Tag: Books

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Creating humanity in our own image

This week, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”. I was struck by one line in particular. It reminded me of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But Sartre’s version is framed existentially. He says (quoting from Macomber’s translation, p. 24), “…in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”

If I understand existentialism, it doesn’t offer forth a strict, structured ethical system by which all must abide. But there is an ethic based in our freedom as humans and our responsibility for our actions. Sartre says that once we’re “cast into this world” against our choice—because we have no choice when it comes to our being born—we are “responsible for everything” we do (p. 29). We can’t blame our actions on others. We do them. Presumably, we do them with a sense of justification. We do them thinking they’re right to do. Sartre is convinced that no one acts thinking that their action is evil. “We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” This isn’t quite Kantian. We’re not making a choice with the Categorical Imperative in mind, explicitly. But we may be abiding by it implicitly. Because we think that if we can do it, humans should be able to do it. And if humans should be able to do it, then in essence, our actions tell everyone around us, whether or not we place them within a concrete ethical framework, that this is what we think is good and right. And whether we would want others to do what we’ve done is secondary to the fact that once we’ve done it, we suggest that humans can and should be able to do it, and if humans can and should be able to do as we’ve done, then this is what we deem acceptable for humans, as a whole. Even if we’re narcissistic enough to say that we alone should be able to act in a certain way, the reality is that we’re a human among humans, so the louder claim of our actions is “this is how humans should act”. We wouldn’t act as we do if we didn’t believe this.

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A box of books, roomier shelves, and past selves

Yesterday, I filled a box halfway with books that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books this morning. Now, I’m a fan of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “antilibrary” where the unread books on our shelves remind us of all the knowledge that we don’t have and won’t acquire in this lifetime. If I could, I’d fill my house with books, read and unread. It would look like a library. It would elate and humble me. But I’m not the only person in my household who makes decisions about home decor, so there are limits to where books can be stored. This means that I needed to clear some space for the many new books that I’ve bought that have been stacking up on my desk—mostly philosophy books in preparation for a new class that I’m teaching next school year. Hence, the half-filled box that I’ll be taking to Half Price Books.

I chose mostly biblical studies and theology books. I didn’t touch my philosophy section. I didn’t touch my religious studies or American religion sections. I decided that only so many books on the Bible were needed, so that’s what I’m selling today. This decision reflects a change in my interest and even personhood over the past few years. I’ve struggled to teach students about the Bible in a way that confounds me. When I’ve taught courses on comparative religion, American religion, or even local religion (ala my summer offering “Religion in San Antonio”), it’s been easy to retain student interest and investment. And honestly, when I teach the Hebrew Bible, other than a lot of whining about “all the reading” (you signed up for a course on the Bible, kids!), it goes well. But every spring, the combination of the year drawing nearer and nearer to the end, along with self-understood “familiarity” (which is hardly any familiarity at all) that breeds contempt, and the fear of using critical thinking skills to evaluate something so sacrosanct as the Christian New Testament, I find myself struggling constantly with resistance to learning. Most of my educational training has been around the Bible, especially the New Testament. I’ve written ThM and doctoral theses on its content. I’ve presented papers at conferences about it. But nearly a decade of teaching it to adolescents has sucked the joy out of it. I enjoy teaching high school…just not the New Testament. And this has led me to lose interest in the very content matter that was at the heart of an undergraduate, two graduate, and one doctoral degree.

Is there another context where I could find myself enjoying the teaching and discussion of the Gospels or the Epistles of Paul again? Sure. I imagine an adult education class at a church, if I had the time or will power. But my experience in my context has so zapped me of interest in that material that I lobbied to reduce our two semesters of biblical studies to a single semester offering titled “Introduction to the Bible” which seems far more manageable for my students and me. I mean, to be fair, if students are going to learn about religion in high school—a privilege that many high school students don’t have or have only in contexts of indoctrination—I find it strange that they would spend all their time on the holy book(s) of Judaism and Christianity without even learning about Judaism and Christianity let alone all of the other religious traditions that are out there. Most of them aren’t going to seminary someday. If they stay Christian, as many of them are, they’ll hear the Bible through the comforting filter of sermons, which seems to be their preferred method of engagement anyway. (Sorry if this sounds bitter!)

This has led me to rethink other aspects of my personality and how I’m using my time. For example, do I want to remain a member of the Society of Biblical Literature? My son’s birthday will be every November, just a few days before Thanksgiving Break when the Society of Biblical Literature and American Academy of Religion meet. Do I want to spend my time at those conferences anymore? I’m not sure. I don’t want to hear papers on some micro-exegetical evaluation of a portion of the Gospel of Mark, that’s for sure. So, is membership and conference attendance a waste of precious time and money? It’s beginning to seem like it.

I’ve been through these transitions before. So far, they’ve always turned out well but they’ve left me with a pedigree that doesn’t match who I’ve become. Let me explain. In high school, no one considered me college material. At best, I would go to the local community college for some skills but I think that most presumed that I would enter the workforce when I graduated. The summer before my junior year, I became curious about the Pentecostal tradition that my mother was raising me in, and by default, I became curious about how to read the Bible “the right way”. The positive side to this is that I turned around as a student and graduated from high school, which was in doubt at times, and then went to a denominationally affiliated college because I thought I was going to become a minister in those Pentecostal circles. By my junior year, I knew this wasn’t going to be the case. I didn’t believe any of their core teachings anymore, so I bid my time until I graduated, looking for a new place to belong.

