable and irrational.
• Considering CSL’s career as a Christian writer, I wonder I the task of apologetics is best undertaken by new Christians, those who have worked through the obstructing clutter recently and are most acutely aware of the current cultural barriers. Just wonderng.
• CSL seems to have needed a -what? Not a muse, but an external stimulus- to write fiction. Tolkien and Lewis encouraged each other to write the sort of stories they liked-influence would be way too strong a word. Tolkien sort of midwifed Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, Charles Williams and Tolkien prompted That Hideous Strength, Roger Lancelyn Green seems to have played a similar role for the Narnia stories, and Joy Davidman Lewis for Till We Have Faces. CSL seems to have needed to discuss, try out, and just plain talk about his fiction with a friendly but briskly critical audience. Influence would be too strong a word for the roles they played: prompter, maybe.
• Is anyone ever going to get CSL and his relationship with women? McGrath, wisely, sort of pokes at it but doesn’t try to psychoanalyze the situation.
• In a discussion beginning on page 363, McGrath (echoing Chad Walsh) suggests that by 1965 CSL’s influence was waning. I’m not sure what he means by that. If, “influence among academics and professional theologians,” maybe. “Influence among general readers,” I doubt it. I first encountered CSL around 1964. By 1965 I was reading Miracles, and no doubt misunderstanding most of it. Lewis’s works were easily available in inexpensive Macmillan paperbacks through the 1960s and 1970s – I still have most of them, the one’s that haven’t fallen apart. Lewis was popular enough to keep Charles Williams’ novels in print, in a rather hideous format from Eerdmans. Dodging over to Amazon, I see that Eerdman’s still publishes these. You could even get Voyage to Arcturus, basically on Lewis’s say-so. At least in the sense that publishers kept Lewis in print because his books sold, and the books he liked sold too, his influence did not wane.
• I got a rueful laugh from McGrath’s description of the jealous American theologian, Norman Pittenger. McGrath (p. 241) :
One such broadside came from the pen of an obscure American Episcopalian theologian, Norman Pittinger (1905-1997). Irritated that Time had incomprehensibly overlooked his own vastly superior claims to be the nation’s top Christian apologist, Pittenger declared that Lewis was a theologically lightweight heretic – a total liability to the kind of intelligent Christianity that he himself so conspicuously represented.
“Obscure American Episcopalian Theologian.” Hah! An accurate description, but note his biography via Wikipedia:
Pittenger was born in Bogota, New Jersey and was raised in Princeton, New Jersey. He attended Princeton University for a short time, but left without graduating because he wanted to try a career as a newspaper reporter in New York City. Not able to find satisfaction he went to The General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. He started as a student and soon he became tutor, instructor, and finally professor of Christian Apologetics. Pittenger was one of the first process theologians without connections with the University of Chicago Divinity School and produced the first genuine process theological christology (The Word Incarnate – 1959). At General Seminary, he was priest and chaplain of the Guild of Scholars of The Episcopal Church. After his retirement in 1966 he moved to Cambridge as an Honorary Senior Member of King’s College. Next to his writing on explicitly Christian themes, he wrote on sexuality in general (Making Sexuality Human – 1970) and a Christian defense of homosexuality in particular (Time for Consent – 1970), a book that was so controversial when published that the Church Times refused to review it. He also admitted his own homosexual bias. Norman Pittenger wrote throughout his life ninety books and many articles.
The intellectual rot that has led TEC to Katie Ragsdale has been at work for a long, long time.
So read it. It offers something to any reader, and is available in lots of formats.
My unpredictable days sometimes – not often enough! – lead me to Northwestern’s main Library for a few hours of quiet time, to write sometimes, sometimes to read. I’ll praise the old library another time – it smells as a library should, and the old Reading Room, which now houses the Art Collection (and Art is a very broad topic. If I want to read about English Country House architecture, or about medieval armor, or 18th century English bone china, that’s the place to go) is a most gracious room. Any building that includes window art like this
is an entertaining place to pass some time.
In reasonably clement weather, the walk to the Library is pleasant, too. On a day last month, I went in search of a duck I had seen in the lagoon at the center of the landfill campus. It was before 9 AM, which is early for January, and the light was diffused by clouds, and the temperatures were slowly, reluctantly rising out of a deep chill. From behind me, to the north, I heard some yelling, and saw that Kelly Amonte Hiller was putting her lacrosse team though one of its early practices.
Scanning the lagoon for the flock, I saw that they had gathered near the warmer water around the heating plant intakes. The geese, though, were standing around on the ice, until they decide to launch somewhere:
I found the ducks on the southeast lobe of the lagoon, and there I found the very handsome fellow I had glimpsed a few weeks earlier:
So far as I can tell, Mr. Wood Duck here is alone, adopted by the mallards for the winter. It seems that woodies usually migrate farther south, but maybe it was drawn by the open water. The mallards don’t seem to mind. Does anyone know if mallards and woodies are cross-fertile? It will be interesting to track the ducklings come spring.
Northwestern’s decisive victory over Mississippi State yesterday left the eyes of Wildcat Nation damp. Infamously, it ended NU’s 64 year bowl victory drought, but that was maybe the least of it. For the football program, the game was the end of a two-decade road to recovery that began with Gary Barnett’s appointment as head coach. For some of us dodderers with long memories, it’s even more.
My time at Northwestern saw pretty good football – my class brought in some pretty good players, and the team went 13-8 over my last two years, pretty good for NU, and they came heart breakingly close to a Rose Bowl appearance in 1970, when the only conference loss was to Ohio State in the Horseshoe. I remember that a bunch of us were having an early dinner for some reason at The Key, and I was the only one with a radio and earphone. The mood got gloomier and gloomier . . .
