A little Monday afternoon aggregating

PRI's The World in Words podcast turned me on to The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. This blog proves the oft-cite rule that it's better to laugh in mockery than to weep tears of impotent rage as one's native language slowly slips away from one's desperate grasp. (Well, it's a rule I often cite, anyway.)

And over at the First Things website, Peter Leithart provides a lovely remembrance of Ray Bradbury's writing by way of a brief review of his classic Dandelion Wine.

Grown-ups prevail at the PCA General Assembly

Bob Godfrey still being Bob Godfrey, I imagine he's still telling seminarians in his Church history classes that Church officers should make a point of reviewing their confessional standards about once a year just so they can remember what they're supposed to believe. I've long thought that discipline might prevent the eagerness in some circles for presbyterian General Assemblies to issue statements on whatever the putative theological controversy of the hour might be. The Westminster Standards cover a great deal of doctrinal ground, and I (for one) think it unlikely a committee-penned statement on, say, justification will be any more clear than the Confession, Larger Catechism, and Shorter Catechism.

Thus, the cockles of my curmudgeonly heart (if, in fact, a curmudgeon can be said to have a heart) were warmed when the 40th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in American rejected an overture that it make an in thesi declaration against theistic evolution on the ground that Scripture and the Westminster Standards do so with sufficient clarity. This is important for two reasons: first, the Assembly has taken the very grown-up position that presbyterians need not restate what they've already stated, no matter how many people insist it is VERY IMPORTANT that they do so. Let the Baptists issue statements; we've subscribed to a confession.

The second reason has to do with that lovely latinate phrase, "an in thesi declaration," and what I believe to be the corrosive effect of these declarations. Such a declaration would state, in this case, that the Assembly believes a minister teaching theistic evolution would be in error. In practice, however, that declaration would do nothing, even if it were passed and a pastor began preaching that God ordained to evolve mankind from lesser organisms. Such a pastor would have to be dealt with through judicial proceedings, and in this case the prosecuting judicatory would have to prove our supposed pastor's views to be out of accord with the Bible and our confessional standards, notwithstanding the existence of an in thesi declaration. (The Orthodox Presbyterian Church has already had such a judical case concerning a ruling elder who taught theistic evolution, which is why the issue is already settled in our denomination.)

The practical impotence of in thesi declarations is why I think them corrosive to the Church's well-being. Church officers are free to agree or disagree with them with whatever degree of openness they prefer; disagreement brings with it no automatic sanctions. This creates the impression that the Church's highest judicatory has spoken in a final way on a matter, and can be freely ignored by any and all of the Church's members; this simply cannot be healthy for any ecclesiastical body. Far better, I think, to read our confessional standards and be content with the very grown-up statements they provide.

Betrayed by Geoffrey Nunberg?

In a May 30 piece on NPR's Fresh Air defending the AP stylebook's decision to begin permitting use of the adverb "hopefully," Geoffrey Nunberg gloriously demonstrated why he is my favorite linguist (don't you all have one?). Consider this wonderful bit of prose:

...the historian T. Harry Williams went so far as to pronounce it "the most horrible usage of our times" — a singular distinction in the age that gave us expressions like "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing," not to mention "I'm Ken and I'll be your waitperson for tonight."

At the same time, he clearly showed there's a world of difference between the linguist-as-antropologist and the style fetishist such as myself. He's right: there's no grammatical, or even stylistic, rule which could legitimately prohibit sticking "hopefully" at the front of a sentence; and for the record, I've never had a problem with that particular verbal tic, in and of itself.

What gives me the fantods is the phrase "I am/one is hopeful that...." Whenever someone utters that abomination instead of the simpler, clearer, and infinitely more vivid "I hope...," poor George Orwell, who told us good writing (not to mention good speaking) requires "using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning," rolls over in his grave. This is why "hopefully" should be avoided: it's like letting your 5-year-old pick up a cooked carrot from his dinner plate instead of using his fork. It's just one vegetable, but let it go and pretty soon he'll be pawing up mashed potatoes and shepherd's pie.

For too many, "hopefully" is the gateway drug to "I am hopeful that." AP stylebook or not, just say no.