The negative side of this is that my undergraduate degree is from a truly terrible school. I will never step foot on that campus again. But my options weren’t Stanford or Cal Berkeley as I neared graduation. My options were workforce/community college or this denominational school and the denomination school did give me the skills needed to get into graduate school. So, I went to Western Seminary, which is loosely affiliated with Baptist churches but mostly brands itself as conservative, “big tent” Evangelical (compared with say the more “liberal” “big tent” of a Fuller Theological Seminary). I earned a MA and then a ThM (Master of Theology) from there. As I began my studies for my PhD, through the University of Bristol but facilitated by the Anglican school Trinity College Bristol, I began to experience a from of deja vu. Just as I had known that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in the Pentecostal circles that had raised and educated me, because I could no longer identify with them, so my time in Evangelicalism was drawing to an end.

The end of my doctoral studies were traumatic. As I neared the completion of my thesis (what they call a dissertation in the UK), a series of things went wrong and I began the job that I’m still working today, which was great because I had a teaching job, but made it extremely difficult to finish off my thesis. For this reason, my viva was a bloodbath. I had to spend the next several months making corrections to my thesis in order to graduate and in order to not fail my doctoral program. I pulled it off but something had changed forever. As much as I’ve tried over the years to regain some sense of myself as a biblical scholar, the confidence was gone. I hated my thesis, so I never could find the will to edit it further to try for publication. It sits as a PDF on my computer and as a lost book somewhere in the library of the University of Bristol. (By the way, the external evaluator who bludgeoned me to death during my viva: his books, which I’ve kept on my shelves all these years, are in the box that I’m taking to sell this morning!)

All of this has me thinking about one of my favorite concepts from Buddhism: anatman/anatta. It’s a complicated theory, but as Daniel Weltman summarizes it: “there is no persisting self—nothing about us that remains the same at all times.” (I recommend his explainer, “The Buddhist Theory of No-Self”, for those who want to know more.) While I don’t know that I’m on board fully with the idea of no-self or no consistent self, it makes a lot of sense experientially. Is the Brian LePort that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister the same as the Brian LePort who thought he was going to be an Evangelical biblical scholar who became a high school religious studies teacher in an Episcopal school? Yes but also in many ways, absolutely not. Those versions of me were necessary for the current version of me to exist, for sure. If I wasn’t under the delusion at age 18 that I was going to be a Pentecostal preacher, I wouldn’t have the job that I enjoy now at age 42. But also, the decision of the 18 year old to go to a school that trains ministers in a highly sectarian denomination forever limited to future options of the person that I’ve become and am becoming. It’s still on my CV and I’m sure that along with schooling from conservative Evangelicals, it’s caused people to write me off as a candidate for many jobs. I got extremely lucky that when I applied for my current job a decade ago, that chaplain who was heading the search has himself spent time in Pentecostal and Evangelical circles, so he was curious about me. I fear that a born-and-bred Episcopalian who’ve never given me a chance!

On the other hand, there seems to be hardly anything left of that kid that thought he was going to be a Pentecostal minister. If I could warp time and meet him, we’d likely agree that there’s no connection between the two of us. We’d have a hard time imagining that we’re the same person in any meaningful sense.

I’ve written mostly about the changes that came from transitions in and out of religious traditions and academic settings but there’s no doubt that other major events forever altered me into someone new, ranging from my marriage at age 27, to moving away from California and eventually living in Texas, to the birth of my son last November, to a major health scare that I experienced just this January. These types of events feel like when the butterfly comes out of the cocoon. There’s continuation but the discontinuation is what’s radical.

Am I a philosopher now? No. I’m self-trained. I’ll always have a more developed skill set for biblical studies than for philosophy but the biblical studies books are going to the store to make room for more philosophy because who I want to be now is someone who thinks philosophically. I’m not as invested in the project of creating human knowledge around/about the Bible as I used to be. It’s a noble endeavor, as all humanities work is, but it’s not my endeavor anymore. And while I’ll continue to teach a class on the Bible for the foreseeable future, it’s not my area of interest anymore, so I hope my philosophy class is a success! Who knows who I’ll be or how I’ll feel in a year from now. I’m sure there will be far more continuation than discontinuation. I’m a relatively stable and static person. But sometimes you need to make room for a new version of yourself by getting rid of that which is old. So, if anyone is looking for a good deal on some biblical studies books, go to Half Priced Books over off Bandera Road here in San Antonio. You’ll find some of my stuff there.

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A high-risk, high-reward society

A while back I was listening to The Herd featuring “American sports media personality” Colin Cowherd. Usually, he sticks to sports, providing his hot takes. But there was one day when he said something about American culture that struck me. I can’t remember the precise wording, or the context, but he praised the United States for being a place where if one “makes it” (in a capitalist sense), then one really makes it. We’re a high-risk, high-reward society. That means for the many who don’t make it, it’s natural to feel like a loser because our society exists as a competition that we welcome. America is held together in the same way that many professional sports organizations are: not so that all will succeed but so that the game itself can exist. Many poorer Americans perceive themselves as losers but rightfully so, admiring those who “succeed” (think of the adoration of Trump and Musk that we’ve seen from some circles), and sometimes hoping that they’ll get another shot to redeem themselves like we see in so many “rags-to-riches” Hollywood flicks. As many have said about Americans: we tend to think of ourselves as one big break from being millionaires when in reality most of us are one bad break from bankruptcy, especially if your health fails you. Most of us are far closer to being the person begging on the street corner than we are to being the next Jeff Bezos but our myths sustain us, so we ignore reality.

