Good tidings and happy new year. Let’s meet for coffee this Friday, January 5, to kick off 2024. Usual time and place.
(1) Extolling failure: At Time, philosophy prof Costica Bradatan mulls the oddity of making and breaking new year’s resolutions, and then boasting of our failures. This tendency runs counter to “the strong Calvinist ethos that played such an important role in the birth of modern capitalism”:
Very much like the early Calvinists, we associate financial prosperity and social success with a sense of personal salvation. To make money, and to show it, is a sign of “election”—divine in Calvin’s case, social in ours. Reversely, failing to do so signals personal damnation; Calvin called such people “reprobates,” and relegated them to eternal flames. We call them “losers,” and consign them, a touch more charitably, to the margins of polite society.
But with the rise of capitalism in the west came a “counterculture,” which Bradatan traces to Herman Melville’s 1853 novel Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (a “hymn to idleness”) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published the next year. These “subversive” works turned the Calvinist ethos on its head:
Failure is celebrated instead of success, and loafers, slackers, and other bohemians are respectable figures, not the hard-working folk. For all its colorfulness and piquancy, this counterculture remains marginal, which is probably a good thing. There would be no fun if such celebrations were to become routine.
And yet, with our “New Year Resolution,” and the secret pleasure we derive from the failure to keep them, this counterculture bursts unexpectedly into the mainstream—if only once a year, and even then, ever so guiltily.
(2) Veritas: Plagued by yet more allegations of plagiarism, Harvard’s president Claudine Gay resigns. When she refused to condemn calls for Jewish genocide, the university stood by her. But omitting a few footnotes is apparently a bridge too far. Such are the moral priorities of academia. Toppling presidents won’t fix this problem. They are figureheads; they are symptoms. The disease is a deeply unamerican racialist ideology that has infected everything. Billionaire investor and Harvard alum Bill Ackman’s lengthy X post yesterday suggests a treatment plan:
In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above…..
The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board….
The [Office for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging] should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated…..
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color…. Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Bonus white paper: For “Relational Catechesis: A Methodological Critique of Content Driven Catechesis,” one Stephen Steininger seeks your critique and feedback at Friday’s coffee. Find a link to the paper below. Stephen argues contemporary spiritual formation overemphasizes content to the exclusion of method:
This critique will observe the relationship between content and method in the practice of catechism and argue that greater effort needs to be made in the status quo to address the deficiency of method…. This will be done by looking at the historical practices of catechism to build a model of the goals aimed to be achieved by the practice. This will be compared to several case studies looking at the methods of early Christian figures starting with Jesus Himself. Looking at these observations will unveil the importance of the method in achieving the end goals of discipleship. These conclusions will be applied to the modern context where several key barriers will be addressed to following the method of catechesis found in ancient contexts. Finally, several suggestions will be given to address this deficiency in method which could create major benefits in modern disciple-making.
Hope to see you Friday.
Ignatius is the ultimate youth pastor. Don’t believe me? Watch this: https://youtu.be/wLGLBVSpBzY?si=QkmIChvBzAhy_U_d