"You are not special" commencement speech

A member of our congregation sent me this high school commencement speech delivered by David McCullough, Jr., himself a high school English teacher. Apparently, I'm coming to it relatively late in webernet terms; read the first two-thirds or so, and you'll understand why. His blunt announcement to the type of privileged high school student I came to resent not only because I taught under-privileged students in inner-city Houston, but because I was one of them, that they are not particularly unique or wonderful is a delight to the disgruntled heart of the curmudgeon in each one of us. What makes this speech great, however, is not its deliberately deflating opening, but its lovely turn towards an exhortation to live the one life we have.

In 1992, my fellow Teach for America corps members and I came early on into the program, long before it became a resumé-padder for the kind of kids graduating near the top of the class at Wellesley High School. For the most part, we joined up not because TFA was a stepping-stone to something else, but because we wanted to spend a couple years helping out under-privileged kids. It changed our lives, and McCullough offers all who hear or read his speech the opportunity to stop living their lives for a distant objective, but instead for the sake of living their lives.

And while we're at it, let's take a moment to remember that despite right-wing attempts to vilify school teachers for sucking up government funds and left-wing attempts to vilify teacher unions for blocking their typically utopian and block-headed visions for school reform, there's a countless number of them out there not only successfully communicating content, but inspiring and changing lives.

God bless the high school English teachers. They just may save the language yet.

The Avengers

I may not see The Avengers as frequently as does Dean (from Mark Tatulli's Heart of the City), but overall both Mrs. Curmudgeon and I were impressed. I bring up my better half because, sadly, she lacks my careful study of the art of sequential narrative, and so can bring a (perhaps healthier) outsider's perspective to this genre. I will say my worst fears about Captain America's uniform were realized: you just can't make wings on the side of one's head look anything other than silly in a live-action movie, no matter how well they complement a costume on the page of a comic book. But since that's about my only criticism, consider this an endorsement of the summer's biggest blockbuster.

And the new Batman film is just around the corner...

The man who discovered Mars

The first paper I wrote in college, so far as I can remember, was for my freshman English class on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. How can one describe Ray Bradbury, who died last week? I despair precisely because description, prose, was his great gift as a writer. When you read Bradbury, you feel the textures of cloth and you taste the smoothness of vanilla ice cream. Even as he aged and his stories descended into sentimentality and predictability, his powers of evocation remained as powerful as ever. This may be why he excelled in the short story form: with the exception of Fahrenheit 451, the novels for which he most celebrated are actually short story collections. The short story is the prose form closest to poetry, and Bradbury's prose was always something just barely short of poetic.

His great gift to his chosen genre of science fiction was never a revolutionary storyline or a new conception of the human relationship to technology. Instead, it was to put human beings into space and the future. For all their strengths as writers, Asimov and Heinlein's lead characters tended to be super-human: clever, morally upright, and generally infallible, even when making mistakes. Bradbury's astronauts and housewives, on the other hand, were always us: not stereotypically flawed, as is the all-too-common antihero of modern popular fiction, but limited, uncertain, and as bewildered by childhood and adulthood in Dandelion Wine as by alien landscapes in The Martian Chronicles.

In the 1980s, DC Comics launched what we today would call a "reboot" of the Martian Manhunter, whose home planet clearly owed a great debt to Bradbury's imagination. As was absolutely necessary, then, the comic was dedicated "To Ray Bradbury, the man who discovered Mars."

Inalienable

At the First Things website, James R. Rogers helpfully explains how it is you have "Rights You Can't Give Away," so memorably enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.

The central motivation (Proverbs 22:17-21)

Proverbs 22:17-21 introduces what most agree is the book's third major section. (The debates on division get interesting after that.) As Bruce Waltke observes in his NICOT commentary, the section is composed of two quatrains around a center line. The three sentences employ what he calls a main clause (MC) and subordinate clause (SC) pattern which is "stitched together" thusly (vol. 2, p. 221):

MC:SC//SC:MC//MC:SC

Neatly observed. However, those subordinate clauses give the motivations to heed the exhortations of the main clauses, which can also be patterned as a chiasm:

A: exhortation + motive (22:17-18)

  B: motive + exhortation (22:19)

A': exhortation + motive (22:20-21)

This suggests the central motive, trust in the Lord, is the most important one. Theologically, something of a given, but here also literarily.