I think when many Americans despair the word “socialism” it’s because they agree with Cowherd: America’s greatness is—in the words of the Alicia Keys and Jay-Z song “Empire State of Mind”—the place where “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere“. Americans see themselves as playing on the biggest stage. Sure, the “World Happiness Report” ranked us 15th overall with nations like Finland, Denmark, and Iceland ranking at the top but I imagine it’s a small portion of Americans who would trade for the secure happiness provided by those countries’ social safety nets and the other perks that come with being a more collectivist society.

No Pleasure without Pain
In Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Joyous Science, Book 1, Section 12 (Hill translation), the philosopher provides a perspective that aligns with Cowherd’s and that of many Americans who see our country as “the greatest in the world” in spite of where we rank in measures like happiness, health, safety, etc. Nietzsche writes, “…suppose that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other (p. 45). In other words, to experience the highest highs, one must risk experiencing the lowest lows. When we think of celebrities in our country, they have fame like no humans before them but often their lives are very complicated: addictions, failed marriages, or in the case of our athletes, the physical toll.

Nietzsche understood Stoicism, which is having a revival in our time, as a philosophy that encouraged seeking “little pleasure” because this would lead to less pain. Likewise, he understood “socialists and party politicians” as opting for a life where risks are minimized in exchange for offering a lower ceiling of pleasure. He writes, “…should you want to mitigate and assuage human suffering…you must also moderate and diminish the human capacity for joy.”

Nietzsche v. Epictetus
This stands contrary to some of the Buddhist, Christian, and Stoic ideas that I’ve come to value, which emphasize human joy being found in minimizing suffering and being content with what one has. For example, this week I read Epictetus’ Encheiridion, and the emphasis from that ancient Roman philosopher (55-135 CE), who has once been a slave, is that true freedom is found in accepting what we might now call your “locus of control”. In Section 29, Epictetus tells his students that if they want to pursue the type of greatness that comes with say being an Olympian, then they should be aware of the cost. He doesn’t say that one shouldn’t pursue such goals; neither does he lionize doing so. Instead, one must be prepared to “exchange it for calm, freedom, and tranquility” (the “it” being the potential glories of achieving lofty goals). There’s something perplexing about human nature, especially as filtered through “the American Dream”: we know the path to peace but it bores us. Meaningfulness matters more than happiness. The philosophy of many Americans seems to be that they’d rather live somewhere where they can dream of greatness than somewhere they can be secure and at peace.

Are Ashramas the Answer?
I find that as I’ve aged, I’m attracted to Buddhist and Stoic ideas but I recognize that when I was younger, I would’ve aligned more with Nietzsche’s perspective. (I’ve found Christianity to be easily molded to fit both perspectives, depending on the emphasis place on different parts of that tradition.) There was a stage in my life where I was obsessed with completing a Ph.D. Once that stage was over, I lost my taste for living in a state of constant ambition. I think I was burned out. I wanted to take life much slower, catch my breath. It seemed like one stage of life required certain things to be satisfied while the next stage has required other things.

In Indian philosophy, there’s the concept of “ashramas” or life-stages. One begins with a preparatory stage where they develop discipline and become educated (“Brahmacharya”); then move to the family and wealth building stage (“Grihastha”); then they transition more toward voluntary service and spirituality (“Vanaprashta”); finally one ends with a preparation for death and hopefully deliverance from the cycle of rebirth (moksha from samsara) during the last stage of life (“Sannyasa”). Maybe this is a middle way? Maybe we need our days seeking glory and our days seeking respite and calm?

Now Cowherd, Trump, Musk, Keys, and Jay-Z aren’t examples of this path. They seem to be pursuing Grihastha to the day they die. But ashramas might serve as a way to reconcile some of the truths that seem to resonate in the contradictory words of Nietzsche and Epictetus, acknowledging, of course, that this presentation is structured upon a metaphysics that many outside of India don’t embrace. Maybe Nietzsche is right for young people: take those risks; pursue great pleasure. Maybe Epictetus, the Buddha, Jesus, and others are better voices for when one comes to realize that all that glitters is not gold, and that once one achieves, the satisfaction fades quickly. In the later, wiser years—for those who find it—peace, calm, freedom, tranquility, etc., should be the goal. It could be argued that one can’t really value the reward of a peaceful, calm, free, tranquil life without having first tried to find satisfaction in the pursuit of greatness. Personally, I needed to see if I had the ability to earn a doctorate. Others have an itch to start a business, earn a million dollars, travel around the world, etc. Sometimes we achieve what we want and it’s a Pyrrhic victory. We’re left wondering if all the effort was worth it. But the fact of the matter is that for many people, they’d be left with the same cloud hanging over them if they never tried to “reach their full potential”. I don’t know what this says about people in the late stages of life who need more money, more property, more power, more, more, more. My suggestion here doesn’t reflect well on them but hey, maybe Nietzsche’s right and our one short life is best lived with our foot on the pedal and the pedal to the metal until the day we close our eyes for the last time.