But from the mid-1970s though mid 1980s, Northwestern went through a period of prolonged doldrums. Not only were the athletic programs miserable, but the campus itself became run down and grey, and University morale was lower than a skunk’s belly. When Arnold Weber became University President in 1985, he had more items on his punch list than the most disorganized home rehabber. He picked NU up by the scruff, shook it vigorously, and over the course of 10 years reversed the course of decline.
It took him a while to get to the athletic programs, but he finally took that aspect of University life over in 1992 when he hired Gary Barnett. It took Barnett a couple of years, but the Rose Bowl appearance in 1996 changed the face of NU football and cleared the way for his successor, Randy Walker, to build on a better foundation. The 20 years since have been marked by staggered progress, interrupted by the complicated effects of Rashidi Wheeler’s death in practice, and later by Walker’s sudden death. Since succeeding Walker as Head Coach, NU great Pat Fitzgerald has emphasized athleticism and character in recruiting, slowly building a faster and stronger team that began to bear fruit this year. Most prognosticating geniuses didn’t hope for much, this year; maybe a .500 team that would be lucky to get in to a Bowl game. Instead, the Cats were in every game they played, grew continually, and finished 10-3.
Yesterday’s victory was the culmination of a long process of restoration, the fruit of a lot of people who refused to believe that decline had to be permanent or inevitable, and who worked – and worked and worked – to prove it. In his postgame speech, Pat Fitzgerald paid tribute to everyone who has played NU football, and he was right. This was a community success, but also mostly the players who worked so hard this year. We’re all very happy for you.
The Church of England has defeated the measure to allow women to be bishops by a squeak. Interesting and inconclusive.
When I was a very young man, so long ago that women could not yet be delegates to the General Convention of The Episcopal Church, I was invited to attend a meeting of the Deanery in which I lived. I don’t know why; probably part of one of those condescending Outreaches to Youth that go on from time to time. I was still in college, so I still could count as Youth. Maybe a preliminary sizing up? Do we want to recruit this guy? Nothing came of it in that way, so if recruitment of any sort was a part of the scheme, I must have flunked some Unwritten Test. As I recall, I sat listening, said nothing.
The Hot Topics of the time were Changing the Prayer Book and Women’s Ordination. The Prayer Book was not discussed at all, but I heard a lot about WO, or, to be more precise, about Women. I heard several of the priests present discuss women in the most dismissive way possible. Caustic. Acid. Intense Dislike. Given that most of their parishes ran on the volunteered energy of women, I thought that odd. One of those present later wrote a “letter to the editor” of the diocesan magazine that stated that women could no more be made priests than Caligula’s horse could be made a senator (this argument is still made today, albeit usually with more subtlety). All this anger and dislike was bewildering to me then, as a young man who very definitely liked women, and not only in the obvious way that very young men do, but who liked women as friends, as fascinatingly different organisms.
None of the priests in the room were married.
Now, I dredge up this memory not to say that opponents to WO are all misogynist primitives. I know folks on both sides whose positions are principled and faithful. This vignette of time past is a just a personal example of how this issue can become entangled with other and less obvious matters. The pure issue, “Can a woman be a priest of the Christian Church?” is messy enough, requiring a lot of interesting and informative discussion about the ministry of the early Church, about the nature of our discipleship in general, and so on. Such a discussion should actually be fruitful for us, were it possible to be held without other agenda creeping in. But that is what does not happen. Inside the big portmanteau labeled “Women’s Ordination,” are packed a lot of other issues, from GLBT(etc) activism, secular politics, personal ambition, raging debate about the nature of ministry and of the sacraments. Anglican conservatives tend to regard WO as the camel’s nose, and with some reason – it’s been used that way. Except that what comes into the tent is not a camel, but some other beast entirely.
I’ve never been able to reach a conclusion on this question: most of the arguments on both sides presuppose their conclusions, which is not helpful to more detached folks. Happily, my indecision doesn’t matter. I do deeply suspect that the vitriol tossed by both sides is a matter of doing the Enemy’s work for him.
That’s the question of the moment for Chicago area gardeners. This warm winter past, a pedal-to-the-metal heat burst in March, and a cooler, dry April, has given us a long bloom time for spring bulbs and flowering trees. The blooming of my tree peonies is a reliable predictor of a savage thunderstorm, but this year they’ve been with us spectacularly for two weeks. In some – in too many – years, the daffs or tulip can get burned out by a hot day in May; this year, we’ve had at least 6 weeks of daffodils, a month of lilacs: my yard has smelled like a parfumerie – pleasantly so, not overwhelmingly. Well ahead of their usual time, lilies-of-the-valley are filling the scent spot vacated by the fading lilacs.
The roses and herbaceous peonies will be next. They are usually June guests, blooming intensely for a couple of weeks before retreating – the peonies for a year, the roses returning less abundantly every few weeks. Some roses are already in bloom – the climber Hansa is starting, and the heat we are getting today will pop more buds open. The rest are running easily three weeks early. Here’s the David Austin rose Geoff Hamilton, 
and a close up of a bud. That’s a clematis whose name I disremember blooming away in the background.
Geoff is a reliable and hardy rose, but it fades fast in bright sun. It’s best for a cutting rose, I think.
The mild weather didn’t please all my flowers. I had the idea of making a sort of oriental carpet effect in a small bed using coneflowers, a flower where a lot of spectacular hybrids have been bred recently. Only a couple survived.
My mid and late summer flowers are usually phlox and daylilies. The leaves of those plants are tall and robust. Who knows when they’ll bloom – 4 weeks? And then what? I’m planting zinnias, I think.
In parting, here’s an enormous peony bud.