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“I, too, seek an unreadable book”

The philosopher Robert Nozick begins his book Philosophical Explanations with this wonderful line (p. 1): “I, too, seek an unreadable book: urgent thoughts to grapple with in agitation and excitement, revelations to be transformed by or to transform, a book incapable of being read straight through, a book, even, to bring reading to a stop.” There’s something about this statement that resonates with me as I think on the books that I’ve read. Now, if I happen to finish a book by reading it straight through for a day, or a few days, or a week, while this is rare, I don’t think it says anything negative about the book. In fact, often I would consider this to be a sign that it was a good book. If I begin a book and it finds its way to my bookshelf, it would seem to follow that it was a bad book. But is this the case? Are good books easy to finish and bad ones difficult?

I don’t know why I’ve never thought about this before but when I stop and reflect, I think some of the best books I’ve read are those that I had to stop, though not permanently. I had to stop for a time. On my shelves sit books like John Rawls A Theory of Justice or Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics. These books are partially read but I stopped with the intent of reengaging later. Why? Because I had to stop. I had to reflect. I had to read other authors on similar topics to help me move forward. I needed to consult the history of some idea or the history of some debate in order to have a great context for what I was reading. I was forced into a hermeneutical spiral of sorts.

I learned from Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book that it’s my responsibility to find out whether a book is worth my time and attention. Not all books need to be finished. I think this is why I sometimes look at unfinished books in a negative light. But the “unreadable” book that makes you stop, walk away, and think, may be more valuable in the long haul than the book through which you can breeze quickly! This reframes many of the books on my shelves that are waiting for the day that I reunite with them. They’re good books; they’re just not books for which I was ready when we first met.

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Reading without comprehending

I’ve been reading Scott Soames’ The World Philosophy Made: From Plato to the Digital Age. As I near the end of chapter 6, I can say that it’s a great book so far and I imagine it will be through to the end. Its main thesis is that in spite of comments to the contrary (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and parents of most philosophy majors), philosophy can be credited with shaping the world we have for the better and with continuing to do so. Soames shows his readers how philosophers have helped birth many other disciplines, including the sciences as we know them, but how it also continues to speak to our politics, our concepts of language, rational choice, mind-body relations, and much more.

There are two chapters that I’m confident are good ones but also that I found humbling: Chapter 5, “Modern Logic and Foundations of Mathematics” and Chapter 6, “Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age”. Admittedly, much of chapter 6 left me lost, not because of anything Soames did wrong in writing it, but because I struggle with these concepts. I’ve struggled with mathematics since high school. As soon as they introduced “x” and “y” in the equations, my brain became allergic. There’s a reason why my primary philosophy/theological/historical interests have to do with things more social-science-y!

Gottlob Frege receives a lot of attention in both chapters; Kurt Gödel receives a lot of attention in chapter 6. These men seem brilliant. I understand the gist: their work in logic, and the logic of mathematics, laid the foundations for computability. The modern digital world owes them a ton. But the details escape me as Soames mentions this formula and that formula. My poor “it took me two attempts to pass Algebra I” brain tries to comprehend what I’m reading but I must admit, I’m lost most of the time.

This humbling experience has a dual silver lining though: (1) it reminds me to be patient with my students who try and fail to understand the material in which I have expertise; (2) it functions sort of like Umberto Eco’s “Antilibrary” reminding me that there’s still so much about our world that I have to discover and better understand. Let me say a little about each point.

Regarding (1), I’ve been reading the Bible since I was young. I’ve been around religion for the same amount of time. My undergraduate, two graduate, and doctoral degrees all focused on religion and theology. I’ve been teaching on these subjects for over a decade, including eight full years in a high school setting. (I began my ninth year this week). It’s the water I swim in daily. And it’s easy to see a student flailing and think, “Why is this concept so hard to understand? It’s simple, really!” But is it simple, really, or is it really simple for me? I have students in my class who can go to another classroom and take a physics or calculus exam who would do way better than me if I were put in the same situation. It’s not that they’re not smart enough; it’s that they lack familiarity. I need to be patient and provide them with the tools to make my discipline more familiar to them.

Regarding (2), I won’t say much because Maria Popova at The Marginalia has an excellent post on this topic that’s worth your time: “Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones”. But in short, the intellectual Umberto Eco argues that it’s actually good to have a library with books you haven’t read/won’t read. Those books sit there reminding you, “you don’t know everything; you have so much—so much!— to learn”. The aforementioned chapters are having a similar effect on me.

As I flip ahead to Chapter 7, “The Science of Language,” in Soames book, I feel like I’m on more secure ground already. I’ve thought about some of this. I can follow the argument. There are less formulae! But I’m glad I struggled through chapter 6 and that I’m doing my best to walk in complete darkness through the end of chapter 7. Maybe someday I’ll be able to understand this stuff but it’s the discipline of trying to learn, reading even when I need help comprehending, that eventually strengthens the mind to understand. But not to understand everything, and that’s ok.

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Reading as an act of listening

Last year, a colleague of mine said something to the extent that he doesn’t enjoy reading non-fiction books from cover-to-cover anymore. Or, he may have been describing a life-stage. In his opinion, you can get the gist of a book by reading the beginning and ending. This is sort of true. I remember reading Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a Book a while ago and if my memory is correct, he advocates that you do something just like this to determine if a book is worth your time. While this is a different goal than that of my colleague, the idea is similar: you can get what you need from a book, quickly, if you know where to look.

Other than a chapter here, an article there, and my doctoral thesis, I haven’t been a long-form writer. Most people in academic circles know me because I used to have a relatively successful “biblioblog” (i.e. a blog on the Bible). When blogging became popular, I know many senior scholars disdained the medium because of the brevity and the lack of gatekeeping. I’ve come to see their point to some extent. Many of my students “do their research” online and anyone can post anything online. There’s a place for editors and publishers. In our effort to democratize knowledge, we’ve flooding the Internet with information and we haven’t provided people with the tools that help them discern good information from bad information. For this reason, I prefer reading books from reputable publishers, even if I’m not someone who has produced much writing this way.

I may sound hypocritical but I think reading books, specifically, still matters, for a variety of reasons. I want to highlight one here. In an era where we’ve stopped listening to each other, instead preparing to respond, books force us to listen. On Twitter/X, Facebook, “older” media like blogs and news website comments sections, and newer media like TikTok, speech is brief. We don’t have to listen for very long. We can respond quickly. In fact, we can respond without reading.

Not so with books. When I read a book, I can stop before I finish. I can write notes in the margins. But I can’t truly “respond” quickly. This doesn’t mean that someone can’t hastily misread a book, as many a book review evidences. It does mean that it’s very difficult to do anything with a book other than listen to an author’s long-form argument. In our era of debate-style cable news, mob-mentality tweeting, etc., books force us to really consider what someone else is saying. This is a virtue in and of itself in our time.

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Philosophical Parenting: Mara van der Lugt’s “Begetting”

In early April, my wife and I received confirmation: we’re going to become parents in November! I’m thrilled, nervous, excited, scared…all of those seemingly oppositional but actually related emotions. I’ve begun to prepare for fatherhood the same way I prepare for most everything: by funding Jeff Bezos’ space program, a.k.a buying too many books on Amazon. I know that reading about parenting won’t make me a good parent but I believe that thoughtful parenting is better than thoughtless parenting, so I’m trying to be thoughtful by reading!

The second book I’ve read in preparation is Mara van der Lugt’s Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?—the first book was read a while back when I completed Jennifer Banks’ Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, which I may discuss at a later date. Begetting is an uncomfortable book to read, at times. Van der Lugt discusses the arguments of anti-natalist philosophers, questioning whether bringing a child into the world is an act (or potential act) of harm, especially in light of the uncertainty that accompanies every birth. Every child who comes into this world risks a life of pain and suffering. Our world is full of potential harms. If we don’t have children, that “non-existent being” (if such language makes any sense) isn’t harmed by not existing but existence brings with it the potential of great harm. Related, Van der Lugt asks whether it’s ethical to beget when the child being born can’t consent to existing. In the background, haunting the entire discussion, is climate change. Van Der Lugt challenges potential parents to consider what it means to bring children into a world that could be devastated ecologically but also to consider potentially affluent parents whose children could contribute to our unsustainable consumer practices in a way that could contribute to this potential, impending disaster.

In Part III of the book (“Narratives”), Van der Lugt asks us to critically evaluate our culture’s narratives around reproduction such as doing it because of a personal desire, or the feeling that our “biological clock” is ticking, or that we can’t mature morally without becoming parents, etc. Her main target, at least as I read the book, is the “Entitlement Narrative” where becoming a parent is framed in “wanting and getting and having” language as states in this quote from p. 145:

Begetting: it should be seen as an act of creation, a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible. Something that should fill us with awe and trepidation, with infinite caution and an awareness of the immeasurable fragility of life, It is not a language of wanting and getting and having that is needed here—but a language of carrying the finest glass of iron firsts, of fragility as we’ll as responsibility. Not to think that our children owe anything to use, but that we must be prepared, at any point, to be held accountable for their creation.

Van der Lugt works through the reasons given for having children, acknowledging their strengths and exposing their weaknesses; reasons ranging from the need to pass along our genes to the love we have for our partner and/or our potential children. Then she revisits these reasons, helping the reader ask better questions and provide better answers. One of the things I appreciate most about the book is she isn’t pro-natalist or anti-natalist. She’s a philosophical tour guide. For potential parents who want to think deeply about the decision to have children, this is an honest, unflinching book.

When our child is born, I’ll be 42 years old. I say this to point out that even though I didn’t read this book until after my wife became pregnant, I felt more like a concrete exploration of things I’ve considered for many years. We waited to become parents. I’ve had anti-natalist impulses at points; I continue to worry about climate change. The choice to become parents was done “in fear and trembling”. But this book, in spite of the fact that it wouldn’t surprise me if someone read it and then decided not to become parents, made me more secure in my choice, primarily because of some of the things Van der Lugt writes in Chapter 28, “Givenness”. Let me share three key quote that resonated with me and my own philosophy of begetting (from pp. 209 and 2011):

The language is all wrong. We need to get rid—in thought and words—of this idea of entitlement. We need to find a different way to talk about begetting. Something that removes us from the vocabulary of wanting, having, getting, being entitled to, and moves us closer to a concept of fragility and accountability: of bring entrusted with, being responsible for.

What conditions are required in order to bring a new being into the world? Is creation always justified? What are our own responsibilities here, and are we fulfilling them? In deciding to beget a child, surely our first concern should be the good of that future child—before society’s interests, before our partner’s interests, before even our own.

But thinking about begetting in this way need not lead to the decision not to beget at all: it may instead lead to a different conception of parenthood, one that is grounded not in entitlement, but in a sense of utmost responsibility—of being entrusted with something both precious and precarious.

This is the conclusion I reached about a year ago: if I have a child, I owe them everything. They didn’t choose to exist. My wife and I made the choice for them. I’m responsible to do everything possible to help them be healthy, happy, successful, fulfilled, etc. This doesn’t mean raising a spoiled, undisciplined child. Not at all. But it does mean giving my all and recognizing the great weight of responsibility that I’ve accepted. If someone is considering begetting but they don’t feel this great weight, then this book is definitely a required read because begetting is serious.

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Book Note: Bryan Van Norden’s “Taking Back Philosophy”

Bryan Van Norden, Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto (New York: CUP, 2017) (Amazon; Bookshop)

While this book wasn’t completely what I expected it was excellent nonetheless and I think I prefer what it is in actuality to what I imagined it would be. When I bought it, I was under the impression that the entire book would be a defense of the basic thesis: a thesis Bryan Van Norden and Jay Garfield put forth first in a May 11th, 2016 entry to “The Stone column of the New York Times blog” titled “If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is” (p. xxiii). Van Norden and Garfield argued that philosophy departments should “rename themselves ‘departments of Anglo-European philosophy'” if they weren’t willing to expand their departments to include the study of philosophy from non-“western” perspectives (p. xxiii). As you can imagine, this provocative claim provoked many responses and those responses led to Van Norden writing Taking Back Philosophy.

The first couple chapters of the book are what I expected and I found them entirely convincing. In chapter 1, “A Manifesto for Multicultural Philosophy” he “names names” and “brings the receipts” as the kids say, showing how the assumption that philosophy is only a “western” thing is ethnocentric and structurally racist, even when unintended. He makes the case that if philosophy is to survive and not kill itself off, it needs to adapt to and embrace a diversifying and pluralistic world. But this isn’t just an attempt to be PC or cosmopolitan: it’s because Van Norden is right in that Indian and Chinese thought, to name two branches, are deeply philosophical! For example, I’ve been (slowly) reading Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and as I encounter his monism I keep thinking, “Didn’t India reach these conclusions centuries, millennia prior to Spinoza?!” Now, they framed it differently but that doesn’t make it less philosophical.

Now, I’m prone to agree with Van Norden. As far back as the early 2010’s when I read Yoram Hazony’s The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, I’ve been convinced that Jewish and Christian sacred texts can be read as rational, philosophical works just as easily as the Pre-Socratics or Plato. I teach them with an eye to their philosophical claims. For example, in past versions of my class “The Hebrew Scriptures” (when I covered a lot more ground pre-pandemic), I would juxtapose the political philosophy and ethical paradigms of the Book of Daniel over against the Book of Esther. I’m supervising independent research by a student right now who is investigating these matters and soon we’ll discuss topics like trauma in the Book of Lamentations and theodicy in the Book of Job. (For a great discussion on how this can work, listen to Dru Johnson’s interview with Van Norden on Johnson’s podcast.)

Chapter 2, “Traditions in Dialogue” was another chapter I expected. In this part of the book, Van Norden does what I imagined he’d do throughout: he juxtaposes Chinese philosophy (his expertise) with “western” counterparts (e.g. the metaphysics of Descartes and Nāgasena; the political philosophy of Hobbes and Kongzi and Mengzi). Anyone with an open mind should recognize not only that China has had philosophy (unless we assume some oddly misplaced concreteness that claims “philosophy” because of its etymological roots in Greek must be “European” or “western” only) but that Chinese philosophy stands its ground quite well!

Chapter 3, “Trump’s Philosophers” looks at the move by personalities like Donald J. Trump and Xi Jinping to build “walls” (metaphorical and literal) that divide. In a sense, this chapter serves as a mirror for those who want to keep philosophy ethnocentric and “western”. Van Norten doesn’t fall into the trap of denegrating “western” philosophy, culture, and traditions but instead advocates something like a “more is more” approach: let’s celebrate the thought that has come from places like Germany, France, England, and the United States but in doing so let’s not close ourselves off to what we can learn from China, India, Japan or from broader groupings like African and Indigenous forms of philosophy.

In chapter 4, “Welders and Philosophers,” Van Norten challenges people like Marco Rubio who use rhetoric that (being generous here) may intend to dignify the working class (“We need more welders and less philosophers.”) at the expense of the academic “elites” but instead is disparaging toward both the welder who could and should want to read philosophy, the philosophy major who can actually do quite well for themselves with their humanities degree, and all citizens of a democracy who have the right to be informed and develop their thinking as members of society. This chapter defends the value of the humanities and the usefulness of a college education. My only complaint is that while showing how an undergraduate degree can raise someone’s earning power, Van Norten doesn’t deal with higher ed’s cost inflation that essentially saddles college graduates with a “tax” (student loan repayment) for getting that education.

Finally, in chapter 5, “The Way of Confucius and Socrates,” Van Norten reminds us of why philosophy is valuable, for everyone. His definition of philosophy is similar to the one I’ve shared with my students and members of our school’s “Philosophy Club” (p. 151): “philosophy is a dialogue about problems that we agree are important, but don’t agree about the method of solving, where ‘importance’ ultimately gets its sense from the question of the way one should live.” The target isn’t just Rubio or others like Ted Cruz, who while allowing themselves to receive a liberal arts education speak to others as if its a waste of their time, but also to members of the cult of scientism, like Neil deGrasse Tyson or the late Stephen Hawking, who think that philosophy is outdated just because certain branches of the sciences have developed a method that helps them solve or begin to solve important questions. Van Norten reminds readers that prior to a field’s emergence, it must be created by philosophy. Once a field has a generally shared methodology, it “grows up” and can go out on its own as “astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics,” to name a few examples (p. 143). Hawking and deGrasse Tyson wouldn’t have their fields of study if it weren’t for the “natural philosophers” who preceded them!

The broader defense of philosophy wasn’t what I expected when I bought to book but it didn’t detract from the book at all. It made it better. It reminded philosophers that what they’re doing is important but that it philosophy can be improved by expanding the conversation to include the many voices that are often ignored.

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Book Note: Danté Stewart’s “Shoutin’ in the Fire”

Danté Stewart, Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle (New York: Convergent, 2021). (Amazon; Bookshop)

Danté Stewart’s Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle is a beautiful and troubling book. It’s beautiful because it’s a testimony to Black-strength, Black-resilience, and Black-pride. It’s troubling because I’m a white reader who was confronted with the meaning of whiteness. But the synthesis of this beauty and this trouble is that it’s essential if you want to hear a contemporary voice speak aloud about what it means to be Black and Christian and American (p. 6).

The title comes from the story in the Book of Daniel where the three Hebrews are thrown in the fiery furnace by the order of the King of Babylon. The title is unpacked through chapter-after-chapter of testimony as to how the Black Church is a witness to this spirit—the spirit of fidelity in the midst of a life-and-death trial. This book is written with the recent murders of Black Americans from Treyvon Martin to George Floyd being always present but also with white silence, especially white, Christian American silence, blaring in our ears.

I was raised as a Oneness Pentecostal who left that tradition for the broader, more mainstream white Evangelical Church. Stewart was raised as an Apostolic Pentecostal who left his tradition for the broader, more mainstream white Evangelical Church. Eventually, Stewart leaves white Evangelicalism and in the process is able to rediscover some of the life-giving treasures of his Apostolic Pentecostal roots. I have left Evangelicalism as well but I couldn’t look back to my Oneness Pentecostal roots with the same fondness. It was easy for me to see that the major difference is that Stewart’s Apostolic Pentecostal community was held together by more than its doctrine but also by the shared experience of being Black Americans, a shared experience I didn’t have with my fellow white Oneness Pentecostals. In other words, my white Oneness Pentecostalism didn’t contribute to my struggle for freedom or the for the recognition of my humanity like Stewart’s Apostolic Pentecostalism did for him. As I read, I could see that Stewart had experienced something in his formative years that I couldn’t and that while our Christianities shared creedal similarities, that’s where the parallels mostly end (though running, shouting, tongue-taking, etc., are shared experiences).

White Evangelicalism didn’t try to rip my identity from me. But white Evangelicalism did try to rip Stewart’s identity from him. And his departure from white Evangelicalism was when he realized he had a role to play in the struggle for Black-liberation in this country. That’s when he was empowered to read Martin Luther King Jr., James Cone, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, et al. And that’s when Stewart was given words that informed his voice as a writer. When you read this book, you’ll be glad that Stewart found his way out of white Evangelicalism because we need his voice: it’s prophetic, it’s poetic, it’s powerful.

The two chapters that will live in my brain forever are “Rage.” and “Back Roads.” It’s in “Rage.” that Stewart explains how he recognized the power and life-giving strength of Black-rage against white supremacy and its impact. But this is also the chapter where he talks about his journies in white Evangelicalism, how he wanted to be accepted in those circles, how he found himself being numbed to the Black experience in this country, and how he escaped.

Stewart writes of how he initially responded to a question asked across social media, “What radicalized you?” with the tweet “JESUS & JAMES BALDWIN” but how he then came to realized that as important as Jesus and James Baldwin were to him, “It wasn’t Jesus or James Baldwin who radicalized me. It was white people. Apathetic white people.” (pp. 78-79) Stewart tells stories about how his Evangelical Church tried the whole “racial reconciliation” approach, which for those in the know, is often code in many Evangelical Churches for “Black Christians are welcome to join our white Church and embrace our traditions, music, hermeneutics, etc., as long as you don’t make us feel bad about the state of race relations in this country”. But as Black people were murdered by the police, Stewart realized he was not in a place that seemed to care. Their approach to racial reconciliation was to do a small group study around a book written by John Piper (p. 80). Yes, John Piper.

As I read this, I remembered my time in white Evangelicalism. While my experience was nothing like Stewart’s because I’m white, I can say that his criticism of white Evangelicalism’s approach to racial reconciliation is every bit as problematic as that chapter describes, and their sense that their theology is normalized “theology,” traditional “theology,” even orthodox “theology,” rather than a specifically situated expression of white theology is what makes it all so very troubling.

It was “Back Roads.” that made me stop several times to digest Stewart’s words. I want to share three extended quotes from that chapter, then I’ll shut up, step aside, and encourage you to buy and read this book:

“Any conception of God, Baldwin wrote, must deal honestly with the ways Black people are unloved in American society and in the American church and give us all something that helps us to work for a world in which all bodies experience what God desires.”

Shoutin’ in the Fire, p. 111

This reminds me of the words spoken by Irving Greenberg, who wrote in Cloud of Smoke; Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity After the Holocaust (p. 506), that, “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” Likewise, no Christian theology can be done in America that isn’t credible in the presence of Black Americans who have seen white American Christians hide behind their theology while continuing their acts of oppression. (As James Cone taught us as Adam Clark recently reminded us.)

“If the white folk I worshipped and went to school with and had dinner with had the imagination to see C.S. Lewis’ Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as Jesus, then I knew there should have been no problem when Black folk said Jesus was Black and Jesus loved Black people and Jesus wanted to see Black people free. Just as they found meaning in the symbol of Aslan’s representation of love, I found meaning in the symbol of Jesus’ solidarity with Blackness. But, sadly, I found out that many could see the symbol of divine goodness and love in an animal before they could ever see the symbol of divine goodness and love in Blackness.

Shoutin’ in the Fire, p. 115

These words remind me of the embarrassing and shameful response I heard from many white Americans to the statement, “Black Lives Matter”. Many of the same people who could listen to the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…those who mourn…the meek…those who hunger and thirst after righteousness…the merciful…the pure in heart…the peacemakers…those persecuted,” and recognize that Jesus was being derogatory toward the rest of humanity but instead was highlighting the special value of those often overlooked and trampled on by society, somehow couldn’t stand the idea that Black Americans were saying, like Jesus, “In a country that says we don’t matter, we declare we matter.” Instead, many white Americans just reinforced the point by trying to silence Black voices.

“I saw why they insisted on saying Jesus was Black. Of course they were not talking about his skin color, though he definitely wasn’t white; they were talking about his experience, about his solidarity with the oppressed, about his universal love, about his commitment to God’s just future, about his healing of wounds, and his good news that Black life does not end in this moment but will forever be beautiful, worthy, and loved. They knew Jesus knew what it meant to live in an occupied territory, knew what it meant to be from an oppressed people, and in a place that does not care about your religion—at least not the way they practice it—but does care to remind you of its idea about your place in society. The threat you pose to their lies. They knew Jesus knew what it was like for people who looked like him to care more about being in proximity to power, and he knew that those in power did not care about people that looked like him.”

Shoutin’ in the Fire, p. 117

When I first read James Cone critique of whiteness, I was taken back; I was upset. I didn’t get it. I thought he was talking about me, the individual. This meant I needed to hear what he was saying because I was identifying with whiteness—not pigmentation but the cultural perks and privileges that come with being recognized as “white” in America. If I wanted to follow in the ways of Jesus, I’d have to abandon my pride in my privilege, in my whiteness, like the “rich young ruler” was asked to abandon his pride in his privilege, in his wealth. When I read the last quote from Stewart, I was reminded of this ongoing challenge for white Christians like myself that want to do better. We must recognize that if we’re going to learn to be Christians, we must learn from the people with whom Jesus would surround himself, with whom he’d identify, with whom he’d be in solidarity.

Go read Shoutin’ in the Fire.

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Notes on some recently read books

The school year has begun, so of course this blog has gone dormant. Sorry!

I do want to mention/recommend a few books I read as summer break was ending:

Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
(Amazon; Bookshop)

I’m sure there are a million reviews of this book available already, so all I’m going to say is this: as a high school teacher who has a front row seat to the Hunger Games that is college admissions, I wish each of my students and their families would read this book. Sandel exposes the flaws of the meritocratic worldview: not only that it’s not real (the hardest workers don’t receive the best rewards) but also that it harms even the “winners”.

Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Amazon; Bookshop)

Storm is brave. He attempts to do something constructive in an era that is dominated by deconstruction. The main focus of the book is this (to oversimplify): how does the humanities move past postmodernism without denying postmodernity’s critiques and returning to modernistic thinking. This book could be a game changer when it comes to epistemology and it offers a new constructive approach to several topics that are desperately needed in the humanities since we’ve poisoned ourselves for a generation by telling everyone why our fields of study are flawed and not really real. For example, modernity sought a concrete definition of religion. Postmodernity helped us realize this is quixotic and that there’s no “form” of religion (to draw Plato and then Wittgenstein into the discussion). But something important still needs to be said about things like “religion,” even if it lacks concreteness. Storm offers a way forward.

Christine M. Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to Other Animals (Amazon; Bookshop)

On Ash Sunday 2020, I became a vegetarian. I’ve been looking for a philosopher to give me words to help me think about this change because it’s not dietary as much as ethical as relates to how we treat animals and the environmental impact of animal consumption. Korsgaard’s attempt to ground animal ethics in a Kantian framework has a lot to offer. Her writing has begun to reshape my understanding of “the good,” how humans relate to other animals in our differences and similarities to other creatures; and why we humans shouldn’t think of ourselves as superior to other creatures. Yet, Korsgaard notes that what makes us different also makes us responsible and while she concludes things like vegetarianism is ethically ideal and that factory farming is deeply immoral, so also draws the readers into ongoing conversations about topics like breeding animals away from being predatory; whether we should have pets; whether we should leave all animals to be wild, among other topics. It’s the type of book I plan on reading again in the future.